Huang Daopo and Cotton Weaving

Those hands were very old. The skin was thin, blue veins stood out, and the knuckles had thickened with the years. Yet they were doing something that no one else in the room could do.

One of her feet pressed the treadle in a steady rhythm. The spinning wheel turned with a low, deep whirr. And from the white cotton under her hands came not one thread but three, all at the same moment. Three strands ran side by side, fine as spider silk, twisting together and winding onto the bobbins. Not one of them broke.

A few young women of the village sat in a circle around her, utterly silent. They had sat at the loom since they were small. Yet they had never seen anyone spin three strands at once without a break. One leaned in very close, trying to see what the old woman had changed in the wheel. Another simply watched her hands.

The place was called Wunijing, a village about 50 Chinese miles east of Songjiang prefecture. The soil there was poor and the fields were thin. Rice did not grow enough to eat, so the villagers turned to growing cotton. The cotton grew well enough. But turning it into a length of cloth was terribly hard work.

As for the white-haired woman sitting among them, later accounts say she was born in this very village. She had simply been gone a very long time before she came back. In later times, the whole region called her Huang Daopo.

The story goes that she left home very early, while she was still a small child. Her first years were hard ones. Then one day she boarded a boat, and it carried her on and on to the south, until it landed on a large island in the open sea. Hainan Island. She stopped in the area of Yazhou, alone, in a completely strange place.

And in that strange place, the people who taught her the craft were the women of the Li.

The Li had lived on Hainan Island for a very long time, and by then their weaving ranked among the most refined. Li women spun thread from cotton, from hemp and from many other plant fibers. They dyed cloth with colors taken from plants. They wove patterns that stood out from the surface of the fabric, and then added embroidery that showed clearly on both sides, each side as lovely as the other.

Li patterns were not there only to please the eye. In the old days the Li did not use writing, so all the legends, beliefs and taboos of the Li people were recorded in colored thread on the cloth itself. The cloth was their book.

Li mothers passed this craft on to their daughters. They taught them from a very young age, with spoken words and by guiding their hands.

Those women took in the lost child who had drifted to them from the mainland, and they taught her everything they knew. She stayed on Hainan not for a few seasons, but for several decades. She learned to separate the seeds, to fluff the cotton, to spin and to dye. She learned to pass the shuttle so that each pattern appeared in exactly the right place. By the time her hair turned white, her hands could do everything her teachers could.

Then she went home. Later writers recorded that this was around the year 1295. But her life story was mostly set down by people who came after her, so no one can be sure of every date.

The old village was as poor as on the day she left. There was cotton, but the villagers pulled the seeds out of it by hand, picking them out one at a time until all ten fingertips were raw. No one here had ever heard of a cotton gin. Cotton was fluffed only with a little bamboo bow strung with thread, set on a table and shaken, and it was slow, hard work. Making a single length of cloth took day after day of labor.

The old woman could have kept the craft to herself. A worker far more skilled than everyone around her could live on it all her life, and her children and grandchildren could too. She did not. She taught the whole village.

She showed them how to build a cotton gin. It had two wooden rollers turning in opposite directions. When a handful of cotton was fed between them, the seeds were held back on one side, and clean cotton came out the other. A task the whole village had done by hand for generations now took only a short while of turning a handle.

She showed them a very different cotton bow. Its string was pulled tight and then struck with a mallet, so that a whole hard clump of cotton burst apart, loose and soft as a cloud.

Then she reworked the spinning wheel. Cotton thread is finer and weaker than hemp thread, and it breaks when pulled hard, so she adjusted the wheel to suit cotton. Once it was done, one person working the treadle could spin three strands at once without a single one breaking.

Last of all she taught the hardest part: how to match threads, combine colors, and lead the warp and the weft so that patterns rose from the cloth. From the looms of Wunijing came quilts and mattresses, sashes and kerchiefs. They bore sprays of cut flowers, phoenixes curled into circles, and neat checkerboard squares. The designs were so clear that from a distance they looked painted on.

Once the villagers had learned, they raced one another to make more. Wunijing cloth went by boat and by cart to be sold in other prefectures. The village of poor soil, which once could not even feed itself, soon grew visibly better off. And the fame of the region's cloth spread far.

Then she died.

The villagers wept for her. Not one household, but the whole village. Together they saw to her burial, built her a temple, and brought offerings there each season. Thirty years later, the temple fell down. A man of the village named Zhao Yuxuan came forward and rebuilt it. Then it fell again, and this time no one built it up. The name Daopo slowly faded from people's memory.

But one thing could not fall.

The cotton gin still turned in the yard of every house. The bow still fluffed cotton in the corner of the kitchen. The three-strand spinning wheel still ran in the hands of one generation of women after another. She had given away the only thing that stays whole in the giver's hands even after it is given: a craft. A temple can fall, but a craft lives in people's hands, and hands can pass it on to other hands.

As for the weaving of her first teachers, the Li women of Hainan, it is still alive today. Li mothers still teach their daughters to spin, to dye and to weave patterns in the old way. And the world has entered this craft on its list of humanity's precious cultural heritage.

It is the same in Vietnam. In the silk-weaving villages along the rivers, and in the hamlets where looms stand right under the floor of the house, the clack of the shuttle is still the sound of a lesson being handed on. An old woman sits at the loom. A granddaughter sits close beside her. And the grandmother takes the child's hand and lays it on the thread, just as the Li women long ago took the hand of a strange child who had drifted to them from far away.

A craft passes from hand to hand, and each time it does, it lives one more life.

In any yard where a spinning wheel runs steadily, thread keeps running out of it. One strand or three, it makes no difference. Behind it there is always someone who was willing to sit down and teach another.