Zhou Jiaming, a 64-year-old who leads a textile workshop at SIP's Xietang Sub-district, recently told Gusu Evening News that they are working on making sijing jiaoluo (an ancient handicraft for textile production) widely used in modern textile production.
Dating back to Shang Dynasty (1600 to 1046 BC), sijing jiaoluo is one of the best silk weaving techniques in the Chinese history. It boasts exquisite texture and patterns formed by four intercrossed warps. However, it has been gradually vanishing from people's eyes since the Song Dynasty (960 to 1279) because of its time-consuming and complicated production process.
Zhou started to study weaving skills from his father when he was 28, and then took to resuming the sijing jiaoluo technique in 1996 when a Japanese client showed him a small piece of fabric made with the technique and asked him to duplicate it.
Over the next few decades, Zhou has been devoting himself to reviving the technique. Based on a great number of historical documents about it and numerous trials, he finally managed to build up several looms that imitate the ancient ones used to produce sijing jiaoluo textiles. His persistent efforts and achievements in carrying forward the technique won him the title of "Representative Sijing Jiaoluo Inheritor" in 2014, and the honor of "Extraordinary Fashion Contributor" last year.
