At Beijing's Ditan Temple Fair during the 2024 Spring Festival, children pushed forward for a better look. Older visitors recognized the colorful paper toys at once. Some bought one before asking how it worked.
The toy was fanlihua, also called "18 flips." Made of paper and bamboo, it opens into dragons, flowers or geometric shapes with a few quick hand movements. Once a familiar sight at temple fairs, it had all but faded from memory.
Li Mei had taught English to children for nearly 12 years when her father-in-law, a fourth-generation maker of fanlihua, prepared to close his workshop. The work was hard and profits were thin. She did not quit at once. Teaching, she thought, would still be there if the experiment failed. So she brought the craft back to Beijing, its place of origin, to see whether the public still cared.
They did. At her small booth, she barely paused as the stock disappeared. At two temple fairs that holiday, her family earned between 150,000 and 200,000 yuan in 15 days. The crowd's excitement mattered more than the sales.
"I realized that a toy many people assumed had faded into history could still spark such instant recognition and excitement," she says.
The response convinced her to leave teaching and devote herself to the craft. The tradition, she later said, had never truly gone. People simply needed a new way to meet it.
The old version had practical weaknesses. Its paper tore easily, the designs offered little variety, and many buyers treated it as disposable. "The complexity of the craft no longer matched its economic value," Li says. She approached the toy as a consumer.
She added patterns inspired by lion dances, carp, fans, jade ornaments, Beijing snacks and city landmarks. She replaced fragile xuan paper with stronger tissue paper once used to wrap fruit. She also turned the plain outer sleeves into colorful covers.
Most importantly, she stopped presenting fanlihua mainly as "heritage." "I want people to think the product is interesting at first," she says.
Her years in the classroom helped. "Heritage workshops and teaching are actually very similar," she explains. "You have to think from the user's perspective." She made a do-it-yourself kit that guides users through gluing, dyeing and assembling their own toy. She led university workshops, where students who had never heard of fanlihua spent hours folding and flipping it. She also began developing English-language experiences for international visitors.
"Such simple materials — paper and sticks — yet so many transformations," she says. "They're fascinated."
That is the difference between displaying a tradition and keeping it alive. Visitors may come for an attractive object, then find themselves handling an old craft. Fun becomes the doorway to understanding. Fanlihua has survived not because it stayed unchanged, but because it learned to flip again — this time into a form that new audiences could enjoy.