Huang Jinmei (R), an inheritor of Bouyei clothing making skills, teaches her daughter and daughter-in-law embroidery skills. [Photo/zgqxn.com]

Huang Jinmei is a woman on a mission: to preserve the future of traditional Bouyei clothes – one stitch at a time.

In the back of a stuffy shop in Rongdu town in the Qianxinan Bouyei and Miao autonomous prefecture, she holds the fate of Bouyei clothes in her hands.   

For people of the Bouyei ethnic group, clothing is an important part of their identity. The group is known for its unique garments, which are usually made white, green, blue or black cloth.

Clothing styles differ from one place to the next in Guizhou - where the majority of the Bouyei people live in China – and women’s clothing is characterized into four different styles: northwest, southwest, central and eastern.

While the costumes have become more plain and practical over the years for modern convenience, they still embody the same elegance, simplicity and cultural significance as their predecessors.

In decades gone by, it was common for most women to wear a long navy blue skirt and a pair of embroidered shoes with pointed ends called “cat nose flower shoes” (hailangao in Chinese.) Nowadays, Bouyei women prefer a more simple style - long trousers and crescent-shaped embroidered shoes with small flowers weaved into the tip.

No matter the style, each piece of clothing is traditionally handmade by the girl who wears it. Bouyei women are known for their fine weaving and embroidery skills, and it is tradition for girls to learn how to plant cotton, spin thread, weave cloth and sew at an early age.    

However, as less people wear the traditional costumes and with less patience among the younger generation for the complexity of the craft, many fear that the number of people with embroidery skills is declining.

Huang, an inheritor of Bouyei costume making skills, hopes to remedy this problem by trying to preserve the clothing culture and pass down the necessary skills for its survival.

In her clothing shop in Rongdu, she produces and sells homespun fabric, lattice sheets, embroidery products, ethnic clothes and other artifacts of Bouyei style.

The clothes designed by Huang have won her several awards at Guizhou’s competitions of tourism products. A set of Bouyei clothes totally handmade by Huang was collected by the Guizhou Intangible Cultural Heritage Center in June, 2011.

To protect the ethnic culture and skills, Huang recently began spending some time teaching her daughter Wei Dan and daughter-in-law Sunxia how to embroider.