The intricate legacy of 'chou sha'

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.

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.