Heritage hits the tracks

Seeking new avenues

For some practitioners, bringing traditional culture closer to contemporary life means taking it beyond exhibitions and performances altogether.

In Nanhua county, Chuxiong Yi autonomous prefecture in Southwest China's Yunnan province, Yi embroidery has found its way into fashion products, international brand collaborations and, most recently, the FIFA World Cup.

For the 2026 FIFA World Cup, FIFA selected Chuxiong Yi embroidery for its "Intangible Cultural Heritage Meets the World Cup" project. Thirty products, including caps, key rings and embroidered football jerseys, went through FIFA's approval process.

Behind that effort is a long process of experimentation led by practitioners such as Chen Haiyan, a representative inheritor of Yi costume-making.

Chen returned to her hometown after graduating with a design degree from Northwest University in Shaanxi province in 2022. Her decision was closely tied to her family. Her mother returned home after working away from the village and started a business in 2014 with the aim of preserving traditional Yi skills.

Chen now runs the Qicai Yi embroidery workshop, which she took over from her mother after graduating. Chen's grandmother, 76, still works with a sewing machine.

The workshop operates one processing factory and eight workshop branches. It has helped more than 1,870 embroiderers from seven ethnic groups achieve stable incomes, including more than 580 women from low-income households and over 100 people with disabilities.

The workshop provides free training at different levels, supplies materials, and handles orders, quality control and sales, while many embroiderers work from home.

But the workshop also looks beyond traditional craft markets for new uses for Yi embroidery. Its designs have been incorporated into gift packaging, bags and collaborative collections with other traditional crafts and contemporary brands. International collaborations have included Adidas and Nike, while custom Yi embroidery products have also been made for Jaguar Land Rover.

"The development of Yi embroidery should not be confined to Yi embroidery itself. We need to look at it from a broader perspective," Chen says.

That approach has also prompted the workshop to seek cooperation with heritage practitioners in other regions, including through exchanges of training methods, market channels and joint product development.