Chinese Batik

Batik is actually should be called the "wax-resist dyeing", it uses the wax pattern painted on linen, silk, cotton, wool and other natural fiber fabrics, and then placed in suitable conditions at low temperature dyeing of indigo dye in the cylinder exhaust dyeing, wax dyeing and not local color, remove wax that is revealed without the beautiful white flowers of wax protection.（A batik tour to China.）

History

Chinese Batik is also called La Ran in China. Researches show batik originates from ancient China. It was then called La Xie. As early as in Qin and Han Dynasties, people in southwestern minority regions of China, finding that wax can prevent from dyeing, proficiently mastered the craft of batik. They used bees wax and worm wax as material in preventing dyeing.

By the time of Dong Han Dynasty, the batik skill was rather mature. By Xi Jin Dynasty, a dozen of color batik products could be produced. In Tang Dynasty, batik prevailed. The batik skill has been passed on generation after generation in the minority regions of Guizhou province and it has been spread widely across different regions.

Legend of the Origin of Chinese Batik

There is an ancient song about batik‘s origin in Miao minority area. There was a smart girl who was not satisfied with the monochrome clothes, wishing to have colorful patterns dyeing on the skirt. Thinking of painting one by one has too much trouble; however, she could not work out other way. One day, she fell asleep among the flowers. When she waked up, she found that the bees had left dotted beeswax on her skirt. She thought it did not look good, so tried to cover it by indigo blue dye. After dyeing, she surprisingly found that the places of beeswax turned out to be the beautiful white patterns. By the inspiration, she painted the cloth with beeswax and dyed it in indigo blue. She was so glad that she found out the way to make the beautiful cloth, hence sangt the song happily. Once heard her songs, people came to her and learnt how to dye the patterns. By this way, the technique spread out among the Miao and Buyi people.

Miao Batik

The technique of Chinese batik had been lost among Han Chinese but being kept by the Miao ethnic group located in the remote mountainous Southwest China. Wax Batik is the foundation of ancient Chinese civilization in dyeing and weaving technology. It involves drawing, waxing (with special wax knife using beeswax), dyeing and wax melting. The United Nation (UN) reported that Miao Tribe costume is one of the world cultural relics, where wax batik clothing being a main part of it.

Miao Batik Handcraft is plain, naive, rough and powerful. These pictures, not confining itself to exact details of natural images, are boldly different and exaggeratedly drawn. Miao love and closely knitted with the nature. They enjoy expressing their joy with nature and their own aesthetic feelings in the way of Batik Art. As they do not have wording system, you may also find abstract symbols or geometric patterns in their artworks, which could be their totems or myths.

In China, the home to batik is the city of Anshun in Guizhou Province. Welcome to travel to China!
This article is from www.chinatourcenter.com