Crafting prosperity

Folk artists display their achievements in reviving traditional crafts at the Sixth China Intangible Cultural Heritage Expo in Jinan, Shandong province. The expo also shows how these time-honored crafts help people in rural areas to fight against poverty. [Photo by Zhao Ruixue/China Daily]

"I feel great that I can make a good living by making traditional handicrafts. More importantly, I can hand down our culture."

Central China's Hunan province is another place where handicraft workshops are being used as platforms to promote traditional heritage for commercial purposes.

By the first half of this year, 152 workshops had been opened in 52 impoverished counties in the province, providing jobs for 72,000 people, 68,000 of whom have escaped poverty, according to the provincial culture and tourism authority.

At the recent Shandong expo, Hunan put up stalls where ethnic Miao embroidery, batik and bamboo weaving were displayed.

Shi Jia, an inheritor of Miao embroidery in Hunan, says at the expo that one such workshop in the province had trained over 1,000 ethnic Miao women to make traditional embroidery products and more than 400 of them had already signed up for work there.

Shi says a woman who worked for the workshop could earn from 1,000 yuan to 2,000 yuan ($150-$300) each month.

"The workshops are expected to cultivate the vitality of intangible cultural heritage to help more people lead better lives," Zhao Gang, head of the Arts and Crafts School of Suzhou Art and Design Technology Institute, says at the expo.