Ramie cloth: a fibre on the Rongchang plain

Rongchang District's farming economy rests on four lines: pigs, sericulture, hemp and tea. Two of those four are fibrous. Hemp is listed again among the products the district produces in quantity, together with folding fans, pigs, pottery and tea. Sericulture, the other fibre line, is described as one of the district's national strengths alongside pigs and citrus. So the plain carries two raw materials that end in entirely different workshops, one a bast fibre that must be broken down before it can be spun and one the cocoon of a silkworm. The district record stops at the list; it does not describe either workshop.

The ground under those four lines was surveyed in 1941, when the county government put Rongchang's area at 899.28 square kilometres. It lies east of Chongqing's Dazu and Yongchuan districts, south of the Sichuan county of Anyue, south of Luxian, and west into the Dongxing district and the city of Longchang under Neijiang. It is a district of six subdistricts and fifteen towns, with Changyuan and Changzhou subdistricts named for the Tang-era county and prefecture that began its history. Its best-known output is not a cloth but an animal: the Rongchang pig, one of the country's three fine local breeds.

What the district record gives for this product is its place in a table rather than a workshop. Hemp appears twice: once among the four backbone lines of the farming economy, with pigs, sericulture and tea, and once in the list of goods the district produces in quantity. Sericulture appears in the first list and is described as a national strength. Around them the record places a livestock economy rather than a textile one: the white pig, the Rongchang breed, an export base for piglets, and the Chongqing Academy of Animal Husbandry and the Rongchang campus of Southwest University. The plain's documented craft is food and fibre together, with pottery the one non-farm product on the same list.