Fagoting

72.Fagoting

Nominating Unit: City of Shantou

Fagoting is a folk embroidery technique popular in the urban and rural areas of Chaoshan Plain. The local women have been doing fagoting and embroidery on textiles from ancient times. In the middle of the 19th century when Shantou started to open up itself to the outside world as a port city, Chaoshan fagoting started to absorb western patterns, styles and techniques and gradually became a special embroidery type with a rich combination of eastern and western styles. After the founding of People’s Republic of China, fagoting has become even more popular and the products have been sold to more than 80 countries and regions.

Chaoshan Fagoting uses many kinds of tools, such as designing and drafting tool, needles, scissors, rulers, modelers, etc. The materials it uses include cotton, fl ax, gauze, silk, glass gauze, etc., and various kinds of threads. The thickness of the threads used, the density of stitches, the levelness are all strictly stipulated according to the textile and pattern.

One of the early techniques of Chaoshan Fagoting was only to pull out the warps and woofs where the pattern is to be embroidered on, and joining them together to form a hollow ornamental pattern. Later, many techniques have been invented, and five main types were formed, i.e. embroidery, choutong, weaving, patching, and joining. Each of the five types has different stitching techniques, and there are more than 240 kinds of techniques known today. Different stitching techniques produce different artistic effects.(https://www.daowen.com)

The themes used in Chaoshan Fagoting mainly are flowers, trees, grass patterns, etc. The patterns mostly use clever combinations of dots, lines, and faces, with continuous and symmetric layouts. The pictures it renders feature a combination of lifted and sunk layout and a hard and soft combination. Its products are for both practical uses and admirations, mainly including table cloth, handkerchiefs, pillow cases, chair pads, coasters, screens, embroidered outfits, etc. The most representative is the heavy styled glass gauze with embroidered table cloths and silk handkerchiefs. Their patterns are carefully structured and changeful in handling the ups and downs. They are marvelous showpieces of craftsmanship, and are publicly acknowledged as “two treasures of China’s embroidery art”. Among them, the glass gauze embroidered table cloth “dual phoenix admiring peony” was awarded a golden medal on the 32nd Munich International Handicraft Industry Expo.

Recently, with the development of urban and rural economies, the number of people in this industry is quickly diminishing, and the old craftsmen are losing their productivities, which all severely endanger the survival of Chaoshan fagoting technique. There is urgent need to protect this fagoting craft.