A brief history of Chinese plane making
A brief history of Chinese plane making
Plus: The historic Plane Talk is now online!
"Sharpening the tool is a threshold, below which there are handymen, and beyond which there are journeymen." — Paul Feller, creator of the Maison de l’Outil et de la Pensée Ouvrière (Museum of Tools and the Philosophy of Labour)
Wooden Chinese planes, with their cross-bar handles, curved body shape, and simplified wedge are an interesting counterpart to the European archetype. They’re initially a little strange: Your hands fit around the handles with your forefingers resting on top of the plane as you push across your workpiece, a curious feeling for anyone used to a rear tote. As someone raised around Western tools, I used to confuse Chinese planes' basic design with a lack of sophistication. But "simplicity was an outstanding feature of Chinese tools, relying heavily on the artisans' wisdom and skill both in use and manufacture," as researchers have noted.1
When exactly did Chinese woodworkers discover the plane? It happened, depending on how you like your origin stories, 2,500 years ago when legend has it that the engineer and carpenter Lu Ban invented basic woodworking tools like the saw and plane. Or maybe it happened during the Tang dynasty (618-907) when the character for plane and drawknife, bao, is first known to have been used.2 Or if we base it on archaeological evidence, maybe it didn't happen until around the 13th century.
I don't believe the plane was introduced to China by Marco Polo as has been suggested.3 Planes found in a Yuan dynasty-era (1271-1368) shipwreck in Shandong province indicate they were likely an established tool by the time of Polo's visit in the late 1200s.4 But there is little research on the cross-cultural flow of tool design between Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Architects Yiting Pan and James Campbell point out that tools like planes and adzes are "based on similar principles, handling methods, and purposes, thus there seems to have been a common understanding of building instruments, which nevertheless fostered a diverse range of building crafts and architecture."5
Complicating matters further is the fact that divergent tool designs emerged across China based on varying climates and available wood types, differences between Han people and ethnic minorities, and the proximity to open ports.6 The earliest depiction of planes comes from Lu Ban jing, a carpenter's manual dating to the Ming dynasty (1368-1644).7 The manual codifies the construction techniques and spiritual elements of building a home, laying out auspicious measurements, favorable days for construction, and even the number of tools a carpenter should carry (28, corresponding to various constellations).
While the Chinese in the 1600s made their own laminated steel/iron plane blades similar to those used in the West,8 by the 1880s they had switched to European irons. Fifty years later, the English carpenter and teacher Alfred Emms noted that wood workers in the Yangtze Valley used traditional planes to build Western-style architecture, but European tools were gradually taking over.9
Over the centuries, Chinese-style planes spread throughout Southeast Asia and beyond. In Australia, some of the country’s first planemakers were Chinese.10 Kevin Chamberlain of the Hand Tool Preservation Association of Australia has found that planes made by Lim Toon (1899-1902), Louey Woon (1908-1909), and Louey Wing (1910-1920) in Melbourne were typically made of a local wood, red ironbark, with kauri wedges and cross-handles.11
Today, Chinese planes available outside Asia are typically factory-made. But their design is used around the world. One of Australia's best-known contemporary planemakers, H.N.T Gordon and Co., makes beautiful, high-end Chinese-style planes. And they're appealing to amateur planemakers. Zefeng Zhang has a multi-part series on building both a jack plane (1, 2, 3) and a rabbet plane (1, 2). Along with his video below, John Z Zhu has basic plans for a traditional Chinese plane.
Plane Talk was the newsletter that started it all, and now it's available online. A huge thanks to Roger K. Smith, Plane Talk's metallic and transitional planes editor, for giving me permission to post them.
Plane Talk was the newsletter of the British-American Rhykenological Society, and over the course of 10 years in the 1970s and 1980s it published more than 840 pages of photos, maker's marks, tracings, planemaker biographies, articles, patent illustrations, drawings and ad reproductions. Some of the information is dated or has been corrected and updated in A Guide to the Makers of American Wooden Planes and other books. But there's a ton of information in its pages that has never been available outside of the remaining physical copies. In 1987, Astragal Press took over the newsletter; those issues are not available online.
You can find out more about B-ARS and download individual issues and the indexes. Or you can download the entire run of Plane Talk from 1976-1986 as a 409.9 MB zip file.
A side note: By a stroke of dumb luck, I ended up with Bob Graham's personal copies of Plane Talk via eBay. (At least I assume they're his because they're marked with his personal stamp and came with a B-ARS membership list and a few memos from Plane Talk's editor, Elliot Sayward.) Graham was B-ARS' president. I never met him while he was alive but I sincerely hope he would be happy knowing his copies are making Plane Talk available to a whole new audience of wooden plane fans.
— Abraham
Yiting Pan and James Campbell. “A Study of Western Influence on Chinese Building Tools in Chinese Treaty Ports in the Early 20th Century.” Journal of Asian Architecture and Building Engineering 17, 2018, pp 183–90. https://doi.org/10.3130/jaabe.17.183.
Klaas Ruitenbeek. Carpentry and Building in Late Imperial China: A Study of the Fifteenth-century Carpenter's Manual, Lu Ban Jing. E.J. Brill. 1996.
John M. Whelan. "Chinese Planes." The Chronicle, vol 57, no. 4, 2004.
Yiting and Campbell, 2018.
Yiting and Campbell, 2018.
Yiting and Campbell, 2018.
Ruitenbeek, 1996.
Chris Hall. "Just Scraping By." The Carpentry Way. 12 Dec. 2011, https://thecarpentryway.blog/2011/12/just-scraping-by
Yiting and Campbell, 2018.
Trevor D. Semmens. Australian Woodworking Planemakers. 1998
Kevin Chamberlain. “Historical: Chinese-Australian furniture makers and their tools.” Australian Wood Review. 12 Feb. 2021, https://www.woodreview.com.au/tools-and-equipment/historical-chinese-australian-furniture-makers-and-their-tools
(as usual) outstanding article. Thank you very much