Ethnic Embroidery of Qiang – A Miracle in Chinese Folk Art (3)

Qiang's ethnic folk art are rooted in China's ancient history and folk culture, applied with colorful silk threads and cotton color threads, Qiang nation's peoples created various embroidery patterns and images such as flowers and fruits, fowls and beasts, pines, bamboos, plums, chrysanthemums, a mass of blossom, Harmony in Water and Fish and so on. In those simple artistic forms, rich connotations are contained and displayed out.

Women in Qiang nation are all good at embroidery work, which is one of essential skills that Qiang nation women experienced, and it's also a main rule to measure whether a Qiang nation girl is intelligent, dexterous and diligent or not. Women in Qiang are often be taught by their elderships to practice embroidery skill hardly when they are still a little girl. When they are in their 6 or 7-year old, the mother will began to teach her daughter to learn the embroidery skill, so when the daughter grew in her marriage age, she usually has become a skilled embroidery master, and when a man in Qiang nation going to pursue for a wife, the basic requirement is the girl should having grasped the embroidery skill well, if the girl are not skilled with embroidery work, the man would not like her. As a result, no woman in Qiang nation could not do embroidery job.

Women in Qiang nation commonly according to the intention person to choose the embroidery image pattern, for example, image patterns of "Fu", "Lu", "Shou" and so on are mostly designed for the elderly, and hereby to wish good health and longevity of the elderly; For children, images to against evil spirits would be picked mostly, and thus to bless healthy growth of children, and flower patterns would be choose also to imply children’s good health and favorable growth.

Young girl usually embroidered cigarettes bag for her lover, there are two pattern designs are most familiar, one is "The Mandarin duck plays with Water", the other is "The Swallows flying wing to wing from winter to spring". Both the two embroidery patterns are implies to love each other forever and stay together forever, and that is so-called "loves are contained in the sachet".

Served as a part of Qiang's ethnic culture, Qiang's ethnic embroidery bearing Qiang nation's people's love to the nature, their yearns for a better life, which are all displayed on their embroidered apparels, to show their rich regional culture and folk customs from one glance side. It can be said that the Qiang's folk embroidery and paper-cut art are visual carriers of Qiang's ethnic culture, they are direct and aesthetic symbolic expressions of this age-old ethnic groups' customs and lifestyles.


Qiang nation's "Yunyun shoes" is the most characteristic embroidered shoes, which are made with fabric and in a boat shape, with a little raised shoe toes and thicker soles, clouds images embroidered on the shoe uppers, it’s durable and wearable, is a typical lyric-by embroidery.

Not only with spirit appeal, but also actual practicality, this kind of art form congealed Qiang nation people's simple desires of blessing an auspicious future and a better life, and its culture characters extended whereby. This character is not only belongs to the Qiang nation, but also belongs to all Chinese working people.