Shawan brick craving is one of the characteristic skills in Guangdong with long history. Brick craving, literally is to crave the patterns or graphics on the bricks with fine gray bricks. Based on the patterns designs the folk craft men crave the brick piece by piece, with the skills of sawing, drilling, cutting, grinding via the tools of chisel and wood hammer, then connect the parts piece by piece, and finally the dimensioned architectures are built up with different sizes and layouts, which is called Tiling. The gray brick is mainly craved into different figures, flowers, birds, used for ancestral hall, temples, and residential building, roof, corner, gable, wall, cornice, fence, and the side of baldachine. The most sophisticated craving skill in Canton craving styles is to have the patterns craved into the bricks like brocades with its smooth and tiny lines, and dimensioned layouts, which is called Seton Brick Craving.

The fine adobe is with gray color and particulate as well as tight texture, if the fire is too strong, it will be cracked, if the fire is weak, it will be weathered. Thus, it should be very strict at the processes of choosing material, modeling, burning, especially for the exquisite craving bricks which should be more firm, fine and smooth. There are lots of comment points between brick craving and wood craving in terms of craving forms, but the applied materials are different, so the requirements for the crafts are different. When craving the bricks, craft men will have the design ready, then to assort the parts through the two steps of‘Hitting Adobe’ and ‘Fined Craving’.

Shawan brick craving is with rigorous layout, lively style, delicate structure and highly decorative functions and strong local characteristics. It tends to apply skills with high relief, shallow relief, round relief, openwork techniques, and its craving is famous for nuanced knife style and diverse structures. Anyhow, its craving techniques are amazing, which impress people a lot. The most representative one is Shaawn He’s family Liu Geng Tang which is considered as the "Lingnan Ancient Architectural Art Palace". Its craving types vary from figure stories, craving on the windows or front gates, or middle halls, or temples with plain but exquisite skills, which express the Ming and Qing dynasty styles.