Needlework made on a silk ground

The craft begins with thread treated like a garden crop. Silk floss is boiled with soap-pod solution, wiped dry with bamboo paper so it will not pill, then split by hand — a single strand can be peeled into two, four, eight, even sixteen parts, each finer than hair — before it ever meets the satin. Xiang embroiderers also work with shaded threads: one colour, many gradations, so a finished petal or haunch carries a smoky transition like a painter's sfumato. The stitch vocabulary is large and codified — seventy-two stitches in five families, from flat and brocade work through mesh to twist and knot stitches — and the most famous is the peng-hair stitch, a bristling technique that stands animal fur on end. A panel was divided labour long before it was art. Painters drew the design; in the 1900s the Ningxiang painter Yang Shizhuo recast embroidery patterns in the language of Chinese ink painting and opened his own workshop to teach it. Dyers prepared the graded threads. And the embroiderers themselves were, historically, the peasant women of Changsha County, working from home: by the end of the Qing the county held twenty-six embroidery workshops, tens of thousands of embroiderers, and more than twenty thousand finished pieces a year, most of them quilt covers and pillowcases.

Ask a Chinese reader about Xiang embroidery and the answer is a tiger. The saying runs 'Su cats, Xiang tigers' — Suzhou's needle for cats, Hunan's for tigers — and the peng-hair stitch was perfected for exactly that coat: lions and tigers whose fur stands up along the panel, eyes worked in a dozen shades of yellow so the gaze seems to follow the viewer. Around the big cats ranges the classic repertoire, peonies and plum, cats and dogs, dragons, landscapes and human figures, most of it drawn from the picture-making tradition rather than invented for the needle. Difficulty rises with the subject: landscapes are counted the easier school, and human faces are hardest, since skin demands density of thread while expression demands restraint. The twentieth century pushed the craft toward likeness and fame at once. Embroidered portraits became prestige gifts — a Roosevelt portrait caused a sensation at Chicago's 1933 centenary exposition and now hangs in the 'Little White House' museum in Georgia, and an embroidered portrait of a warlord's mother entered the Shanghai Museum. The technical frontier arrived around 1980: double-sided embroidery in which the two faces of one transparent ground carry different subjects and colour schemes — a panel with no back, which foreign visitors of the day called 'magic-like art'.

The craft's keepers are museums, a school and a difficult market. In 1995 the Changsha suburb of Shaping was named the home of Xiang embroidery; in 1998 the provincial government spent 7.8 million yuan to build the Hunan Embroidery Museum, and a second museum inside the provincial embroidery research institute holds more than three thousand fine pieces across four halls; a private museum followed on the edge of the Shaping embroidery-culture square in May 2010. Training moved into formal education: in 2011 the country's first Xiang embroidery art college opened at Hunan Arts and Crafts Vocational College as a national base for passing on the craft, planned for about 1,500 students. Official recognition came early in the present century — the style entered the first national intangible cultural heritage list in 2006 — but recognition has not meant demand. A 2009 market study found Suzhou embroidery holding eighty per cent of the international high-end decoration market to Xiang's five, and within China Su's sixty to Xiang's thirty. Masters add the human problem: the needle needs years of practice, and young people with choices mostly choose elsewhere. What steadies the craft is the same trio that built it — household skill, studio training, and a museum public that keeps coming to look at tigers.