When Beijingers think of Tongzhou District, the first things that come to mind are its prosperous real estate markets and the Songzhuang Village, home to an emergent contemporary art community.

But many have forgotten Tongzhou was an important dock at the northern end of the ancient Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal and boasted diverse folk arts and traditions.

To boost interest in Tongzhou's rich cultural and tourism legacies, locals recently designated 54 renowned virtuosos as "folk art ambassadors". The chosen few would represent the cultures surrounding the local handicrafts, folk music, calligraphy and traditional cuisine.

Shaping the future

The father-and-son team of the Tang family, affectionately dubbed "Dough Figurine Tang", are an eminent pair among the Chinese folk culture community. It was Tang Zibo who upgraded the status of the dough sculpture from an ordinary toy in street stalls to a refined art form by endowing it with rich cultural charm. Tang Suguo (pictured left) carries forward his father's insistence of incorporating diverse artistic elements into dough sculpting.

He has enormously enriched the art form's scope by extending the subject matter from Buddhist and Taoist figures to those of several religions, and from ancient Chinese literati and Chinese opera characters to those of modern music, dance, films and fashion. In 1996, he was honored by UNESCO as a "craftsman master".

Leaving no stone unturned

Nearly half of a century has passed since Zhang Yuan, then a student of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, collected his first batch of "rain flower" (yuhua) stones during a visit to the Yangtze River in Chongqing Municipality.

The famous calligrapher and painter now owns a treasure trove of more than 10,000 rare stones, which he has been collecting from the country's major rivers.

He says the myriad of shapes, colors and patterns of the stones has inspired his calligraphic works and traditional paintings. He believes people can become closer to nature and find inner peace through appreciating stones.

Songs of the sea

Zhao Qingfu (pictured above) started to help his family onboard boats at the age of 6. Within three years, he learned all of the boatmen's ballads, or haozi, from his father and uncle, which had been passed down from his grandfather.

The boatmen's ballads are living records of life along the ancient canal. They were created to set the working pace, release work tensions and boost productivity. People leading the ballads were usually veteran boatmen, who enjoyed high reputations and earned the biggest salaries on the boats.

Tongzhou canal ballads are included on Beijing's Intangible Cultural Heritage list, and Zhan is currently the only inheritor.