Rhythmic pounding echoes off a large stone wall of the Maodegong Drum City giving its lively streets a proper heartbeat. Among the performance is a shop where flat strips of grass lay on woven mats: green strips taped along one edge to be held vertically and dyed strips to be wefted horizontally.

A piece of paper explains that the purple grass is to be weaved in following a two-above-two-below pattern, but even with the help of a teacher, one finds themselves doubting their own abilities. It's something so simple, but our typing, swiping, and clicking fingers can't make sense of it. The experts rush over to quickly find the problem, and show us how to do it. Congratulations, you've made a bookmark!

On our way out, we pass a woman working on a purse, and were it not for the dyed strips behind her, we would not have known that she was doing the same process that we did… only way better. The stacks of hats, bags, and boxes around her suddenly seemed like treasures once we realized how hard weaving really is.

It's all too tempting to see clay pots and grass sundries as primitive simply because the materials used were readily available to the earliest of civilizations. After encountering it ourselves, its real value becomes apparent — the mastery needed to turn a lump of clay or a pile of grass into something beautiful is what we're really looking at.

We refer to the skills behind this masterpieces as “intangible cultural heritage” and the few who continue the legacy as “inheritors”. But it is those of us who are enriched by these continuations of human history that are the real inheritors of something truly valuable.