Craftsmanship

Craftsmanship is a long urban novel by the web novelist Sha Bao, serialized on Zongheng Chinese from 2018 and completed in December 2021, with 1,120 main chapters and six extra chapters, totaling about 2.71 million characters. The title draws on the saying "If one cannot repair a single house, how can one repair the world," and the story revolves around the young craftsman Xu Wen: after resigning from his job, he inherits a Qing-dynasty old house left by his great-grandfather, and by chance enters the world of traditional architecture and woodwork restoration. Starting from the most basic skills—identifying wood, carrying water, doing odd jobs, and apprenticing to a master—he gradually masters mortise-and-tenon joinery, wood carving, and furniture making while restoring the old house, courtyard homes, and gardens, and comes into contact with the traditional craftsmen's inheritance system, including roles such as "Object Master" and the "Hundred Trades Guild." The novel uses a wealth of craft detail as its skeleton, making the selection of materials, drafting, simplified mortise-and-tenon work, and the aesthetics of objects concrete and tangible, while also weaving in a wondrous thread that lets the protagonist cross-verify and fulfill each other across ancient and modern crafting environments. The work is about craft, but also about people: the teaching and friction between master and apprentice, the competition and respect among peers, and the clash between old rules and new ideas all unfold slowly through everyday narrative. The book's tone is warm and restrained, with little aggression, and readers regard it as a representative work of craftsman-themed web fiction; it received a 2019 China Writers Association key works grant and was selected in 2022 for the "Welcoming the 20th Party Congress" exhibition of outstanding online literature.