China Ethnic Crafts Lotus Collection

Made from hand-embroidered cloth stitched by the Miao women of Hunan. This limited edition collection is crafted with pieces of hand-embroidered cloth that we call “Antique Miao Cloth”  because it is embroidered with the same patterns that the Miao people have been doing for hundreds of years. The women in the villages will hand-stitch this cloth about 4 hours a day after coming in from working in the rice fields that surround their houses and villages. They sew long strips of this cloth which are later sewn into the bags in a patch work fashion. They embroider with silk threads that are spun and dyed in local Miao villages. The colors and the patterns will vary depending upon their mood that day.

In the rural mountains of Hunan Province in central China nestled amidst terraced rice fields lie many Miao villages. One group of the Miao people have lived here for thousands of years, farming the land, and living according to the customs of their minority tribe. For many years they lived very separately from the Han Chinese, the majority people of China, but in the last half century, they have started to intermingle with them more and more. More than half of the Miao people now speak Mandarin, the main language of China, because it has been taught in the schools there for the past 20 years.

Many of the 1 million Miao people in the area of Hunan Province live in small rural villages far from the more well known cities on the east coast such as Hong Kong or Beijing. Here you can see typical Miao villages.