National Crafts

Wax Printing Technique

The wax printing of the Buyi people has been famous for a long time. As early as in the Song dynasty, there were records about the specialty of wax printed cloth in Huishui, Guizhou province. The “blue-dragon cloth” in the history of Qing dynasty is wax printed cloth. Buyi girls usually start learning wax printing since they are 12 or 13 years old.

The procedure is as follows. Heat the honey wax into liquid, dip the liquid with the triangular bronze wax knife, draw various lively patterns with the liquid on the home-woven white cloth, put the cloth into dying jars and dye it in blue or light blue, and lastly put the cloth into the boiler to get rid of the wax. After all these are done, the Buyi people repeatedly wash the cloth in the river and hang it up till it dries. A unique wax printed piece of cloth is hence finished.

The wax printed cloth features rustic, rich designs, lively, bold strokes, and a unique pattern that resembles that of tortoise shells (also called small-wave pattern). The artistic effects of it cannot be achieved by machines.

Miao Embroidery

Besides farming, most of the Miao women’s lives are spent in weaving and embroidering or on cross-stitch work and wax painting. These are their specialties and manifest their understandings of life. Since they are 3 or 4, they start learning these skills from their mothers and sisters, and continue to work on them until they are seventy or even eighty years old. The most common embroidery skills include flat embroidery, lock stitch, back stitch, appliqué embroidery, insertion, plait embroidery, flower padding, tangled embroidery, and raised embroidery, etc. Besides the traditional patterns of ×, 井, 十, □, 回, Ｖ, ◇, guavas, butterflies, fish, and birds, etc, the embroider can also set her imagination free and design whatever patterns she likes, be they abstract or lifelike, so that the forms and content of Miao embroidery can be continuously innovated. Among the numerous Miao embroidery works, the most famous are the girls’ attires and the faces of the fans used at the flower-dancing festival. Attires are the Miao women’s favorite dress and also the epitomes of their embroidery life. Miao women wear attires only twice in their lives. Attires are worn as part of their dowry when they get married, and worn as part of their burial objects when they die. The attires are made of splendid red silk, whereas the faces of the fans are made of cotton and flax cloth in red, orange, yellow, green, dark green, blue, purple, black, and white. The embroiders of both the attires and the faces of the fans have to be instructed by the experts in Miao people, as the needlework is complicated and the patterns are exotic. It takes about a year for a woman to finish embroidering an attire with the sporadic time allowed for her to work. This is why Miao women go to the market, they often select colored thread and they keep doing needlework even when chatting with each other. As the saying goes, “when you judge a man, look at his field; when you judge a woman, look at her needlework”, which is a vivid description of the Miao folk customs.

Wood Sculptures

The wood sculptures mainly take the form of masks in the local drama. The masks feature bizarre shapes and rustic, bold strokes, which are a perfect embodiment of the simple, rustic beauty and the unique scariness.

Buyi Satchels

Buyi satchels are made of black handmade cloth with white, elegant patterns. The margins of the satchels are stitched together with stripes of handmade cloth in dark green, blue, light red, and dark red. At the center there are exquisite handmade embroidery of auspicious patterns, and the bottom is adorned with ball-shaped little patches of various colors. The entire design is balanced and orderly arranged.

Silver Adornments

Miao people, men and women alike, love wearing silver adornments, and young Miao women are particularly fond of them. Miao silver adornments feature exquisite workmanship and the production of the small but refined bead-shaped earrings, necklaces, and chaplets is very demanding.

The Miao silver adornments are all made by male Miao craftsmen. The finished products are divided into the thick and the thin ones. The thick ones mostly take the form of necklaces with clasps, solid chaplets, and solid bracelets. They usually do not require exquisite craftsmanship while uses a lot of silver. The purpose of wearing them is to show off wealth. However, there are more exquisite thick products such as bubbled chaplets and bracelets, as well as hollow engraved chaplets and bracelets, etc. Though they are more demanding in techniques, they take up less silver. The thin adornments are very exquisite, such as the famous silver waist chains, silver feathers, silver bubbles, silver birds, silver ropes, silver crowns, silver Buddhas, silver bells, silver flowers, silver earrings, silver toothpicks, silver butterflies, silver plates, silver shawls, and the silver hats for sacrificial purposes. This kind of silver adornments is very time- and labor-consuming. Some have to be made through multiple procedures. Take the making of silver ropes for example. One has to stretch silver into thread with the width of a hair, and plait dozens of such silver threads into 6-row ropes with each side in the shape of “人”. The silver crown marks the peak of Miao silver adornments, as the craftsmen have to weld onto the small frame dozens or even hundreds of adornments including silver flowers, bells, birds, butterflies, bells, and sticks with the weight of about 30 to 40 liang (1.5 to 2 kg). Each adornment is an exquisite work of art and sparkles with the wisdom of the Miao people.