gejus-06-11

Kunming hand

# 20

Chinese mystery: playing card hands.

After one and a half year the exhibition "Small Cards, Great Stories" in the National Playing Card Museum in Turnhout, Belgium, has come to an end. It is a pleasure and an honour to know that many people have visited the exhibition. According to what Filip Cremers from the museum told me, it was a great success. Many visitors left positive comments on the giant playing card in the entrance of the exhibition.

One of the people that e-mailed me was Dirk van Gestel from Antwerp, Belgium. He sent me some pictures of hands cut out of playing card sheets. These hands, with only four fingers, were found on a market place in Kunming, China. He also found them in Hangzou, China. Dirk traveled a lot in China and he even worked there as a teacher for a while.

Dirk found the playing card hands on the pavement of the market place and took them home, wondering about the use of this kind of hands. To make it even more intriguing: on one hand somebody wrote Chinese characters. What? Why?

I visited Dirk in Antwerp en we were talking about the possible purpose of these hands. Some kind of tradition for a celebration? I asked Dirk where exactly he did find the hands and he told me it was close to a market stand where they sold underwear, socks, stockings and gloves. Indeed, that was the magic word: gloves. After deducting all possible uses we were pretty sure that these playing card hands were (are) used for gloves, to present them in the proper form to prospective customers. The paperboard hands, with only four fingers, must have been inside the gloves to make them look good.

What about those hand written characters on one of the hands? Fortunately my wife has a colleague from China and she was so kind to translate the text, although it is in a version of the Chinese language that she is not really familiar with. The characters on the hand tell a kind of simple poem, about the wind that moves bells to announce the ending of the day, time for dinner. Maybe it was written by the salesman on the market. A poet selling gloves?