Local straw plaiting tradition pays off for Shandong farmers

JINAN－Winter is a slack season for most Chinese farmers, but that's not the case for Jiang Suye and her friends.

While chatting in her living room, they plait straw into pads and strips by hand.

Jiang, 67, is from the town of Xinhe, in Pingdu, Shandong province. She works eight hours a day making plaited handbags out of wheat straw or corn husks, bringing home up to 2,000 yuan ($290) a month.

People in Xinhe have been plaiting straw for nearly 400 years, and the skill was listed as a provincial intangible cultural heritage in 2013.

But villagers never expected their traditional skills would be connected to fashion, drawing orders from international brands.

To meet the high standards of foreign companies, Jiang plants wheat and corn in her backyard, and is very picky in selecting the materials.

"We have to choose the middle layer of the corn husk, which can't be too tender or overgrown. The wheat straws need to be shiny," she said.

In a workshop of Qingdao Yufengxiang Artware, a straw handicraft company in Xinhe, workers using sewing machines busily plait straw into handbags.

The workers are mainly female farmers from the area in their 50s or 60s who learned straw plaiting from older generations. The company's orders exceed 100,000 units a month on average.

Wang Jianming, its general manager, said that in addition to the 60-plus workers in the workshop, it has outsourced the plaiting to more than 10,000 villagers.

"Up to 90 percent of the processing can be attributed to local farmers," he said, adding that the company's output was worth 25 million yuan last year.

Xinhe is now home to more than 90 straw handicraft enterprises. Of the 103 villages in the town, more than 80 have set up straw-plaiting outsourcing stations, with over 20,000 part-time workers.

The output of the straw-plaiting industry was valued at 2.4 billion yuan in 2018.

The finished articles are exported to more than 50 countries and regions, including the United States, Britain, France and Japan. Favored by fashion brands, straw-plaited bags and hats even appear on the catwalks of international fashion weeks.

Zhao Jinli, 40, works for the China branch of a British design company that has long cooperated with British brands.

Based in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, it has been doing business with straw handicraft enterprises in Xinhe for about five years, with annual orders totaling around 6 million yuan.

"Environmental friendliness and craftsmanship are our main considerations in choosing partners in China," Zhao said. "Xinhe straw plaiting has a long history, mature skills and obvious industrial advantages."

To make the handicrafts more profitable, the town government registered its own brand in 2018.

"We expect to transform the traditional straw-plaiting sector into a fashion industry," said Jiang Xun, director of its rural vitalization office.