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joinery shops, such as this one in Beijing (above), supply the oldstylegates, doors and window sashes needed to repair houses inolder neighborhoods. Safety standards in these shops would makemany Western woodworkers shudder: Note the jointer in the foregroundwithout a safety guard or fence and the shopmade tablesawin the background. Finishers line the windowless, dimly lit room(below) with damp straw mats to provide the high humidity environmentnecessary to properly cure their lacquer finishes. In theurban factories, burlap is sometimes used in place of the mats.that clutter our secondhand fu rniture stores. Our guide had difficultyfinding hand-crafted furniture to show us, but eventually helocated the rural Shanghai Art Carving and Engraving Factory, wherea fellow guide had taken President Jimmy Carter some years ago.S hanghai fuctory-This rural factory is like a vision from the earlydays of the industrial revolution in the West. There are rows ofworkbenches lining a long wall of windows. Elsewhere, electricityis used mainly to power scattered fluorescent lights. Nonetheless,the showroom is filled with beautifully made lacquered reproductionfurniture. The company's entire product line is exported. The 250factory employees produce about 100 different designs in Brazilianmahogany, but they also rely on a variety of hardwoods from Thailand.82 Fine WoodworkingPower tools are used for sizing lumber and for roughing outsimple work, but the carving, joinery and finish-planing are doneexclusively with hand tools. We watched a worker deftly fit a doorwith a mitered frame to a cabinet slightly out of square. He sawedbetween the mitered shoulders, down to the tenon, on one faceand repeated this on the opposite face. He brought the joint together,producing a door that was out of square just enough tomatch the cabinet. Chinese planes and saws, unlike Japanese tools,are pushed; the planes are equipped with a crossbar handgrip.Lack of machinelY, however, doesn't prevent Chinese woodworkersfrom accomplishing their tasks quickly and efficiently. They havecreated many homemade tools especially fo r their style of woodworking,such as the "maya cuo" and "pang bao" scrapers, which arediscussed in the sidebar and shown in the photo on the facing page.Most of us knew of the natural lacquer used by the Chinese byits Japanese name "urushi," but we learned that the incrediblytough finish originated in China as "qishu" (pronounced: Cheeshoo). The lacquer is the sap of the Rbus vemicijera, a relative ofpoison sumac. Finishers wear gloves and sleeves to prevent theirsweat and body oils from ruining the finish, but they do nothingadditional to protect themselves. Instead, workers who are allergicto the sap, which causes an irritating rash, are transferred to otherjobs. Several of our group suffered from qishu rashes during ourtrip and took cortisone pills at the first itch, but we still had tocontend with rashes, some pretty nasty, over the next two weeks.Qishu is a major commodity in China, and more than 100,000metric tons are exported annually to Japan. Domestic demand forqishu is high, but not just for its use as a furniture lacquer. TraditionalChinese ceremonial buildings are coated with gesso, coveredwith coarse cloth, then lacquered inside and out-a monumental taskconsidering qishu's finicky curing requirements. Pigments have tobe compatible with qishu's cross-linking chemical bonds or thefinish loses its toughness. The pigments that work best are red cinnabarand malachite, but the first is poisonous and the second isprecious. Chinese finish experts don't consider qishu an effectiveexterior finish, but the 60-year-old lacquer finish we examined onone building showed few signs of cracking or peeling.The workers at the factOlY brush at least four coats of qishu oneach piece of furniture. After each coat, the piece is left in a wetroom to cure overnight. Damp straw mats lining the room maintainthe moisture level necessary for the finish to cure properly.The first coat, a mixture of qishu and a chalky white powder,serves as a paste filler. Between coats, bamboo shoots, which containsilica from the soil, are used to smooth tight corners; ordinarysandpaper smooths the flat surfaces. After the final coat, largebumps are removed with a chisel, and smoothing is done with wetleaves from tile Chinese elm, appropriately referred to as the"sandpaper tree." A thin, final coat is padded on like French polishand then the piece is waxed. These finishers claim that only elmleaves will produce an acceptable finish, but the urban factoriesseem to do fine with wet-or-dry sandpaper.Fish glue in the Forbidden City-In the center of Beijing is thecolossal walled palace of the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368-1644and 1680-1911 respectively), once known as the Forbidden City.This complex housed the imperial family, the bureaucracy and theemperor's eunuchs and concubines. It is now the Palace Museum,housing an unmatched collection of fine Chinese furniture. In themuseum's restoration shops, we found one worker regluing a finewood chair with locking tenon joints. He had disassembled thechair, be ause tile fish glue holding the joints was failing. He wassurprise that we thought such interlocking joints didn't requireglue. After tile repair, tilin layers of hot wax are applied and buffed