The Weaver and the Loom at Her Waist

The intangible-heritage profile of Liu Xianglan begins close to the floor. She sits with a belt around her waist, stretches her legs and presses them against a warp rod. Once the loom’s two beams are fixed, she separates the warp threads into layers, passes the weft with both hands and uses a wooden weaving sword in her right hand to pull each line tight. The report describes the cloth advancing in small repeated increments under this movement. It is a compact machine whose tension comes from the weaver’s posture. At Liu’s waist, a belt and wooden beams hold the warp taut; her legs, hands and weaving sword keep the threads under tension.

Liu’s account divides a finished piece into spinning cloth, dyeing, weaving and embroidery. The report says the sequence takes at least three or four months, longer when the reverse or double-sided techniques are more complex. At the beginning is not a bolt of factory cloth but fibre: she describes gathering island cotton and wild hemp in the rainy season, then twisting the material slowly on a spindle. Each stage changes what the next hand receives. The finished pattern carries the time of preparing thread as well as the visible work at the loom.

In the profile’s demonstration, Liu breaks a piece of turmeric into water and rubs it with a small scraper. A golden ring spreads through the water; cloth dipped into it takes on colour. She also names indigo leaves, wild chestnut bark, sappanwood and maple bark among dye materials. These details turn “natural dye” from a label into a sequence of choices: a plant gathered, a surface cut, pigment released, fibre soaked. The article records Liu’s particular practice, while the wider heritage entry describes spinning, dyeing, weaving and embroidery as a connected system passed on orally and through demonstration.

Liu tells the reporter that she began learning at thirteen beside her mother. The profile later follows the technique forward: Liu taught her son, and he taught his son; the grandson began at three and had learned four patterns by the time of the 2022 report. Liu also brought village women together in a weaving company in 2005 and helped establish a Wuzhishan Li brocade learning centre two years later, where classes were free. These are specific steps in one documented transmission story. They show both intimate instruction and organized teaching, without suggesting that a single workshop speaks for every Li community.