Chairs with rattan plaited seats. [Photo/WeChat account: chongchuanonline]

Forty of the intangible cultural heritage items in Nantong, East China's Jiangsu province, were recently upgraded to provincial status, according to the Jiangsu Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism.

The upgraded items include a legend about a white dragon with horns, Dianshang work songs and rattan plaited articles, as well as techniques for mending porcelain, making diabolo, extracting peppermint oil, cooking pork's head meat, cooking Haimen mutton, making fish balls with crab roes, making Nantong-style bonsai, and making Baipu yellow wine. They also include Qi Family boxing, Qidong pingtan, Nantong paper cutting, Nantong jade carving, Nantong sugar painting, Nantong pyrographs, Rugao dough sculpture, and Chen Family bone-injury therapies.

Nantong started protecting ethnic and folk culture in 2004 and, as of now, has had one included in the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO (guqin), and 12 recognized as national intangible cultural heritage items,

with a further 93 recognized provincially and 148 at the municipal level.