Baobei: Those Who Live by the Mountain

In Zhaoxing, we were left with a question: What gets carried forward?

A few days later, in the mountains of Rongjiang, we found one answer. Her name is Yang Chenglan, though everyone calls her Lan Lan. She grew up in Fengdeng, a Dong village surrounded by the rhythm of traditional Dong craft. Women grew cotton, spun thread, wove cloth and dyed it with plants gathered from the mountain. These customs were apart of everyday life. 

Lan Lan became the first woman from her village to attend university. She left the mountains, studied music and started a life elsewhere. Years later she decided to come home, and something had changed. The sound of weaving she remembered from childhood was disappearing. Older women still carried the knowledge, but many younger women did not. Without education and guidance on how to make, people left the village or took different paths for work. There were fewer reasons to learn the long, laborious processes that had once been a natural extension of life.

Lan Lan saw something precious at risk of being lost forever. So in 2016 started Yishanren - 倚山人. The name can be translated as Those Who Live by the Mountains. It's a name that encompasses what living in harmony with the mountains offers: plants for dye, fields to grow cotton, rivers to wash, the sun to dry... even chickens whose eggs provide the cloth's lustrous shine. Nature flows in harmony with human hands. 

At first, only one elderly woman was willing to weave for her. Lan Lan began going from house to house, asking women to return to skills that had been put aside. She created work that could be done close to home and began finding new markets for what they made. And her collective of women grew. Today, Yishanren works with hundreds of makers across the region.  

Arriving at her world made us literally gasp with awe. It is just magical. We watched Dong women weave, dye with plants, and polish cloth against a backdrop of swaying grass. It's a place that just feels right... like it was created with the encouraging, approving whispers of ancestors. 

Lan Lan has carried on tradition while finding a place for it today. The roots are in these mountains, but the branches keep growing towards the sky. This is the hope for traditional craft. Not protecting it from change, but creating the conditions for it to change without losing the knowledge, people and places that give it meaning.

Shop what we collected along the way.

Creative Direction: Kelly Wang Shanahan (@theziran)
Photography + Videography: Jess Foley (@faxuly)
Video Editing: Jhonson Phielipus (@jjnnxx2250)

Shot in Guizhou, China. April 2024.