Statue of the Chinese Mother River

Located in Lanzhou, there is an exquisite statue that is the Chinese Mother River, namely the Yellow River. As the Chinese Mother River, the Yellow River gave birth to the earliest Chinese civilization and nurtured the Chinese ancestors in ancient time. Nowadays, she appraises the brilliant achievements that made by the Chinese descendants. It is nice to view it while traveling to Lanzhou, China on the ancient Silk Road.
At present, among all the sculptural works that depict the Yellow River? the statue in Lanzhou City is the most beautiful one in China and she has the higher artistic value. She was created by the famous sculptor Mrs. He'e in Gansu Province and produced by Beijing sculptural factory on the April 30, 1986. She is a granite sculpture which is 6 m in length, 2. 2 m in width, 2. 6 m in height, and total weight is more than 40 tons.
As the color of the Yellow River, and then the color of our skin, all are yellow, so the common granite used for the statue can better display the color of the Yellow River and the color of the skin of Chinese descendants of Yan Di and Huang Di. At the same time, the coarse quality of this material also seems to relate the Chinese nation's great changes during the thousands of years.
There is a child who is beside the mother for the statue. The child's hair is curl, single edged eyelid, and high bridge of the nose. We might as well think about the facial features of our minority nationalities, and you will find that some minority nationalities, such as the Uygurs, the Huis, and the Tibetans, most of them have curly hair, high bridge of the nose while the Koreans and the Mongolians most have single-edged eyelid, so this child is not only a child of the Hans, but also a child of all 56 Chinese nationalities. Therefore, it also presents that China is a big family. In this big family, children of each nationality are equal, just because e. Every child is the same in mother's eye. Mrs. He'e herself also took a lot of trouble to think about it at that time. She once wanted to create a boy, but was afraid that someone would misunderstand that our Chinese nation had the bias of inequality between sexes, which regarded men as superior to. women since ancient times. Nowadays, it was just this sculpture that even represented this bias. While if she had created a girl, considering the whole composition of the sculpture, this sculpture would have appeared more feminine, When Mrs. He'e felt embarrassed, she caught sight of her own child who was crawling on the bed and playing. The child was so lovable and lively, and couldn't been told the sex. So she created this child in crawling posture, seemed acting like a spoiled child beside the mother.
The female statue is the mother, her soft hair possessing natural grace, wearing smile, having a kindly face, fulfilling love and affection in her eye, such mother's mild and plump cheek depicts the beauty of oriental traditional femininity. In this period of popularizing the "bone beauty", the mother appears a little stout, and just such stoutness is the most charming, because in Chinese traditional thought, feminine stoutness is the prediction of flourishing family, flourishing husband, and flourishing children. So the statue of the Chinese Mother River manifests such kind of beauty vividly and incisively.
(Cui Shuhua)