What kinds of skills do kites mainly include?

China's traditional kite skills include four kinds: tying, pasting, painting and flying.

"Knot" means to achieve symmetry and the left and right regions are equivalent, including: selecting, dividing, bending, cutting and connecting; "Sticking" means ensuring that everyone is flat and clean, and it also includes: selecting materials, cutting, pasting, trimming and proofreading; "Painting" means seeing the real effect clearly from a distance, and it also includes: color, background, drawing, dyeing and mending.

"Release" means adjusting the lifting angle according to the wind power, including: wind, line, release, adjustment and collection. Kites can be divided into two categories: "hard arm" and "soft wing". "Hard-armed" kites have hard wings and strong winds, and fly high; "Soft-winged" kites are soft and can't fly high, but they can fly far. In terms of style, in addition to traditional birds, animals, insects and fish, new styles such as character kites have been developed in modern times.

Kite origin

Kites were invented by working people in ancient China during the Spring and Autumn Period of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, which has been more than 2,000 years since. According to legend, Mo Zhai made wooden birds out of wood, which took three years to develop, and was the earliest origin of human kites. Later, Lu Ban used bamboo to improve kite materials in Mo Zhai. It was not until Cai Lun improved papermaking in the Eastern Han Dynasty that people began to make kites out of paper, which was called "paper kites".

In the Northern and Southern Dynasties, kites began to be a tool for transmitting information. Since the Sui and Tang Dynasties, due to the development of the paper industry, people began to paste kites with paper. In the Song Dynasty, flying kites became a popular outdoor activity. In Song Dynasty, Zhou Mi wrote in Old Wulin: "During Qingming Festival, people fly kites in the suburbs and return at dusk." "Kite" refers to a kite. There are vivid kite-flying scenes in Zhang Zeduan's The Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival in the Northern Song Dynasty and Su Hanchen's The Hundred Poems in the Song Dynasty.