Li Traditional Spinning, Dyeing, Weaving and Embroidery

The Li traditional spinning, dyeing, weaving and embroidery techniques have a history of over three thousand years, a distinct brocade art created by the Li people of Hainan in the course of daily life and called a "living fossil" of the textile trade. Li women weave on backstrap looms through the four stages of spinning, dyeing, weaving and embroidering, the skills still handed down by word and hand in Li villages. The craft entered the first national ICH list in 2006, was inscribed on UNESCO's List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding in 2009, and was moved onto the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in December 2024.

Li brocade is woven on a backstrap loom using island cotton and hemp, in single or polychrome figured patterns; dyes come from plants such as indigo and sappanwood and from minerals, with black or blue grounds set against red, yellow and white geometric and human-figure motifs that carry clan totems and ancestral legends, earning it the name "history book without words".

The Li spinning, dyeing, weaving and embroidery craft is a treasure of Chinese and even world textile history, of irreplaceable value for the study of early human textile techniques and the cultural transmission of ethnic minorities, and one of Hainan's most internationally influential heritage items.

Li brocade weaving can be seen, and pieces bought, at Sanya's Li-culture tourism areas and heritage halls (such as around the Binglanggu Li and Miao Cultural Tourism Zone).