Stitching history with flying needles and memory

Silver needles flicker, colorful threads glide, and without a sketch or pattern, landscapes, flowers, birds and mythical creatures emerge stitch by stitch. Guided only by memory and imagination, women of the Huayao ethnic group transform plain cloth into richly detailed works of art.

This is Huayao Tiaohua cross-stitch embroidery, a centuries-old craft passed down through generations of women in Huxingshan Yao township, Longhui county, Shaoyang city, Hunan province.

The Huayao community (literally, "flowery Yao") is a branch of the Yao ethnic group, so named because of their unique and brightly colored clothing. The origin of cross-stitch can be traced back to the Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) and flourished during the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties.

Using a painstaking counted-thread technique, artisans create intricate designs directly onto handwoven blue cloth with brightly colored silk threads. Every stitch is placed by counting the fabric's threads rather than following a printed pattern. The embroidery is reversible: the front has neat designs, while the back features orderly lines.

Completing a single skirt can require hundreds of thousands of stitches and take months, sometimes years.

In 2006, Longhui Huayao cross-stitch embroidery was added to China's first national list of intangible cultural heritage.

Across the villages of Huxingshan, women embroider beneath the eaves of their homes or gather outdoors on village greens and in the forest. As needles move and conversations flow, they stitch flowers, birds and symbols of good fortune onto skirts, headscarves and belts, weaving their love of nature and hopes for the future into every piece.

In the 1980s, folk culture photographer Liu Qihou brought examples of Huayao cross-stitch to renowned writer Shen Congwen, who praised it as "the world's finest cross-stitch".