Ha Yi Qi of Beijing has a peculiarly Chinese dilemma. A fourth generation kitemaker, Ha (profiled in Journal issue No. 12) by tradition is expected to pass on his flourishing gift-item factory business to a direct descendent. But because of the one-child rule in modern day China, and because his one child is a daughter, and because women by tradition don’t run big businesses like Ha’s works which employs 100 people, he has a dilemma.

In a sport which in the West seems often to be largely dominated by men, kiting in China presents another face: A majority of men, yes, but lots of women too—-in participant, administrative, and support roles. Here’s a look at some of the fair sex in action during a spate of kite festivals and celebrations in China in the spring of 2004. Hostesses:

With the microminiature kites Leng Shi Xiang, of Beijing, makes, seeing is believing. Some are half the size of a housefly. The kites are so tiny a viewer without Leng’s amazing eyesight needs to use a loup to really see and appreciate their detail. Made of bamboo and silk, they take him days to make, he says, and a half day just to bridle. “The hardest thing is to saturate the silk,” he says. Flying line is a single fiber extracted from a nylon cloth. All of his creations fly, he says.

As one of China’s leading kitemakers as well as being a direct descendant of the philosopher Confucius (551-479 B.C.), Kong Xiang Ze was a marked man during the Cultural Revolution which swept his country in l966-76. Mao had instructed the young Red Guards to destroy the “old”—–traditions, objects, human exemplars of Chinese culture. Kong thus became the perfect target. “I was beaten up seven times by Red Guards,” the 84-year-old says. “My property was trashed.”

Color woodblock prints vibrantly convey the popular urban culture of 18th and 19th century Edo, now called Tokyo. In a book that brings together two of Edo’s most colorful traditions, prints and kites, John Stevenson celebrates the charm and significance of the mass-produced, elegant broadsheets known as ukiyo-e. The term means “pictures of the floating world,” a pun on a Buddhist concept of the fleeting world of desires that is, coincidentally but poetically, appropriate for a study of kites borne on the wind.

Wolfgang Bieck and wife Mona Hie, of Bad Bevensen, Germany, made a second expedition to Muna island in Indonesia to more closely examine the cave painting of a man flying a kite that has now been viewed and photographed by several groups. The issue is age. Is the painting ancient—-if so it may trump the Chinese claim to having invented the kite—-or is it a modern day fake, as some suspect?

A Large Mandate After 10 years as a foundation, the challenge for the Drachen Foundation is not to lose its focus. What can we do that impacts more people rather than dealing solely with the kite community? We’ve expanded outside this community. We had to lay a foundation, and this is almost completed, although it will always shift. Our mandate is people, culture, history. It’s a large mandate.

As skydiving icon Bill Ottley, of Washington, D.C., notes, people in his sport tend to think of today, of the moment; or maybe tomorrow, what’s ahead? But yesterday, or history, doesn’t interest them much. Holder of degrees from Yale, Georgetown, and Embry Riddle, Ottley, a much-honored veteran of parachuting, has a more scholarly take. He knows and honors the history of the sport.

Kiting is an excellent form of expression. If a playful and original approach is used by the teacher, students learn useful skills. They learn to know materials, use tools, engage with nature, discover distant civilizations. Some find kiting soothing, indeed even theraputic. Teaching kitemaking and kiteflying is one of my major teaching tools. From early on, I came to see kites as a field to be explored as an alternate way for children to learn. The kite gives a child a new approach to knowledge—-a spiritual dimension, if you will.

It is the popular belief that rainfall follows battles and Fourth of July celebrations. It has been easy to infer that the explosion of the guns sets up a commotion in the air, creates convectional circulation, and leads to precipitation. Such reasoning has led to numerous attempts to create rain by means of high explosives. According to W. Prescott Webb in his book The Great Plains (Grosset & Dunlap, 1931), probably the most elaborate efforts of this kind were made on a ranch near Midland, Texas, in l891, and at San Antonio the following year.