Traditional Jewelry Craft Heritage

"The modernization process is the issue of what mankinds are facing to."(Xiaotong Fei,2003) Facing to the decline of traditional crafts and heritage fracture caused by the cultural changes, on one hand the Government and all sectors should make effort together to protect the our spiritual environment; on the other hand, a serial of practical researches are needed to be well organized to study the traditional crafts deeply. Well understanding of "People" as existing individuals and their life in reality is the starting point as well as the key of understanding the culture of traditional crafts and its ways and means of transmission. By analyzing the case study of the crisis of Beijing Traditional jewelry trends and its general laws, this paper uses ethnographic research methods to present human ecology and its transmission as the main industrial activities at present.Recalling the Beijing metalworking history, we can see that traditional craft jewellery culture based on "court culture" shows us the social structure and cultural life of the ruling class under the Chinese feudal system. Cultural communication and exchange between regions, countries and various ethnics for centuries and centralized political system formed the Beijing traditional jewellery process system; moreover, the symbolic sense of majesty's royal and the aristocratic extravagant lifestyle characterised Beijing traditional jewellery art. In such a context, Beijing traditional jewellery industry structure and inheritance system share some characters in common with traditional handicrafts and at the same time, achieve their own unique laws of property. With the time going, a serials social reform greatly impacted the traditional jewellery industry in Beijing, such as the collapse of China's feudal monarchy, the rise of democratic consciousness, and the free flow of capital in the market. Since then, the "court-like" jewellery, as the representative of Beijing traditional jewellery, was introduced to folks formally and led to changes in traditional handicraft industrial structure:on one hand, the traditional mode composed by the kinship, geographical region, and industry-based transmission was fuzzed, which foreshadowed the crisis in the contemporary technology skills inheritance. On the other hand, facing to the reconstruction of the traditional handicraft industry caused by the change of the regime, craftsmen had to change their social identification in the arts and crafts transition era. The way of being generated, industrial system, social status, professional roles and other aspects of changes were closely linked with social development, as the reflection of transmission process from the traditional agricultural society to the early industrialization society. With the deepening of industrialization, the crisis in Beijing heritage of traditional jewellery techniques appears more. The ethnographic field investigation method is applied to a detailed investigation and evidence collection among Beijing contemporary arts and crafts of traditional jewellery groups. Geographical span in the investigation included Beijing four major administrations and its surroundings such as Yixian, Dachang. Nine traditional metalworking plants, six studios and sixty people were involved in the survey. The survey tried to find out the way of resolving the crisis while calendaring people's living transmission. And thus come to some conclusions:The heritage and the evolution of traditional jewellery techniques are based on the change of its application and aesthetics, technological innovation and the social development. The life today has even stronger needs for the traditional handicrafts, even though it is facing to a big challenge from the new technology and new craft procedure. So with the improvement of social aesthetic and cultural consciousness, the remodelling of traditional crafts, and the adjustment of industry structure, the protection and the development of traditional handicrafts is necessary and feasible. There are three prerequisites to solve the Beijing traditional jewellery craftsmanship heritage crisis:legal regulations, consistent innovations with the times, and the professional training and education. In this context, marketing strategy should also be concerned. The successful marketing precedents of worldwide well-known clothing enterprise can be good references to cultivate the traditional production process to create high-end brands, to realize the change from small scale of a kind of "conservative production" workshop approach to a capitalized brand.