Kaili, Guizhou: Miao embroidery "out of the circle"
In 2015, Kaili City, Guizhou Province formulated the Miao embroidery poverty alleviation plan. As of the end of 2019, more than 4 million yuan has been invested, and the embroidered women who participated in the project have increased their income by thousands of yuan each year
In 2017, the Kaili City Cultural Industry Office brought representatives from the villages to Hangzhou to study and visit.
Photo courtesy of respondents
On August 4, after lunch, Long Feili sat by the south-facing window at home as usual.
Long Feili spent most of the day here, wearing reading glasses, holding the embroidery piece in one hand and the fine needle in the other.
The 20-centimeter-long, 10-centimeter-wide "Pisces Pomegranate Flower" embroidered piece in front of me has just been half completed, which is the result of her five days of labor.
Embroidery is the main livelihood of this 57-year-old Miao woman.
By selling embroidery pieces, she now earns three to five thousand yuan a year.
When Long Feili seldom walked out of Miao Village, she did not expect that the embroidery work she had learned from her mother when she was a teenager can now sell money.
In 2015, Kaili City in Guizhou Province formulated a poverty alleviation plan for Miao embroidery, organizing women in poor villages to sew and sell Miao embroidery.
As of the end of 2019, Kaili City has invested more than 4 million yuan to carry out Miao embroidery training for more than 2,800 embroiderers in 17 villages and help connect resources.
More than 600 poor embroidered women benefited from this, and the embroidered women who participated in the Miao embroidery project increased their income by thousands of yuan each year.
Help them earn money with what they know
Take a minibus from downtown Kaili, and it takes one hour to reach Kaitang Town in the northwest of the city. The town is located at the foot of the mountain and its 46 Miao villages are built on the hillside.
Meixiang Village is the highest village in the town, located on the halfway of Yangzhi Mountain.
Of the 152 households in the village, 55 are poor households with file registration, involving 236 people, and are deeply impoverished villages.
There is little arable land in the village, and the households are basically self-sufficient. Almost all young adults work outside.
Most of the people who stayed in the village were old and young women and children.
The elderly women with hair buns on their heads sat downstairs on the stilts, holding unfinished embroidery pieces, chatting, and carefully tying stitches and threads.
The finished embroideries will be sewn on gorgeous dresses or girls’ wedding dresses in the future.
The patterns polished under the needle and thread are all from the front, the fish, frogs, and ducks in the rice fields, the butterflies and birds in the fields, the pomegranate flowers on the hillside, and the embroidery is the life, joy, and death in the eyes of the Miao people.
Southeast of Guizhou is home to more than half of the Miao population in the world. In Kaili, where the prefecture is located in Southeast Guizhou Miao-Dong Autonomous Prefecture, nearly 65% of the people are Miao. Therefore, Kaili is also known as the "Pearl of Miaoling."
However, the Miao villages in the mountains are trapped by the word "poor", land is scarce, industries are scarce, and transportation is inconvenient. Young people go out to work and make money, and the elderly and children stay in their hometowns. This is the current situation in most Miao villages.
"The per capita annual income is more than 1,000 yuan, which was common 10 years ago." When Liu Rui went to the Kaili City Cultural Industry Office (hereinafter referred to as the Cultural Industry Office) in 2012, he was still a layman, but he clearly felt the Miao culture. The villagers are very rich and the economy is extremely poor. The villagers are poor, and there are not many things that can be picked up and exchanged for money, but he sees it right. Almost all women are familiar with Miao embroidery. Miao embroidery was one of them in 2006. Included in the first batch of national intangible cultural heritage lists, "Use what they know to help them earn money, even if it is local materials, it should be a good way."
In 2015, Kaili City launched the Miao embroidery poverty alleviation program, and 40-year-old Liu Rui became one of the responsible persons.
At that time, among the 166 villages under the jurisdiction of Kaili City, there were 81 national standard poverty villages, of which 27 were deeply impoverished villages. There were 16044 poverty-stricken households, involving 61516 people.
Choosing women from poor villages to train in the Miao embroidery industry is the first step in the poverty alleviation plan.
Need to change here, just stuck on "how to turn"
In 2015, Meixiang Village became one of the five Miao Villages in the first batch of Miao embroidery poverty alleviation plan selected by Liu Rui. It is a hard standard for Meixiang Village to be selected as a poverty-stricken embroiderer with a basic number of 20-50 people.
Liu Rui approached Gu Lanhua, the party secretary of Meixiang Village, to discuss this matter. Gu Lanhua was quite confident. She started embroidering with her mother when she was 13 years old. She once embroidered eight sets of gorgeous wedding gowns. She was known for her neighbors and eight villages. "Hand Qiao" ("Hand Qiao" in Miao language means "No. 1 Scholar").
She worked in Kaili, did business, and then studied at the health school. After graduation, she became a village secretary from a village doctor. She has craftsmanship, knowledge, and seen the outside world. She became the leader of Miao embroidery in Meixiang Village. .
Liu Rui invited teachers into the village, and Gu Lanhua went door-to-door to persuade the embroiderer to study. Jiang Chunhua was one of the rare embroiderers she had brought in who had no embroidery skills.
Jiang Chunhua went to Guangdong to work after graduating from junior high school. Like most women with low education and poor families, working was the only and best way out.
By 2010, she had earned more than 1,000 yuan a month. To earn more than 200 to 300 yuan, she had to work overtime and night shifts continuously.
However, this figure is already a bit more than the annual per capita income of Meixiang Village at that time.
In 2014, the husband, who was also working outside, suffered from severe stomach problems. The two returned to Meixiang Village when their savings were just enough to build a house and ended their working life.
But income was completely interrupted at this time.
Jiang Chunhua's family is classified as a poor household.
"During the training, they all laughed at me and said that you dare to come? What are you embroidered with?" Now when she said this, Jiang Chunhua suddenly laughed. She felt that she was bold, 32-year-old. Only at a young age did the first stitch of Miao embroidery.
But she really has no other way. The farming harvest is small, the breeding requires capital investment, and the culture and technology are scarce.
She didn't know whether she could make money through embroidery, but Gu Lanhua tried to persuade her again and again, "You have to try it. If you don't have any money at home, you can't live on subsistence allowances."
Jidao Village, Sankeshu Town, where Long Feili is located, was also included in the first batch of training plans in 2015, and village doctor Chen Qin was selected as the training liaison.
Compared with Meixiang Village, Jidao Village, located on the Bala River, has a more convenient location, with quaint stilted buildings built on the back of the mountain.
Chen Qin had a business acumen for a long time. In 2010, she converted her home into a guest house and began to receive tourists from other places, organizing villagers to perform song and dance performances in ethnic costumes, set long tables for banquets, and display Miao embroidery.
But Chen Qin didn't expect that when she really had the opportunity to contact the embroiderers for their embroidery orders, they would refuse because of the "high" requirements of the other party. "Is it really high requirements? No, people (enterprises) The requirements may be different from the color matching of the thread used by the embroidery ladies, the pattern requirements are different, or the stitching is more demanding." Chen Qin knows that this requirement is not high, the difficulty lies in the embroiderers’ unwillingness to change their thinking and habit.
"All our embroidery is a history book, a record of the history of our Miao nationality. Each embroiderer is a different designer. Their aesthetics are very abstract and they have their own understanding of life and everything. You like red, she likes it. Purple, and some people like green, it doesn’t matter. But the order has standards, uniform requirements, and strictly follows the requirements of others, which is difficult for them to accept." Chen Qin can understand the embroiderers who are as big as his mother and grandmother. Thought, but she was helpless because in the end they told her, "Forget it, I won't do it, I won't."
Before getting to know Liu Rui, Chen Qin realized that there needs to be a change here, but he was stuck on "how to turn".
In 2015, Liu Rui approached Chen Qin and started training four times a year for the embroiderers in Jidao Village for three years.
"Dormant Period"
"Improve skills, integrate with the market, and order to do it." Liu Rui said that the training objectives are nothing more than these three. It is not difficult to improve skills. Miao village women's embroidery skills come from family traditions. Traditional people sew clothes and make clothes for their daughters. It’s easy to see whether the dressing and wedding gowns are exquisite or not. Old and young, good-skilled embroidery mothers and poor-skilled embroidery mothers have done this for generations.
However, the embroidery standards vary from village to village, from family to family, and from person to person. The number of stitches, thread colors, and embroidery techniques of the same pattern are different. The most difficult thing for embroiderers to accept is “be in line with the market and work according to standards. ".
Gu Lanhua said that once a company put forward a custom request, the embroiderer "proofed" according to the company's requirements, but the embroiderer did not meet the requirements several times, the embroiderer was anxious, "Our stuff is like this, put it here, you If you feel bad, you just leave."
Liu Rui said that under such circumstances, "standardization" has become the focus of training.
"The patterns from different hands must be the same, the same side, the number of stitches must be the same, and the silk thread purchased for embroidery must be the same batch, otherwise even the thread of one color will have color difference. The'standardization' mentioned in class For the embroiderers, they are jerky and difficult to understand, but when they are transformed into the same pattern on the embroidery piece, the same color scheme, elegant hooks, and quantitative stitches, they will know in their hearts."
There will be "homework" after the training class, and awards will be given to outstanding candidates.
In the two months after each training, the embroiderer has enough time to complete a large piece of "customized" embroidery, and participate in the awards in the next training.
500 yuan, 300 yuan, 200 yuan and 100 yuan will be used as first, second and third prizes and encouragement awards for all participants.
"In this way, you can calculate an account. If an embroiderer has a good skill, he can get one or two thousand yuan a year. The two thousand yuan is not only to solve their actual difficulties in life, but also to let everyone know that the original family How can you sell Miao embroidery that is for self-entertainment?"
There are also changes in the way of thinking.
Liu Rui told reporters that in 2016, a company customized a batch of embroidery in a village, but when the company came to receive the goods as agreed in the contract, it was dumbfounded, "There is not one, can you imagine? I haven't seen any embroideries." Liu Rui later learned that the embroiderers felt that the price that had been negotiated with the company was low, and they didn't want to do it, so they didn't do it quietly.
In 2017, in order to let the embroiderers know more about the assembly line craftsmanship of the garment industry, Liu Rui contacted a well-known clothing company in Shanghai and selected 20 embroiderers to practice in the factory. The contract period is one year.
But after two or three months of work, there was Xiu Niang and went home by herself without saying hello. The reason was, "I don't adapt to life in Shanghai."
These two things have become negative cases in the Embroidery training class. Liu Rui said that everyone does not understand the contract and does not know what the spirit of the contract is. "The price you agreed to later regretted not doing it. You are in breach of contract! People are losing money!" He also reflected that the previous training for embroiderers was mostly "smooth and coaxing", and now they have to criticize education when they encounter problems, "How can it be so easy to make money!"
In addition to training courses in the village, the Kaili Cultural Industry Office also organizes the embroiderers of various villages to learn from each other and take them out of Kaili to visit embroidery enterprises in Guiyang and Hangzhou.
Participate in cultural industry fairs in Hangzhou, Beijing, Shenzhen and other places, and let everyone show Miao embroidery on the spot.
Kaili City also organized an expo and invited foreign companies and manufacturers to visit. Liu Rui felt that the early closed-door training was a "dormant period" for attracting opportunities and orders.
Chen Qin took a few embroiderers from Jidao Village out many times. She saw everyone’s eye-opening look. “Stay in the village, everyone thinks I’m good at craftsmanship. The price is high, but in fact, there are mountains outside the mountains, and there are people outside the people."
Women support their homes with ancestral skills
At the end of 2016, through the United Nations Development Program, Liu Rui received a large order from a well-known cosmetics brand, and hand-embroidered pieces were sewn on the commemorative notebook that the company sent to the guests of the annual meeting.
The embroiderers from several villages worked together, and Miao Embroidery got the money back and paid more attention.
Since then, more companies have come to Kaili, including high-end customization from major international luxury brands, and cooperation invitations from domestic clothing companies.
Jiang Chunhua, who returned to Meixiang Village in 2014, originally planned to take a one-year break to work in Shenzhen to earn money. However, after learning Miao embroidery, she has been able to earn nearly 10,000 yuan each year from this since 2017. The family also picked up this year. Lost the hat of poor households.
Although the money is not much compared to the income from part-time work, Jiang Chunhua is satisfied. She has more time to take care of her two children and her 80-year-old in-laws, grow vegetables, raise chickens, and keep the family in order.
In 2017, Meixiang Village established the Miaoxiang Jinxiu Embroidery Farmers Professional Cooperative. The Cultural Industry Office sent several electric sewing machines and seaming machines to Gu Lanhua to teach embroiderers how to use them and sew hand-embroidered pieces on finished clothes. On the bag.
With the help of cultural industry offices, public welfare foundations, and regional women’s federations, the cooperative has signed strategic cooperation agreements with a number of companies. 60% of the proceeds will be used for member dividends and 20% will be used for the establishment of files and cards for poor households in the village. Assistance and dividends, and the remaining 20% is used to improve the village collective economy and cooperative development funds.
After an order is received, in addition to requesting and providing proofing embroidery, some companies will send a unified raw material. The embroiderers in the village will receive some shares according to the situation at home and the speed of their own work, and finish them within the specified time.
"Don't delay farm work, don't hinder taking care of the elderly and children, work more and get more."
In 2019, the cooperative received a total of 400,000 yuan of social orders, and more than 50 embroiderers had incomes ranging from one to eight or nine thousand yuan each.
At the end of 2019, all 55 impoverished households in Meixiang Village had been lifted out of poverty. Gu Lanhua said, among them, embroiderers have contributed a lot. In the past, the wives and mothers who could not get out of the house in the eyes of men, now rely on ancestral handicraft .
After Jiang Chunhua, several young women who worked outside returned to Meixiang Village to resume Miao embroidery.
This is the scene that 52-year-old Gu Lanhua hopes to see. When young people come back and earn money at their doorstep, the village has vitality. She also hopes that these young women who have worked outside, met the world, and have been exposed to the market will become embroiders in the village. The bridge between my mother and outside enterprises.
According to Liu Rui, embroidery cooperatives have been established in 5 villages. The Cultural Industry Office has also organized guidance and training on accounting, management, and marketing for the heads of the cooperatives. “We will definitely continue to bring energy and resources to The next village is about to start training, but before leaving, they must be taught to make their own blood, find orders, sign orders, make orders, and submit finished products. All links must rely on themselves."
"Out of the circle" with Miao embroidery
The three years supported by the Cultural Industries Office have been the most lively three years in Jidao Village. Visitors from home and abroad attracted by Miao embroidery are in an endless stream. Naturally, there is no need to worry about orders.
The embroidery pieces that Long Feili uses at home can bring up to five or six thousand yuan in income a year. Life is guaranteed. He occasionally helps his son who is studying abroad.
At the end of 2018, Longfeilijia got rid of poverty.
For Jidao Village, Miao embroidery is only the first step in poverty alleviation.
Chen Qin has been "exploring the way" in recent years, how can the craftsmanship of the embroiderers be recognized and more valuable.
She thought of combining with the unique natural resources of Jidao Village, pulling other villagers to expand the size of the village to receive tourists.
Every summer vacation, Chen Qin's family welcomes the children who are traveling with their parents, living in stilts, catching fish in rice fields, and making firewood barbecues, allowing the children in the city to immerse into the original Miao village life.
She also asked Long Feili and other embroidery ladies to teach children and parents Miao embroidery on the spot.
"Those kids don't talk about embroidery, they haven't even moved the needles." Chen Qin felt that the new things in the eyes of these children were cultural relics passed down from generation to generation. She wanted people outside the mountain to bring Miao embroidery out of the mountain. Go home and take it to the big city.
"It may be some finished products from embroidered mothers, or it may be gadgets made by children themselves. Even if it is to let more people know how Miao embroidery is made, it can gradually expand people's recognition of traditional handicrafts."
Chen Qin recalled that as early as 2007, foreigners came to Jidao Village to collect old costumes passed down from the villagers' ancestors at a price of several hundred or thousands of yuan each.
Once a foreign visitor asked, "Do you still have this kind of stitches?" Women in the village shook their heads, whether they were young or old.
It was the "double-needle old thread embroidery" that was nearly lost. It was the unique embroidery technique of Jidao Village. Later, a 70-year-old woman who had been married to Qiannan Prefecture said when she visited her relatives in Jidao Village. I have seen my mother embroider this kind of stitch, try to remember and imitate, and use "double needle old thread embroidery" to copy an old pattern a few months later.
Since then, more and more Jidao Village embroiderers have begun to learn this embroidery method. After the Cultural Industry Office organized training for embroiderers in 2015, double-needle old thread embroidery became the mainstream of Jidao Village’s embroiderers.
This is an unexpected surprise for Liu Rui. “Miao embroidery originally had more than 100 embroidery methods, but now people know more than 20. Most of them have been lost. I didn’t expect that training can rescue the skills.”
This also gave Chen Qin a big touch. She was thinking about transforming her old house into a Miao embroidery exhibition hall. "Our village is not big and does not need to receive too many tourists, but everyone who comes can embroider Miao. Take it out."
Beijing News reporter Zhang Jingshu