Zhoucheng Bai Tie-Dye Experience Base

Cultural heritage

Zhoucheng, in Xizhou town of Dali, is the birthplace and chief home of the Bai tie-dye craft, named "home of Chinese Bai tie-dye art" by the Ministry of Culture in 1996 and honoured as the "home of Chinese Bai tie-dye." Every household here has some tie to the craft, dye-works large and small line the lanes, and the indigo vats and drying blue-and-white cloth make a landscape found nowhere else, with many inheritors opening workshops for visits and hands-on experience.

Visiting: Stepping into a Zhoucheng dye-work, one watches the craftspeople stitch and bind the "flowers," dip them again and again into the indigo vat, then untie the threads to reveal the pattern, feeling the old wisdom that "blue comes from the indigo plant"; visitors may even tie their own cloth and dip it in the vat, taking home a blue-and-white piece of their own making, the most vivid way to meet Bai intangible heritage.