Hubei's Cultural Heritage in Post Pandemic World Through Illustrations

Hi there everybody! We hope that your work life is treating you well especially if you are back to the Work from Home mode. As you guys know that we came out from the first wave after trying and following all the SOPs that were there to be followed, we are sure that we will come out even stronger this time too so, let us just stay hopeful and keep doing whatever there is to be done to stay safe.

For our today’s blog, we were thinking to talk about something that has a direction connection with the virus itself and the area that got to see the worst of the worst in the last one year. We are going to be talking about Hubei – the landlocked province in central China and its province is Wuhan. Ever since the pandemic made everything difficult for almost everyone in the world, businesses had to see the worst scenarios. And not just businesses of course, individuals were laid off – some of them were informed while most of them were not even told.

Then salaries were deducted, educational institutions were moved to online platforms which is not liked by many parents, teachers and students too and for the right reasons for example; we were new to the online mode of getting educated – as direct students as well as in the context of being there as a parent, guardian or sibling to the students. No one really knew how to deal with things – management and authorities did not wait for them to get accustomed to the new mode of education too.

Everyone was not ready to change the routine life and switch to something as new as logging into Zoom and attending online lectures. Even the tech savvy ones took their time to accept that that was going to stay like that for a while. A lot of individuals and their parents did not have the resources or access to digital devices like smartphones and tablets etc. or even to the internet for that matter. There was not a loss of time and energy but we really do not think if anyone could learn what they were supposed to learn from their online lectures & classes.

Same goes for the ones who work – people like us who would be involved in healthy activities and were also managing work too by putting in efforts stopped for a while to process as it was quite overwhelming. We are sure that you guys are also friends with people whose salaries stopped coming in after some time or who were told to wait for a while so that the management could do something instead of laying them off.

We know that the past 12 months were not something anyone of us would have ever imagined and while we were happy to be back to work, to finally be able to be out there even if we do not get to hang out with our loved ones or friends and colleagues etc., things took a wrong turn and now everyone has to be even more careful now.

The second wave can and will be contained soon as the vaccines have started to work and we are sure that we will wake up in a world where COVID-19 is going to go away, but there still are people, countries and businesses that might take a lot of time to be back at their feet. And while we understand the financial challenges of people around the world, Hubei is one of those areas of the world that is going to take a little longer than normal to be back to what it was.

Interestingly enough, many areas of China are reported as COVID-19 free and for good – like we are super glad that things have started to become better for the people around the world, economy of Hubei suffered a lot. As we know that arts & crafts happen to do things even politicians can’t do, a couple of artists gathered and thought of creating a series of amazing illustrations that depict the greatness of Hubei’s 8 unique and intangible cultural heritages.

These illustrations are mainly created to attract tourists from around the world to come visit the place so that it can strengthen the economy of Hubei too which will eventually make things easier for the ones who are the inhabitants of the area. The 8 different and intangible cultural heritages of Hubei include;

Legend of Mulan
Wood engravings
Shadow puppetry
Wudang martial arts
Yangxin’s cloth stickers
Chinese cutting paper art
Sugar figure art of Tianmen
Legend of the Yellow Crane Tower

We would encourage you guys to go through these interesting illustrations and also read up on the cultural heritage of the Chinese Hubei as it will help you in getting to know about the area and their amazing culture better.

Credit: Source