A former joiner has turned an old mansion in Beijing into a museum that aims to educate the public about the value of ancient carpentry, Xing Wen reports.

Within a village in Taihu town in Beijing's Tongzhou district stands a quaint country mansion that was turned into the capital's first private museum devoted to traditional Chinese woodworking.

Covering an area of 10,000 square meters, the museum has five exhibition halls in which woodworks ranging from utensils to adornments to waterwheels and canoes are displayed and classified into over 40 categories.

In one of the rooms, a wide variety of tools with which woodworkers use to construct furniture and houses are fastened on the wall. Stakes made with different types of timber are also neatly arranged in a row, with captions introducing their characteristics and the intricacy of the time-honored craft put up for visitors to read.

Pacing around the museum, one will find that wooden objects such as buckets, chairs, cabinets, shoulder poles, ploughs, steelyards and carriages that were widely used by laborers in the past dominate the exhibition space.

"I prefer to collect these antiques that are highly related to ordinary people's daily lives," explains Wang Wenwang, a 50-year-old carpenter who is the founder and director of the museum. "In this way, visitors can discover how important woodworking is in providing us with the basic necessities in life."

Wang says that he always researches the background information of his artifacts through reading books on joinery, architecture and folk culture before displaying them. He even has two storage spaces where, with the help of seven assistants, he can repair, sort and produce fine replicas of wooden antiques, especially those from the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368-1911).

"Each article embodies something that has been passed down throughout history," says Wang. "When they are presented systematically with illustration of their origins and evolvement, it's easier for people to understand their cultural value."

Wang's career as a carpenter started in the late 1980s when he traveled from his hometown in Wuyi county, Hebei province, to Beijing to become an apprentice in furniture restoration.

He was initially apprehensive about the job because he feared that he would be looked down upon by others for being a woodworker. But his passion for the craft was born after he witnessed the beauty of traditional joinery techniques that can create a perfect fit without the use of any bindings, fasteners and glues.

"Our predecessors only use wood elements to make a strong joint that is really difficult to be disassembled. That sparked my curiosity in the techniques and birthed my respect for the craft," explains Wang.

He then started to hone his skills by making reproductions of rare wood artworks that he saw in well-known gardens in Beijing such as Beihai Park and the Sum-mer Palace. He once crafted a 50-centimeter-high arched niche for a Buddha statue and sold it at a price of 240 yuan, which was a considerable sum of money for the young man in the early 1990s. This incident spurred him to persevere with his craft, and there were times when he would spend an entire day just sketching an art piece that he wanted to reproduce. He soon made enough money from his creations and started his own furniture restoration business.

As the business expanded, his expertise as a wood antique restorer became known among many collectors. He even started getting customers from abroad.

"Cleaning, renovating, waxing and packaging - I had all the process down pat," he says. "And I became increasingly fascinated with the diverse types of woodwork." In 1997, his passion for the craft drove him to amass a collection of woodworks. He scoured the country for old furniture, and one journey took him to a village home where he found an old woman who was on the verge of using a table leg made from rare huanghuali wood as firewood for her stove.

"I quickly stopped her and bought the wooden leg. It would have been a travesty to use a part of an antique furniture from the Ming Dynasty as firewood!" he quips.

The accident made him realize that many people did not know the value of woodwork. He also found out that many valuable antique utensils and furnishings were being sold by Chinese dealers to foreign countries, and that folk woodworks were largely ignored as only those used by the royal families were considered valuable. This was when he decided to quit his job to open a museum that would shine the spotlight on folk woodworks.

Ahead of the museum's opening, he traveled to several countries to attend cultural expos with his collections. He also set up exhibitions in national and provincial museums. He currently has an ongoing exhibition at the China Port Museum in Ningbo, Zhejiang province, which kicked off on Dec 8 and will run for three months.

Last May, his efforts paid off when he received the official certificate to start his private museum.

However, not content with just having a museum where people can only view cultural relics, he introduced a workshop where they can also try their hand at sawing lumber and disassemble a luban lock, a Chinese puzzle featuring mortise and tenon joints.

In a bid to make the craft of woodworking more appealing to the younger generation, he also produced wooden souvenirs in the shape of rabbits, planes, tanks and castles that can be purchased.

"I thought that providing visitors with a chance to get hands-on with woodworking, which might make the experience more memorable. I hope that all visitors will remember what they learn in the museum and spread this knowledge to others," says Wang.

Wang has recently been busy with researching the connection between woodworking and liuyi, or Six Arts, the classical disciplines in ancient China that include rites, music, archery, chariot and math.

"I want to develop a course for children to learn the six arts in a setting of woodworking so that they can better understand the wisdom of the ancient Chinese," he says.

"I think I can discover more possibilities to vitalize my museum and traditional woodworking."