Zhongshi Garment Making Craftsmanship
01 · Historical Records
In the late Qing and early Republican period, Ningbo's native tailor groups traveled out with the merchant bands; meeting the "west wind blowing east," they were prompted to merge Western garment tailoring techniques with their own, transforming into the Hongbang tailors. According to archives held by the Shanghai Municipal Archives, in 1896 Jiang Liangtong, a native of Fenghua, founded China's earliest Hongbang tailor shop—the Hechang Store—at 405 Julu Road, Shanghai, and it gradually became a main force in China's clothing reform. The Hongbang tailoring craft is a witness to and a cultural emblem of the local evolution of dress.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
The Hongbang tailoring craft is also called the "Fenghua-style tailoring craft"; it is a Chinese-style garment-making skill that originated in Ningbo City, Zhejiang Province. It is mainly distributed along both banks of the Fenghua River in Ningbo, including Jiangkou and Xiwu subdistricts of Fenghua District and Maoshan and Jiangshan towns of Yinzhou District. Ningbo people were accustomed to calling blue-eyed, high-nosed, brown-haired foreigners "red-haired people," and the tailors who made Western suits for these "red-haired people" came to be called Hongbang tailors. Fenghua District lies on the coast of eastern Zhejiang, in the south-central part of Ningbo; its landforms are broadly "six parts mountains, one part water, three parts fields," and it has a subtropical monsoon climate with distinct seasons and a mild, humid weather. The cultural ecology of Fenghua—valuing craft, commerce, and venture—provided suitable soil for the formation and development of the Hongbang tailoring craft. Rooted in Ningbo's native traditional tailoring and absorbing Western three-dimensional cutting, the Hongbang craft emphasizes bespoke customization and has developed singular skills such as visual estimation and mental calculation, correction of special body shapes, and renewal and hole-mending. Its basic process includes such stages as body measuring, material selection, style fixing, pattern drafting, cutting, and sewing, amounting to over 130 distinct operations. First are the Four Merits—knife skill, hand skill, machine skill, and pressing skill. Second are the Nine Shapes (jiushi), comprising the side shape, full shape, nestled shape, concave shape, raised shape, surplus shape, round shape, curved shape, and padded shape—nine modeling characteristics of different parts of the human body summed up by the Hongbang tailors. Third is the Sixteen-Character Formula—flat, conforming, smooth, straight, round, perky, upright, full, thin, loose, even, soft, lively, light, nested, and padded—the standard for realizing the finished-garment effect. China's first Zhongshan suit, first "Shanghai-style" Western suit, first Western-style tailor shop, first Western-tailoring vocational school, and first book on Western tailoring all came from the hands of Hongbang tailors, advancing the modern transformation of Chinese traditional dress. In over a century of practice, the Hongbang tailors explored core craft techniques and gradually formed a theoretical system suited to local garment-making, advancing the reform of China's modern clothing.
Documented Process Records
Its basic process includes such stages as body measuring, material selection, style fixing, pattern drafting, cutting, and sewing, amounting to over 130 distinct operations.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
Under the leadership of the Hongbang tailoring craft, Fenghua District now has nearly 1,000 garment enterprises and close to 100,000 employees, contributing to the local economic and social development.
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04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
Its core techniques are embodied in three aspects. The bearers of the Hongbang tailoring craft are mostly artisans from the Fenghua and Yinzhou areas, who transmit it through diverse means such as family teaching, master–apprentice training, short-term courses, school education, and study bases. The inheritors not only practice the craft locally but also actively engage in transmission and dissemination, spreading it to major cities at home and abroad and advancing the development of Chinese garment culture.
05 · Associated Representative Bearers
Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:
- Xu Yongliang 04-1921
- Lin Ruixiang 04-1922
- Bao Wenqi 04-1923
- Chen Yuqiu
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
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