Fu Guoyan： Weaving Women’s Way to Wealth with the Intangible Heritage ＂Splendid＂

Senior Arts and Crafts Artist in Guizhou ProvinceFu Guoyan

CCTV News:Every summer, the workers harvest blue grass enthusiastically, which is the most lively scene in the suburbs of Guiyang. Such a picture was memorable when Fu Guoyan was as tall as bluegrass when she was a child. Guizhou is rich in blue grass, which blooms in July and is harvested in August. Its root is the famous Chinese medicine Radix Isatidis, and its stems and leaves are excellent raw materials for fabric dyeing. "shine on you" means blue grass.

In the 1990s, Fu Guoyan was confined in a small workshop in xiaohe district, Guiyang with a dozen workers, a dozen sewing machines and a big dye vat. She inherited the pioneering capital from her parents, and it was the pure handmade plant batik with bluegrass as the main dye.

Today, the small workshop of more than 10 square meters has expanded to the three-story shop of more than 5,000 square meters; The 2,600-square-meter Guizhou Cuixing Complex is located in Tianhetan Scenic Area, Guiyang, adjacent to the flower sea and close to the lake, which has become a new window to show Guizhou populism. Behind this, it is a growth sample of a private enterprise relying on the "Splendid Plan" of the People’s Livelihood Project of Guizhou Women’s Federation, and it is also an inspirational story of Fu Guoyan, a female craftsman, who insisted on Guizhou’s populist inheritance and led women to get rid of poverty and increase income.　

Female craftsmen show batik embroidery skills

Fu Guoyan’s dry batik is a female inheritance. She was born in Anshun, Guizhou, where batik is known as "the first dyeing in the East" and Anshun is also known as "the hometown of batik". Fu Guoyan heard from his father that in his early years, his grandfather set up a dyehouse in Anshun market town. Among many workshops, Shuaijia, Fujia and Tanjia were larger. Fu Jia is the ancestor of Fu Guoyan.

In 1988, Fu Guoyan quit her enviable job as a salesperson in a state-owned enterprise and opened a small batik workshop. In 1990, the Asian Games was held in Beijing, and the Chinese style was very popular in Asia. In the streets and lanes, more and more Guiyang people who dare to show off wear national costumes, and batik bat shirts and tie-dyed dresses have become the most fashionable dresses. Fu Guoyan saw the business opportunity and cooperated with friends to open a batik clothing factory.

Guizhou is a veritable non-legacy province, with more than 6,000 "non-legacy" lists from county level to world level, covering traditional crafts, folk songs and dances, etc. How can these populists be passed down? Fu Guoyan began to study the market-oriented development of ethnic handicrafts. "Non-legacy" products such as ponytail embroidery, Miao embroidery and batik are very popular.

Fu Guoyan (right) went to the farmer’s house to collect embroidery.　

There are 16.09 million women in Guizhou province, of whom 36% are ethnic minority women, and about 60% live in rural areas. Over the years, going out to work has almost become the only way for women to get rid of poverty and increase their income, but it has brought social problems such as left-behind children and left-behind elderly people. In the 1990s, many villages had no access to water, and drinking water had to be carried on their backs by walking for several hours. The villagers lived in poverty and backwardness.

At that time, Fu Guoyan often went to Shan Ye fields hundreds of kilometers away alone to buy batik embroidery and other ethnic handicrafts, and she could carry back nearly 100 kilograms of ethnic handicrafts with her own sewing backpack. "Sometimes I can’t find the way. Others pointed to a hill and said that it would take two hours to walk. As a result, I found that four or five hours passed and it was dark." Fu Guoyan recalled that this made her strengthen the idea of using populism to pull villagers out of poverty and increase income.

In order to ensure the quality and quantity of products, she has always insisted on buying products from embroidered mothers with three times the order number. For unqualified products, she would rather cut them and throw them away. "To avoid the embroidered mother’s bad embroidery in the future, her products can be collected for her, but you have to cut it with scissors in front of her and throw it into the garbage. Only by making this determination can we make the product well. " Once, in order to catch up with customers, Fu Guoyan took the team and didn’t sleep for three days and three nights. "Because once you sleep, they must sleep, so there is no way. Just take them without sleeping for three days and three nights, and make products and give them to customers."

Shenshantong Highway in Guizhou

Since 2013, Guizhou Women’s Federation has taken the lead in launching Splendid Plan, combining women’s handiwork with precision poverty alleviation, and integrating traditional skills with modern fashion. Women’s "fingertip economy" has mushroomed, and more than a thousand skilled poverty alleviation bases, 1,354 women’s characteristic handicraft enterprises and professional cooperatives have been built, with nearly 500,000 women engaged in characteristic handicraft industries and auxiliary industries. The Women’s Federation of Guizhou Province integrated all member units to carry out 65,000 person-times of splendid plan training, and the output value of the handicraft industry with women’s characteristics in Guizhou Province reached 6 billion yuan.

This solved Fu Guoyan’s big problem. "Women receive training in the cooperative, and I will go to the cooperative to get it when the goods are delivered. The group of embroidered mothers has expanded and the quality is good, so I don’t have to collect them one by one. " Fu Guoyan said with a smile.

With the implementation and promotion of "Splendid Plan", Fu Guoyan found more than 20 "non-legacy" inheritors, who set up rural cooperatives and handicraft alliance bases in Anshun, Qiandongnan and Qiannan. Through training embroidered mothers and craftsmen, their products can be directly provided to Qiancuihang.

Since the patented technology product "Silk Batik" launched in 1994 won the gold medal at the International Small and Medium-sized Enterprises New Products and New Technologies Expo, in 2010, Fu Guoyan provided 90% of the exhibits for the Guizhou Pavilion of the Shanghai World Expo, including Miao silver ornaments and aquatic ponytail embroidery crafts. In 2016, she brought Guizhou ethnic handicrafts to the 12th China Shenzhen Cultural Expo, and in 2018, members of delegations from Cambodia, Malaysia, Myanmar and other ASEAN countries were deeply attracted by the exquisite embroidery patterns of ponytail embroidered handbags she brought.

Fu GuoyanParticipated as a representative in the Twelfth National Congress of Women in China (source map)

"You respect the dye vat and clean up around it. The things you dye are just different." Today, Fu Guoyan’s team has obtained 15 patents of Guizhou ethnic handicrafts, but she still holds the unchanging persistence and awe of traditional crafts. "More and better folk arts products will be created, which will continue to drive more poor women to increase their income by staying at home, so that the bright pearl of ethnic handicrafts can be passed on to more people."