To tell a family, these printers carry wooden characters.

In Rui’an County, Chinese artisans still use wooden movable characters to print family genealogies. Each character is engraved separately, then assembled with the others to form a page. After printing, the composition can be disassembled and the elements reused.

The artisans carry their characters and materials in the ancestral halls of the communities. The work requires not only knowing how to print, but also understanding historical information and the language of the documents. The leaves are then cut out and connected.

A ceremony marks the completion of the genealogy, kept in a locked chest. The workshop is not necessarily a fixed place where all customers come to order. Here, the material joins the families whose memory it must fix, before leaving to compose other pages with the same small pieces of wood.