A 13-inch handkerchief featuring intricate, all-over embroidery. CHINA DAILY
In the award-winning film Dear You, the character Zheng Musheng travels to Thailand for work, leaving his wife, Ye Shurou, and children at their home in the Chaoshan region of Guangdong province, and sends remittance letters back to her. Following his untimely death, his friend Xie Nanzhi — a Chinese woman born in Thailand — continues to write letters to his family in Zheng's name, helping to support Ye and Zheng's children for the next 18 years.
But in the final letter Ye receives, there is a photograph of Zheng and Xie together. Unaware of Zheng's death, Ye assumes that Zheng has started a new family.
She says nothing. After staring at the photograph for two seconds, she returns to her embroidery, chou sha, a delicate form of needlework that became popular in the Chaoshan region of southern Guangdong province. The unspoken premise is that Ye is confident in her own ability to support her family financially.
"There is a saying here that one embroidery needle is worth more than a chimney," says Li Changrong, a former deputy manager at the Chaozhou Chou Sha Company, also known as Chaozhou Drawnwork Company.
After watching the film, Li has little doubt that Ye could have supported her family through embroidery.
"She has two sons and a daughter. Her daughter could have helped with the embroidery, too," Li says.
In the film, Ye sews beneath the banyan trees as she listens to love letters read out to her, supposedly written by her husband. In the Chaoshan region at the time, scenes like this were part of everyday life.
"Every village had a chou sha (pulled thread embroidery) workshop. In almost every household, someone was doing it," Li recalls.
Chaozhou is one of three prefecture-level cities in the Chaoshan region, along with Shantou and Jieyang in Guangdong. For women like Ye, embroidery was not simply a craft. It was a way to earn money. At the height of the industry in the 1980s, Chaozhou had about 300 embroidery workshops and more than 200,000 female workers.
Chaozhou chou sha inheritor Cai Saihua sews a chou sha piece. Because of the intricate work involved, many women in the craft have developed myopia. CHINA DAILY
Born of exchange
The story of chou sha dates back to the 19th century, when China was forced to open more ports to Western powers after a series of unequal treaties. The Chaoshan region was drawn into this exchange.
There, missionaries encountered large numbers of women skilled in needlework and introduced Western embroidery techniques. These techniques blended with local embroidery traditions, known as chao xiu, giving rise to chou sha, whose intricate openwork resembled European lace.
In 1900, the first chou sha shop opened in Chaozhou. The industry expanded rapidly and became one of the region's leading export industries.
By the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, 215 shops were operating in Chaozhou, employing about 70,000 embroiderers.
The industry entered its golden age after 1956, when privately run businesses were brought under joint public-private ownership and the Chaozhou Chou Sha Company was established to coordinate production.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Chaozhou's annual export value for chou sha reached 100 million yuan ($14.89 million at current exchange rates).
"That is an astonishing figure," Li says.
The goods, made one stitch at a time by women in Chinese villages, eventually found their way into homes across Europe. They were used as curtains and tablecloths and draped over pianos. The market also extended to Japan and Southeast Asia.
In 1972, when the Empress of Iran Farah Pahlavi visited China, chou sha was presented as a State gift.
Cai Saihua, then 15 and working at the Chaozhou Chou Sha Company, helped make it. She and her colleagues worked in shifts for about two months to finish the piece.
Cai began learning the craft from her mother when she was 6 years old. Today, she is a nationally recognized inheritor of Chaozhou chou sha.
At a time when the local economy was weak, daughters became their mothers' apprentices, and many embroiderers learned the craft at home, passing it from one generation to the next.
Over the years, chou sha developed more than 400 stitching techniques, with more than 100 commonly used today.
Its most distinctive feature, compared with chao xiu, is a process known as chou tong. The embroiderer carefully locates individual warp and weft threads, pulls them out one by one, and then embroiders designs into the spaces left behind.
Its patterns reveal its hybrid history. Grapes, roses and cathedral-like windows sit alongside chrysanthemums, peonies and phoenixes.
"The beauty of chou sha lies in how distinctive it is. It is delicate and understated, and it has a natural sheen," Cai says.
Chou sha pieces combine Western drawn-thread techniques with traditional Chaoshan embroidery and were exported overseas. They were once common decorative items in European homes. CHINA DAILY
Mechanization
Cai once traveled to Austria to demonstrate the craft in the 1980s. People there were amazed to learn that the exquisite pieces were made entirely by hand rather than by machine.
But beginning in the 1990s, handmade production was increasingly displaced by large-scale mechanized manufacturing. The international market for chou sha contracted, leaving large quantities of unsold inventory.
By 1993, production had effectively ground to a halt. Cai left the craft and went into business before eventually retiring.
Then, in 2014, Chaozhou chou sha was included in the fourth batch of China's national intangible cultural heritage list. The Chaozhou Chou Sha Company was designated as the official institution responsible for protecting the craft, including promoting it and preserving its records.
During the application process, Cai was called back to the company. She helped urgently produce a batch of embroidery pieces for display.
Now nearly 70, she spends most of her time helping care for her grandson. Sometimes he draws a picture, and she turns it into embroidery.
For another inheritor, 62-year-old Zhu Shuqin, the decline of the craft has been harder to accept.
Zhu, a provincial-level representative inheritor of chou sha, also learned needlework as a child. But by the time she was in school, handmade embroidery was already disappearing from the market. The embroidery companies eventually went out of business.
In 2006, she heard that chao xiu had been recognized as a national intangible cultural heritage. The following year, she gave up the small business she had built and registered a brand called Chao Xiu Family.
For years, she has tried to find a place for the craft in the modern economy. She established an intangible cultural heritage workshop, trained students and developed new products.
Her shop focuses on chao xiu rather than chou sha, largely because she believes chao xiu has greater market potential.
"Actually, chou sha is what I'm better at," she says. "But you have to survive. You could say I'm using chao xiu to support chou sha."
In her view, chou sha faces three major obstacles.
First, it is extraordinarily difficult. The craft involves hundreds of processes and incorporates nearly every major embroidery technique.
Second, it takes time. The amount of fabric an embroiderer can complete in a given period is far smaller than with other forms of embroidery.
And third, tastes have changed. Chou sha's restrained, pale colors do not fit the popular image of embroidery as something bright and richly colored.
"If you want chou sha to become popular again and circulate widely in the market, it is almost impossible," Zhu says.
In the 1970s and 1980s, nearly every village in Guangdong's Chaoshan region had a chou sha workshop, and women in almost every household were involved in making chou sha. CHINA DAILY
Still, she has not stopped trying to pass it on. She tells every student who comes to learn embroidery from her that they must also learn chou sha. Most, however, find the craft too demanding. A single piece can take a very long time to complete, and many students give up halfway through.
"Without resilience, patience and hard work, you could never make a living by pulling out thread after thread and doing something this painstaking," she says. The character of the people of Chaoshan, in Zhu's view, is stitched into chou sha itself.
Her determination also carries a trace of regret: her mother was an exceptionally skilled chou sha embroiderer, but the family kept none of her work.
Whenever her mother received fabric and thread from the production team, she would immediately begin embroidering it so she could sell the finished piece for money. She never made one for herself.
Years later, when Zhu traveled to Europe, she saw chou sha everywhere, on dining tables, over chairs and even covering teapots. It was then that she realized how far the work her mother had made had traveled.
