Drawn-work Embroidery
01 · Historical Records
In the 1860s, Chaozhou in Guangdong was opened as a treaty port. The Western drawn-thread (drawnwork) embroidery techniques introduced from abroad combined with local embroidery skills, giving rise to Chaozhou drawnwork.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
Drawnwork is an applied art in which special tools are used to apply various artistic treatments to suitable fabrics and yarns according to patterns and designs. Chaozhou drawnwork comprises more than 40 categories of products, including tablecloths, quilt and pillowcases, towels, screens, and hanging ornaments, which fall into four groups: embroidery, drawn-thread work, appliqué and patching, and weaving. Nearly 400 stitch and craft types are employed across the product range; the commonly used ones total 108 stitches in nine major categories, including laid-thread embroidery, flat embroidery, mixed-needle embroidery, carved-twist embroidery, drawn-thread embroidery, openwork embroidery, patched-and-inlaid embroidery, lace embroidery, and combined treatments. All product types, crafts, and stitches are executed under a complete set of strict technical requirements and quality standards, ensuring that drawnwork products reach a high standard of refinement, precision, and elegance. The Chaozhou drawnwork production process runs from pattern design to completion through three major stages and 38 process steps: in the early stage, preliminary design, finalizing the draft, measuring the cloth and brushing on the design, coloring the design, and dyeing the yarns; in the middle stage, embroidery by female artisans; and in the late stage, washing and pressing treatments. Its compositions are distinctive, its stitches fine and delicate, its coloring light and elegant, and its specifications complete; it is both beautiful and practical. It emphasizes the organic combination of point, line, and plane, with well-judged density in the layout; circular, oval, fan-shaped, square, and prismatic forms each have their own character. Techniques of standalone motifs as well as continuous and symmetrical compositions are applied with ease, cloth widths are joined in orderly variations, and solid and void set one another off. It is a widely popular household item and craft product, exported to nearly 100 countries and regions around the world. Chaozhou drawnwork has a long history with deep roots. During the Guangxu reign of the Qing dynasty, Chaozhou folk artists and embroiderers began to integrate the embroidery patterns and drawn-thread crafts introduced from the West with traditional embroidery techniques. Through generations of absorption and innovation and the unbroken transmission of embroiderers, they developed the new out of the old to form a distinctive folk handicraft.
Archival Record of Process Steps
The Chaozhou drawnwork production process runs from pattern design to completion through three major stages and 38 process steps: in the early stage, preliminary design, finalizing the draft, measuring the cloth and brushing on the design, coloring the design, and dyeing the yarns; in the middle stage, embroidery by female artisans; and in the late stage, washing and pressing treatments.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
Chaozhou drawnwork initially spread within the urban area of Chaozhou. With the growth of export sales, it extended to rural market towns along both banks of the Han River, the Chao'an plain, the Phoenix Mountain area, and the Huanggang River basin. Some varieties and techniques gradually radiated to Jieyang City, Chenghai District of Shantou, and Chaonan in eastern Guangdong, as well as to Fujian, Jiangxi, and Hunan.
Other submitting regions for the same item: Drawn-work Embroidery.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
Chaozhou drawnwork is rooted in the local culture of Chaozhou, bearing distinctive folk customs and the cultural and artistic substance of both East and West; it has reference value for the study of local folklore, political and economic developments and changes, and the blending of Eastern and Western cultures. Chaozhou drawnwork is widely used in local daily life and has practical, artistic, and collectible value; it has also made a certain contribution to increasing local employment and economic development. Cai Saihua (recorded in the official file of the associated inheritor): Female, Han ethnicity, born in January 1958, from Chaozhou City, Guangdong Province. Senior Arts and Crafts Artist. From the age of six she learned drawnwork from her mother, Cai Sumei. She has worked in the field for more than forty years and has mastered the full set of Chaozhou drawnwork embroidery techniques. She has actively devoted herself to the transmission of Chaozhou drawnwork, placing importance on teaching by both word and example; she has formally taken on more than ten apprentices and trained more than two hundred professional drawnwork technicians. She is a representative inheritor of Drawnwork (Chaozhou Drawnwork), an item of the fifth national-level batch of national-level intangible cultural heritage. The glass-yarn tablecloth 'Double Phoenixes Facing the Peony,' to whose creation she contributed, won the gold medal at the 32nd Munich International Handicrafts Fair in 1980 and the Gold Cup Award of the China Arts and Crafts Hundred Flowers Award in 1981; the double-sided embroidery screen 'Purple Clouds Revealing Emerald' won the gold medal at the China Arts and Crafts Cultural Creativity Award. She enjoys considerable representativeness and influence within the industry.
05 · Associated Representative Bearers
Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:
- Cai Saihua 05-2713
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
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