Lanjiaxiejiyi
01 · Historical Records
It uses a dye liquor made from indigo (prepared from the plant of isatis root, a Chinese medicinal herb); its principal motifs are plots from Kunqu, luantan, and Peking opera that circulated from the late Qing through the Republican period, supplemented by auspicious motifs of flowers, birds, insects, and beasts. It is thus the sole surviving example among China's traditional dyed-and-woven textiles whose main motif is operatic figures. After the blue clamp-resist dyehouses that once spread across all the counties (cities, districts) of Wenzhou closed down one after another in the 1970s, farmers in Cangnan opened dyehouses and operated them intermittently, having a positive effect on the transmission and protection of the craft.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
Blue clamp-resist (lan jiaxie) is one of the four traditional Chinese resist-dyeing ("four xie") techniques, and is the fountainhead of Chinese block-printed dyeing and printing. Jiaxie (clamp-resist) arose in the Qin and Han and flourished in the Tang and Song; Emperor Ming of Tang once presented it as a national gift to the envoy missions from various countries sent to the Tang court. By the Yuan and Ming, jiaxie turned toward a single blue color, and in the end survived only in southern Zhejiang, centered on Wenzhou and radiating to adjoining parts of Taizhou and Lishui. Blue clamp-resist was once an essential item in folk weddings of southern Zhejiang. To this day Wenzhou preserves intact the craft sequence of block-carving, indigo-making, and printing-dyeing.
Documented Process Records
To this day Wenzhou preserves intact the craft sequence of block-carving, indigo-making, and printing-dyeing.
Preparing the indigo dye
Indigo from the indigo plant is fermented into a dye liquor; success at this stage decides whether the printed cloth comes out even.
Carving the drama onto the blocks
Scenes popular in the late Qing and Republic period are cut into printing blocks, whose compositions are often whole stage scenes.
Pair-block clamping
Block and cloth are aligned and clamped before the dye is scraped in; the motif emerges identically on both faces, the hallmark of jie xie.
Indigo cloth as wedding equipment
The cloth was once required at weddings across southern Zhejiang; quilt linens and garments carrying whole drama scenes were what kept the dye-houses going.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
The spatial distribution of blue clamp-resist is centered on Wenzhou and radiates to adjoining areas such as Taizhou and Lishui; it is the only surviving resist-dyeing category among the four xie whose main motif is operatic figures. After the Yuan and Ming, the colors of jiaxie gradually receded and it turned to a single blue, and the only branch to truly survive was this southern-Zhejiang one—so the dyehouses that once spread across the counties (cities, districts) of Wenzhou became the sole carrier of the craft. After these dyehouses closed down one by one in the 1970s, farmers in Cangnan reopened dyehouses and operated them intermittently, and thus Cangnan, Ruian, and Yueqing became the three present-day pillars of its transmission.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
The blue clamp-resist craft once spread widely through Wenzhou City in southern Zhejiang, and to this day it is well protected and transmitted in its subordinate Cangnan County as well as in the county-level cities of Ruian and Yueqing. Jiaxie is the common source of both block-printed dyeing and printing: a carved pattern block presses out paired-flower cloth, and the carving's knifework determines whether the motifs come out in pairs. Once operatic plots entered the blocks, the titles of Kunqu, luantan, and Peking opera traveled with the dyed cloth into the wedding customs of southern Zhejiang, making the cloth at once a dyed textile and an illustrated libretto. This craft once covered every county of Wenzhou; when the dyehouses closed in the 1970s the line nearly broke, and today it is kept going intermittently by the dyehouses of Cangnan, Ruian, and Yueqing.
05 · Associated Representative Bearers
Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
This static English edition is rendered at the edge for search engines, AI crawlers and readers without JavaScript; it mirrors the bilingual dossier. 阅读中文版，或返回 英文名录。