THE MIAO MINORITIES
COLLECTIONS
The Miao are an ethnical group in China with a population of eight million people who mainly live in the Guizhou province or along the south China border or at remote places in northern Laos or northern Vietnam. Today some of them even live in France or the US.
The landscape is characterised by rice paddies (raps seed in spring time), water wheels to water the rice paddies and net fishing. Valleys in remote mountain areas with a river or lake are preferred by the Miao.
Miao people are today self-sufficient like growing ramy/cotton for textiles, indigo plant for dyeing, bamboo for different sized containers, all type of food, looms for weaving and so on.
Miao Minority, Miao embroidery, Miao culture, Miao jewellery, Miao Artifact
They are varying between embroidery, cross stitch (up to 14 stitches per centimetre), batic (unbelievable thin coloured lines between the wax).
Out of the numerous festivals we only saw the bull fighting festival, sisters festival and the guest welcome festival. The most spectacular is the sisters festival, where hundreds of girls are shown in their festive clothing.
These are only some clothes lying on the road on that these people have to offer for sale like vegetables or fruits. But mainly offerings are bamboo shoots.
Mothers are teaching embroidery their daughters when they are eight or nine years old. To finalise their embroidered wedding blouse can take two to three years.
In the past a lot of effort was taken for the wonderful embroidered items. Today the embroidery is mostly mechanically done or printed on synthetic fibres. The old baby backpacks show fantastic details for instance two million cross stitches per square meter, that is 14 stitches per centimeter.
Baby hats exist in different shapes, sometimes with silver Luohans on it to protect the babies from evil spirits.
In the old days Miao people had really specific jewellery, which defines the village they are from. A festive day jewellery could make up to 15kg of silver.
In the old days the earrings made it possible to identify where the people are from by village.
They normally look like woven pieces but could also be embroidered, just looking like woven.
These are rarer objects especially from the Huaxy people. The middle part of the apron consists of same stripes. The outer part are two stripes with different design.
These pieces are looking curious. They partially are something like a towel or like a relatively small woven textile square.
At the end there are pieces which don't fit into the other categories but still are beautiful pieces.
Within the embroideries there are always some pieces unknown use to us. For instance, our estimate is: apron middle part or top of a baby backpack.
These reference books are selected occasionally to prove the collectibles, especially “the art of silver jewellery”. Whatever the silver content of our collectibles is, was not jet analysed.