A tradition worth dyeing for

Seeds of revival

After Yang Shenghua married, she had less and less time for weaving, as she was preoccupied with housework, farm chores and raising children and grandchildren.

Then, one day, an architect changed everything.

Taiwan-born designer Jenny Chou, who has a studio in Beijing with two friends she studied with at the Rhode Island School of Design, the United States, visited Dali Dong village for the first time in the autumn of 2015 on a business trip. She happened to see villagers harvesting indigo and soaking it in vats to make dye.

Chou was fascinated by their perseverance, and that weaving was part of the Dong way of maintaining their traditional styles in an industrialized age.

"Making Dong cloth is not a task for one person alone," Chou says. "Spinning and winding thread, weaving it on the loom to produce white cloth, dipping it in the indigo dye, it takes about a year to complete a pi (a Chinese measurement of length, roughly equivalent to 33 meters)."

Inspired, she went on to found the Dousa Women's Cooperative, which allows the women of Dali Dong village to not only continue the traditional craft, but also to experiment.