——Ye County Xu’s Business 1937-1945
When the smoke of war rises: the last cargo ship in Yantai Port
On the autumnal equinox of 1937, in the No. 3 warehouse of Yantai Tianshun Commercial Port, Xu Shichang used his ancestral brass abacus to check the 47th box of straw braids: the spacing between each bundle of “Shahebai” was strictly three fingers wide, and the fragrance of wheat straw and the humid sea breeze wrestled between the gaps in the wooden boxes. The young master of the largest braiding shop in Ye County would not have thought that the “Tianshun Incident” that broke out three days later would make this batch of goods that were originally destined for Fifth Avenue in New York the best footnote to war economics – when the Japanese warships blockaded the Bohai Bay, the straw braids worth 23,000 silver dollars solidified into “wartime stranded goods” on the customs declaration form, just like the Western clock that stopped in the exhibition hall.
Grass Purgatory: Civilization Guardian in the Dark Night
On the winter night of 1942, the oil lamp in the Xu family’s cellar flickered with strange light and shadow. The accountant wrote in red ink in the “Record of Braids”: “On the seventh day of the twelfth lunar month in the year of Renwu, the pseudo-chamber of commerce levied a ‘special tax’ and required 32 boxes of money to be paid to offset the tax.” But the real secret account was hidden in the interlayer of the kang: in the hollowed-out bundles of straw braids, there were illustrations of seven unique skills – from the three-dimensional weaving method of “centipede whiskers” to the formula for “blue sky after rain” plant dyeing. On the New Year’s Eve of the most thrilling year, Zhou Shichang and his men buried twelve boxes of top-grade “Laizhou flowers” in the ancestral grave, and deliberately sprinkled old wheat seeds when covering the soil: “Even if we are gone, the seedlings will break through the soil next year, and future generations will be able to find the fire.”
Transoceanic Covenant: Resonance on the other side of the Atlantic
On the night of August 15, 1945, when Boston businessman James Wilson read the news of the recovery of Yantai in the Christian Science Monitor, he trembled and took out the yellowed contract: Order No. B-309 of Xu’s Trading Company in 1937, the penalty clause was clearly marked with blood fingerprints – that was when Xu issued the ultimatum before the war. Shichang bit his finger and promised: “As long as the goods are there, the people are there; if the goods are destroyed, I will pay tenfold.” Three months later, the “Liberty” loaded with British worsted wool and Swiss watch parts entered Qingdao Port. The letter in the cargo box read: “Dedicated to the Stoics of the East, you taught us that the highest form of the spirit of contract is faith.”
Wheat ears and gears: a dialogue with the new world
In the spring of 1946, Xu’s warehouse held an unprecedented trade fair: on the left side, the “Shahe saw blades” produced in 1937 that were well preserved during the war were displayed, and on the right side, Ray-Ban sunglasses and Parker pens sent by the Allies were stacked. When Zhou Shichang used a Swiss Army knife to cut open American canvas and demonstrated how to weave nylon thread into traditional Zongjiao patterns, the foreign journalists watching wrote in their notebooks: “This is the quantum entanglement of agricultural civilization and industrial civilization.” The most moving exhibit was a straw hat – woven with German parachute ribbons and wheat straw, with excerpts from “Biographies of Merchants” embroidered in Chinese and English on the brim of the hat.
Afterscore: Civilization resilience in straw weaving
In 2019, when the great-grandson of the Xu family bought back the batch of “Tian Shun Relics” at Christie’s in New York, he found a 1937 Yantai tide table and twelve wheat seeds hidden in the interlayer of the box. Today, these seeds grow in the “Time Wheat Field” of Laiyin Workshop, and their straw is being woven into the installation art “1945: Unfinished Voyage” in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When the laser scanner restored the longitude and latitude of the buried skills, people were surprised: those patterns that were forced to be distorted during the war actually coincided with the double helix structure of DNA – it turns out that the true code of civilization was written in the weaving of suffering.