Reluctant heir to a family business
In 1965 Huang Yaodong, then 35, opened the “Guangxing Paper Processing Facility” on the Ailan Plateau. As a contract manufacturer, it supplied major firms with high-quality paper stock for export, as well as small quantities of hair-perming paper, electrical insulation paper for batteries, and paper for firecrackers.
When Huang’s son Huanzhang was nine, he watched his father dip his hands into a vat of pulp and shake a screen before lifting it out to reveal a white layer of coagulated paste. Huanzhang didn’t realize it at the time, but this step of “screening” by hand is essential if paper is to be described as “handmade.”
In the early 1990s, Huang Yaodong wanted his son to take over the business. By then, the handmade paper industry was already in decline, but Huanzhang, over 30 and lacking any other work experience, summoned the courage to take over the family firm.
After taking the reins, Huanzhang found himself under great stress. Faced with the decline of the handmade paper industry, he acutely felt the pressure that his father had borne over the years managing a paper plant. He explains that even when exports were booming for the Taiwanese paper industry, Guangxing had very thin profit margins on small quantities, whereas the big firms were making money “hand over fist” by exporting their container loads.
Consequently, although he had taken over the family business, he still wasn’t at peace with the choice and wasn’t willing to let go of any opportunity to change fields. Among the other lines of business he tried without success was orchid cultivation.
He stayed with paper making, he explains today, “just to save a little face!”
In his first year as boss, Huang Huanzhang struggled every day with how to raise profit margins on the company’s handmade paper. At one point he established a trading firm so they could handle the exporting themselves, but it didn’t help the bottom line. Observing that the domestic market was contracting, his anxiety only grew.
One day, while visiting at a store selling calligraphy materials, he noticed they were selling Guangxing paper with a high markup. “We work so hard to make this paper,” he thought angrily, “but all the profits go to the retailers.” For all the effort that he, his father and their employees had put in, he felt aggrieved.
Raising his head, he noticed a calligraphy on the wall, as well as the signature of its calligrapher: Tai Jingnong. “Why don’t we just sell directly to the end user?” he thought. It was a turning point: He had transformed his frustration into single-minded determination to find a solution.
Huang Huanzhang says that those three characters—Tai Jingnong—were like a blow to the head that prompted a sudden understanding: Guangxing shouldn’t be concerned with paper dealers; it should focus on the needs of painters and calligraphers. From that moment on, Huang started to collect the names of painters and calligraphers to send them paper samples for free.
“I sent it everywhere—to calligraphers living and dead,” says Huang of his period of “shameless” and stubborn single-mindedness. “I asked them to tell me the strong and weak points of the paper.” He regarded the artists’ satisfaction with Guangxing’s products as the highest form of affirmation for the company.
What Huang didn’t expect back then was that by taking the initiative to contact painters and calligraphers he was taking the first step both to expanding sales and to putting Guangxing on the road toward developing ever higher-quality paper.
Visitors to the Guangxing Mill learn how to make paper themselves, which they then can use to make rubbings of their choice.