Some Miao Folklore
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Jessy Zhang |
Chinese Miao Minority textiles
are full of fascinating imagery. Our young Chinese friend Jessy
Zhang has kindly made notes on the tales she has heard related by Miao
women--stories explaining their popular textile imagery.
Below are some of these accounts, in her own words.
Jessy has also collected notes on Miao customs and festivals
from various Chinese language sources, and excerpts from these
are included on a second page. Many thanks to Jessy!
To see examples of Miao and other
Chinese Minority textiles from our gallery inventory, click
here
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| Miao
Batik |
Miao batik has a long
history. In some place they even have batik songs
describing the origin of batik. In Song dynasty batik
was popular in Wuxi area; from Ming and Qing dynasty
many batik cloths were made in Guizhou. Most of the batik
fabric has been made into dresses; in some places, people
used it for sheets, curtains, etc. |
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| The procedure: put a white cloth on a
table, melt wax in a hot pot, about 60 - 70°C, use wax knife to
dip the wax liquid, drawing on the cloth. Normally people do not
have patterns/designs attached on the cloth ahead of drawing.
They just design it whatever they thought. They don't use rulers
or compasses either; the middle lines, straight lines and
square-round circles could be fixed when folding the cloth. The
flowers, birds and fishes on the drawing are vivid. After
drawing, they throw the cloth into the dying jar. After dying,
they
move the cloth into water to boil it. When the wax is melted,
the places being covered with wax will appear with white
patterns.
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| A
Miao
Folk Story about the Origin of Batik
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A wise and beautiful girl, who was not
satisfied with her only colored dress, had been thinking
how to put some flower patterns onto her skirts. She
drew some on the skirts, it was too complicated, and she
couldn't find out any better methods.
She had been sad about it for days. One day,
again, she was watching at those beautiful flowers,
thinking, thinking, and went into sleep. It was
not clear enough, but she saw a flower fairy, wearing a
beautiful dress, taking her into a beautiful garden. She
saw various flowers, birds, butterflies, and bees
there. She was amazed by them, even when her skirt
was full of bees, she didn't know. |
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| When she woke up, she realized that was a
dream. She looked down to her skirt, those bees just flied away
from the flowers, and kept dots of honey and wax on the skirt,
and made her skirt ugly looking. While, what she could do was to
throw the skirt into the blue dying jar, intending to get it dyed
again. In order to cover those dots, after dying, she got
some boiled water, to wash. When she took the skirt out from the
boiled water, she was amazed: beautiful white flowers appeared on the places which were covered by the bee wax! |
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| Immediately she got some bee wax, got it melt,
used a stick to tip some melt wax, drew some wax patterns on a
white cloth, and dropped the cloth into the blue dying jar.
Then, used boiling water to get rid of the wax. Various white
beautiful flowers were shown on the cloth. She got the
batik! She was happy to sing songs. Other women came to
see her, listened to her dream, and based on her instruction,
began to do the batik works. |
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| Why the batik cloth all
in blue color
background? Why there is no red, yellow, green
batik? Because blue is the only color could be dyed in
cold water, and for red and yellow, only in hot water could be
dyed. But wax would melt, and disappear in hot water. |
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| Dan
Village Batik and Its Motifs
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Batik in Dan village is famous in
Miao's batik. There are eight styles of patterns: |
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| Butterfly Pattern |
| It was
said that the ancestor of Miao was born by the
butterfly. According to the folk story, butterfly
was the ancestor of everything in the earth, including
fairies, ghosts, human beings, animals, plants, as well
as thunder and lightning. So butterflies were respected
mostly, and were the important patterns of the batik. |
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| Fish and Bird
Patterns |
| Miao people thought birds stood for
males, fishes symbolized for females. Fish with bird
patterns meant loved couples. |
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| Centipede Patterns |
| According to the folk, long long ago,
thunder, dragon tiger, snake and centipede were close
brothers. Centipede was the youngest, being responsible
for farm works, setting up houses, having the
grandchildren rich and happy. |
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| Dragon Patterns |
| Miao people thought that dragon was a
lucky animal. But they are not as crazy as Han
nationality to treat it. So their dragons were shaped as
with bird head and snake body, cow head with fish body,
centipede, etc., without a fixed pattern. |
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| Horse's Hoof
Patterns |
| It was said that this pattern was the
design by a woman in the imperial house. |
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| Spiral Patterns |
| A good fortune pattern stood for Miao
people to be united forever, being used on the back and
the sleeves. |
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| Pear Flower
Patterns |
| It was said, on the way of their
ancestors' moving, there was a place where pear flowers
were full of the mountain. Having been moving for a long
time, they were nearly running out of their energy, when
they saw those beautiful flowers, they got encouraged to
live. Another saying was that when kids wearing pear
flower patterned batik dress, they would be healthy and
safer. |
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| Brass Drum Patterns |
| Used on the quilts putting on the died
old person's body. |
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| Other
Traditional Textile Arts |
Traditional Miao art
works include cross-stitch work, embroidery works,
weaving-stitch works, paper cutting works, silver
ornaments. These works are handed down generation
by generation. The traditional styles are saved
also; even today's modern developed market doesn't
influence the style. From the patterns, all of the plant
or animal shapes are related to Miao's living condition,
and the layout of the whole patterns are very much vivid
and naturally connected, instead of mechanically being
put together. |
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Certain patterns have
certain meanings:
Flowers: beautiful things and young girls.
Birds: freedom and happiness.
Fish: next generation's reproduction.
Butterfly: seeking for the root.
Pomegranate: son's prosperity.
Money/coins: to be rich.
Long-life character: endless happiness.
Whirlpool pattern: missing of the remote ancestor.
Six-ear connection pattern: the love between male and female. |
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| Among them all, Miao's
art works/patterns all the time mean praying for good luck,
meaning their ethnic consciousness, meaning to be dignified,
mean missing of remote ancestors, culture exchange, beautiful
life. All of these meanings are shaped in squares,
circles, ellipses, whirlpools, triangles, diamonds and multi-angle
patterns-- lined by straight lines, curved lines, water wave
lines, etc. |
| A folk story tells the
basic Miao idea: At the very beginning, Miao did have
beautiful/colorful dresses. One day a hunting young man got a
golden pheasant, and took it back home to his mother. His mother
was impressed by its beauty. She used her needle and thread,
started to copy this golden pheasant. She got her hair higher
according to its feather hair, copied its wing, she embroidered
the beautiful sleeves. Based on its colorful tail, she made a
pleated skirt and the weaving belt. And its beautiful legs
were similar to the women's leg wrappings. Since then on,
Miao women have been as beautiful as the golden pheasants in the
hills. |
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| The dress styles differed
according to their sexual distinctions, ages, and marital
status, as well as living places, but the patterns were handed
down for generations. Usually they used red, blue, yellow,
white and black colors mainly, in order to keep the
five-color-dress tradition, and the cloth was home made from the
raw materials in their living sites, such as cotton, hessian,
and feather. Miao garments were the history books, put on
the body. The patterns were telling you their unique tradition
background. Looking at the colorful lines on the pleated
skirts, those were rivers and mountains. And the circled square
figures, those were the cities they had owned, including the
streets, city walls, and corner towers. The cloud patterns,
water patterns and diamond patterns meant the heaven and field
in the north; the horses patterns on the belts telling you how
their ancestors moved from sites to sites. The patterns on
the garments were the totems on the dresses. Those were the
carriers of wordless civilization, to be translated, read and
understood. |
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Several cross-stitch
patterns have their own meanings:
Square: the field/garden in which their ancestors had been
living. Being forced to be moved, the later generations put it
on their dresses in order to remember their original home
land.
The red line in the square: it's the fish.
Figures in the square: river snail and stars in the sky.
Curves lines in the square: trees.
Those were the memorable patterns, not allowed to be changed and
forgotten. |
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| In other embroidery works
the patterns were various: most were dragons, phoenix, tigers, foo-dogs,
horses, butterflies, fish, birds, fruits and flowers. Although the
figures were normally in water cloud figures formed into
"S" patterns, water cloud figures were the standard
embroidery of Tijiang's. |
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| In weaving stitch works
(woven brocades), most of the patterns were continuous geometric
figures--parallel lines in the outside, with rhombus, triangles or
single curves inside, and birds or butterfly patterns were made by
means of these figures. These kinds of patterns were normally used
in sleeves, collars, shoulder parts, or even belts. The
patterns were made by a weaving machine, dark blue in warp, other
colors in weft. |
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| In Miao's patterns it was
said that their ancestors regarded dragon as their totem. And they
treated birds instead of phoenix. Because the birds hatched twelve
eggs for the butterfly, they thought that birds were one of the
ancestors. According to the tradition, they had a pattern,
called wizard with cock, sometimes a wizard was riding on a
two-head-cock. Based on the folk story, butterfly mother
were changed from the Chinese sweet gum; she had been living in
this tree. This pattern was regarded as the gods who had the
human being recreated. |
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This embroidered purse with dragons was made by a Dong artisan.
Dong groups lived amongst the Miao In Guizhou province and shared
many of their customs and beliefs.
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