Cassie Yushan Sun was at an arts and culture conference in China when she first encountered an obscure double-thread stitching technique called Panxiu, which produces beautiful embroidery through a painstaking process. She was astonished by the results. “The colors were so vibrant,” she said. “It was really like nothing I’d ever seen before.”
Employment of the technique is largely limited to members of the Tu minority in the small Huzhu tribe in Qinghai, China, and Sun was discouraged to hear Panxiu was declining in use and could one day disappear altogether. The Huzhu are far removed from mainstream Chinese culture because of their considerable physical distance from urban areas, and Panxiu embroidery has never found a footing in the broader Chinese marketplace — demand is low and so are prices, making the time-consuming work economically inefficient.
In response, Sun, a native of Beijing, traveled to the remote area in Qinghai where the Huzhu reside and moved in with a family for several weeks. She shared a bed with one of her female hosts, ate the local bread three times a day, endured the lack of running water and learned Panxiu from the women who were its masters — the only ones in the world. In her mind, she was there to save something precious.
“I had this idea that I could be the person to pass it down,” Sun said.
Sun’s appreciation for Panxiu only grew as she learned it herself. After her trip, she struggled with the best approach to helping ensure the technique survived. She wanted to provide support to the Huzhu people but she did not want to insert herself too conspicuously — to disrupt their lives and behave as some prospective outside savior. She wanted any decisions about the spread of Panxiu to be theirs.
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