Four of us have spent the past few years walking into workshops across China — more than a hundred of them between us — and filming what happens inside. This site is the part we had not done yet: putting the objects themselves in front of people who read English.
Between us we hold national-level designation in two crafts — Huzhou brush-making and Chaoshan Yingge — and inheritor status in a third, Tujia brocade. Two of us have gone well beyond our own crafts, learning several dozen more at the bench. That breadth is the useful part: it lets us read the culture a technique carries, and see where the real value in a piece lies.
Seventy-six crafts learned well enough to make a passable object.
More than twenty million followers built up across our social media in China.
The numbers matter for one reason only — they mean these crafts have already been seen, by more people than most museum collections reach in a decade. What has been missing is somewhere to buy them, from someone who has stood in the workshop.
The four of us
Peng Ke runs this. Sixty-odd workshops visited, forty crafts learned — badly at first, which is the point.
He is an inheritor of Tujia brocade — xilankapu, the "flower-patterned cover." It is woven face-down: the pattern is picked in by hand, row by row, from the reverse. The weaver spends months looking at loose threads and never once at the image she is making.
His own bench is Miao silver: sheet hammered thin, then chased and drawn into the crescent collars and stacked neck-rings worn at festival in the villages of eastern Guizhou. Of late he has been raising silver cups from the same sheet — that is the photograph further down. A festival set is not bought for oneself: a mother begins putting it together for her daughter years before the girl is grown.
His account is where most of this began. It is how the rest of us found each other.
Lin Nannan is a national-level inheritor of Huzhou brush-making — the brush of Chinese calligraphy, made in Shanlian, where a good one is still sorted hair by hair. Her account explains the craft rather than selling it, which is why we asked her to join.
Zhang Sanbai has visited fifty-odd projects and learned thirty-six. He is also an inheritor of Tujia brocade.
His own bench is cloisonné on a silver body: fine silver wire bent into the pattern and soldered down, enamel packed into each cell, then fired. Silver softens at a temperature not far above the one the enamel needs. Hold it in the kiln a moment too long and the whole piece slumps. That is what the photograph below is: a man watching a piece that could still fail.
Chen Laifa is a national-level inheritor of Yingge, the drum-and-stick dance of Chaoshan — painted faces, a few dozen men moving as one body, one wrong step visible from the back of the square. He is why we think of craft as something performed, not only made: a thing is either in time, or it is not.
Then we went looking
We do not only film. Two of us, at work this year.
We went to see how a price is actually arrived at, and the first thing we understood was the count of days. A lacquer box takes ninety. An embroidered fan takes three months. A Miao festival collar can take the better part of a year — and it is worn perhaps ten times in a lifetime, then put away for a daughter.
None of that is a complaint. It is the cost of the thing, stated plainly.
And it sets the scale of what is possible. One man, working alone, can finish perhaps eight pieces a year. Not because he is slow — because that is the rate at which the work can be done properly.
What is difficult is the distance between that cost and what a buyer can see. Standing in front of a price, nobody sees ninety days. They see a box that looks like another box at a tenth of the price, and they are not wrong to hesitate.
They do not add up for the buyer either.
That is arithmetic, not morals.
What we are doing
We are not a museum. Museums keep things; we would rather they were used. A craft is not finished until someone uses it — and for most of the last century, the people who could pay a fair price for this work were not reading Chinese.
China already watches these workshops. That is not the problem. The problem is that the people who would pay properly are in Osaka and Copenhagen and Seoul and Texas, and nobody has given them a way to buy.
So we sell the objects themselves — not photographs of them.
To record. Every studio we visit, we write down how the piece is made, how long each step takes, who did which part. We photograph the hands, not just the objects. This record will still be here when the pieces are gone.
To sell. Every piece on this site is bought directly from the workshop and paid at the workshop's own price. We do not ask for a discount, and we do not ask for the same piece made thinner to reach a number. If a price does not work for a buyer here, we say so and move on — we do not go back and ask the maker to make it cheaper.
We will not sell a piece we have not seen in the workshop, made by someone we have met. If we cannot name the maker, it does not go on the site.
What travels with the object is not only the object. It is a standard — the one that will not let a maker stop at nearly right.
So this is what we want, and it is simple. Not that you admire it from a distance. That you hold it.
What you are buying
All four of us are practitioners — of brocade, brushes, cloisonné, and dance. None of us made the pieces on this page. The work is theirs; our names are only on the explanation.
What you are buying is not a souvenir of a vanishing world. It is the work of someone who is still at the bench, at the top of a trade that takes decades to reach — and a price that lets him stay there.
We are not new to this. We are new to saying it in English.
The pieces: all five crafts · notes from the workshops
If you want to know how a particular piece was made, write to paulpeng1989@gmail.com and ask. We answer within two working days.