Pronounced mashuhui in the local dialect, mashuhui is a Taiwan folk handicraft that is difficult to find today and with which many Chinese people may be unfamiliar.
Mashuhui is a kind of clay modeling and commonly used for making figurines in ancient costume. It resembles Cochin ceramic in appearance and, like Cochin ceramic, is used as a decoration in temples and similar buildings.
Mashuhui is made by mixing glutinous rice, thoroughly boiled, with lime, thereby forming a modeling material similar to clay which can be colored once it has dried. The substance gets its name because of its similarity in handling to the sticky dessert called mashu. It differs from Cochin ceramic in that it need not be glazed or fired in a kiln first. Mashuhui is rather simple and crude when compared with Cochin ceramic but is superior to clay in malleability and resistance to corrosion.
Because it is so simple to make and the materials for it are so readily available, mashuhui is quite inexpensive and well suited for use as an artistic decoration in financially strapped temples in poor areas, where fancy Cochin ceramic would be unaffordable.
In the prosperous society we live in today, mashuhui is naturally losing ground. The renovated or newly built temples that seem to be everywhere all have fancier decorations, like rich ladies dressed for a ball, while mashuhui, like a plain village girl, stands shyly to one side.
Of course, mashuhui has its drawbacks as a material, becoming brittle in time and easily broken, for instance. And it is often destroyed or cast away during renovation, which is the reason that so little of it has been preserved. But the same reasons also make it seem that much more precious. Mashuhui has a special value as a specimen of folk art and culture: it is testimony to the arduous history of Taiwan's development and to the perseverance and pioneer spirit of the people.
It is interesting to compare mashuhui with molded flour figurines, which are still popular today. The methods of modeling are the same for each. Flour figurines originated as folk offerings in temple worship and then evolved into children's playthings, edible at first but since enjoyed solely as decorative items, to which chemicals are added as preservatives.
Mashuhui likewise possesses a special feel inimitable by any other material. Having lost its function as an architectural ornament, can it, like molded flour figurines, be turned into an object of purely aesthetic appreciation? This may well be the only way to preserve this traditional handicraft from eclipse!
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