The intricate legacy of 'chou sha'

In the award-winning film Dear You, the character Zheng Musheng travels to Thailand for work, leaving his wife, Ye Shurou, and children at their home in the Chaoshan region of Guangdong province, and sends remittance letters back to her. Following his untimely death, his friend Xie Nanzhi — a Chinese woman born in Thailand — continues to write letters to his family in Zheng's name, helping to support Ye and Zheng's children for the next 18 years.

But in the final letter Ye receives, there is a photograph of Zheng and Xie together. Unaware of Zheng's death, Ye assumes that Zheng has started a new family.

She says nothing. After staring at the photograph for two seconds, she returns to her embroidery, chou sha, a delicate form of needlework that became popular in the Chaoshan region of southern Guangdong province. The unspoken premise is that Ye is confident in her own ability to support her family financially.

"There is a saying here that one embroidery needle is worth more than a chimney," says Li Changrong, a former deputy manager at the Chaozhou Chou Sha Company, also known as Chaozhou Drawnwork Company.

After watching the film, Li has little doubt that Ye could have supported her family through embroidery.

"She has two sons and a daughter. Her daughter could have helped with the embroidery, too," Li says.

In the film, Ye sews beneath the banyan trees as she listens to love letters read out to her, supposedly written by her husband. In the Chaoshan region at the time, scenes like this were part of everyday life.

"Every village had a chou sha (pulled thread embroidery) workshop. In almost every household, someone was doing it," Li recalls.

Chaozhou is one of three prefecture-level cities in the Chaoshan region, along with Shantou and Jieyang in Guangdong. For women like Ye, embroidery was not simply a craft. It was a way to earn money. At the height of the industry in the 1980s, Chaozhou had about 300 embroidery workshops and more than 200,000 female workers.

Born of exchange

The story of chou sha dates back to the 19th century, when China was forced to open more ports to Western powers after a series of unequal treaties. The Chaoshan region was drawn into this exchange.

There, missionaries encountered large numbers of women skilled in needlework and introduced Western embroidery techniques. These techniques blended with local embroidery traditions, known as chao xiu, giving rise to chou sha, whose intricate openwork resembled European lace.

In 1900, the first chou sha shop opened in Chaozhou. The industry expanded rapidly and became one of the region's leading export industries.

By the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, 215 shops were operating in Chaozhou, employing about 70,000 embroiderers.

The industry entered its golden age after 1956, when privately run businesses were brought under joint public-private ownership and the Chaozhou Chou Sha Company was established to coordinate production.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Chaozhou's annual export value for chou sha reached 100 million yuan ($14.89 million at current exchange rates).

"That is an astonishing figure," Li says.

The goods, made one stitch at a time by women in Chinese villages, eventually found their way into homes across Europe. They were used as curtains and tablecloths and draped over pianos. The market also extended to Japan and Southeast Asia.

In 1972, when the Empress of Iran Farah Pahlavi visited China, chou sha was presented as a State gift.

Cai Saihua, then 15 and working at the Chaozhou Chou Sha Company, helped make it. She and her colleagues worked in shifts for about two months to finish the piece.

Cai began learning the craft from her mother when she was 6 years old. Today, she is a nationally recognized inheritor of Chaozhou chou sha.

At a time when the local economy was weak, daughters became their mothers' apprentices, and many embroiderers learned the craft at home, passing it from one generation to the next.

Over the years, chou sha developed more than 400 stitching techniques, with more than 100 commonly used today.

Its most distinctive feature, compared with chao xiu, is a process known as chou tong. The embroiderer carefully locates individual warp and weft threads, pulls them out one by one, and then embroiders designs into the spaces left behind.

Its patterns reveal its hybrid history. Grapes, roses and cathedral-like windows sit alongside chrysanthemums, peonies and phoenixes.

"The beauty of chou sha lies in how distinctive it is. It is delicate and understated, and it has a natural sheen," Cai says.