Wunijiang Cotton Manual Weaving Weaving Skills

The inheritance of Wunijing Cotton Manual Weaving Skills originated from the weaving skills brought back by Huang Daopo from Yazhou. During the late Song and the early Yuan period, Huang Daopo, a native of Wunijing, Songjiang Prefectural, was displaced in Yazhou. Thirty years ago, during the year of Yuanzhen, she returned to her hometown and disseminated cotton planting and weaving skills there. She improved crafts such as gin, picker, spinning wheel, and loom, created weaving processes like "color matching" and "forming patterns" of "flowering branches" or "phoenix roundels", developing a great number of fine cotton textiles.

Huang Daopo's cotton weaving skills changed thousands of years of tradition using silk and linen as the primary clothing materials and the economic structure of Jiangnan, spawning an emerging cotton weaving industry. The living customs and traditional marriage practices in Jiangnan also changed because of that. Arguably, Wunijing Cotton Manual Weaving Skills are one of the core contents of Chinese weaving techniques.

Dyeing skills in Wunijing, Songjiang, are also very famous in history. Kou cloth (a type of cloth that is dense, narrow and short), Xi cloth (a type of cloth that is sparse, broad and long), Biao cloth (a type of cloth that is broad above and thin at the point), Dingniangzi cloth, Koryo cloth, twill, bucket cloth, Nankeen, scrape-into cloth, Taguang cloth, etc., and cloud green cloth, Mao Bao blue, grey cloth, color printing cloth, blueprinting cloth (blue calico cloth), etc., after printing and dyeing, they enjoyed the same reputation. Current successors of cotton manual weaving and dyeing skills are all in their 70s or 80s. With the danger of losing this ancient art, it's necessary to have them effectively preserved.