Blue-Printed Textiles from a Hunan Lakeside Village Take Eastern Beauty to the World

In Shaoyang County, Hunan Province, a shade of blue with a thousand-year history is now finding new life across borders.

An artisan carving printing blocks. Photo by Li Yuan

As the director of the Shaoyang County Blue-Printed Textile Cultural Heritage Base, Yang Caihong has brought this blue-printed fabric to markets in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Russia, and beyond, weaving ancient Eastern aesthetics into the fabric of global life.
Historically known as "soy milk cloth," this blue is created by mixing lime with soy milk to form a resist paste. Through repeated processes of pressing the paste through a carved perforated stencil onto the fabric, then dyeing, scraping off the dried paste, washing, and sun-drying, a single length of elegant, deep-hued blue-printed cloth is finally produced. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, Shaoyang County was already the largest production and sales center for blue-printed cloth in South China, and the title of "Hometown of Blue-Printed Cloth" has been passed down through generations.
Some once dismissed blue-printed cloth as "rustic, old-fashioned, and limited in use," but Yang Caihong was determined to break this mold and breathe new life into the craft: "We later improved and diversified our designs, and now we offer over 2,000 different products." Today, her products are sold at 21 retail locations across the Chinese market and have crossed oceans to gain international recognition.
In 2017, Yang Caihong invested 160 million yuan to build a blue-printed cloth cultural and creative industrial park, and subsequently established an intangible cultural heritage (ICH) town in Wangjianghu Village, pioneering the "ICH + tourism" model. Today, the area attracts over 100,000 visitors annually, providing local employment for hundreds of women and increasing the income of more than 2,000 farmers.