Cheap in price, diversified in type, and available in large quantity, booming industrialized textiles have flooded, to the saturated extent, the market, getting other traditional weaving products, including brocade by ethnic minority people involved in a biased competition. And in this war, the traditional brocade making practice by ethnic minority people, nationwide and in Quang Ngai as well, is presumably facing the risk of getting lost.
It is Teng village in Ba Thanh commune, just about 4 km east of Ba To district centre, the only one in Quang Ngai province where brocade making occupation is still practiced by H’re people.
This is a village where people keep on weaving with their hand-operated looms. They weave not just to earn money, but to live, to preserve their fading cultures.
Brocade made by H’re people is composed of nice vignettes and patterns. H’re brocade products include katu skirts, kapen loicloths, iu shirts, tatak cloth bands, mul scarfs, sipah ribbons, tagoh covering cloths, veixan blankets, etc.
Together with the sound from gongs and ruou can (wine in a jar drunk via a straw), H’re traditional brocade clothes are an integral part on those acassions of new year, village festivals and weddings.
As the story told, it was a H’re girl’s custom before marriage to spend much of the time weaving cloth, blankets, pillows, and the like as dowry to the man and his family she would marry later. After marriage the woman went on weaving, partly for her family’s use and partly for their future daughters.
In the past, it was a long way and paintaking process to have a piece of perfected cloth, beginning with the making of the threads. Threads were usually made by hand from natural plants such as cotton, jute, dyed before weaving. Things are much easier now thanks to industrial machines.
Brocade making practice in Teng Village has now been preserved and strongly encouraged by the Provincial Government to develop.
Training courses in brocade weaving under the facilitation and sponsorship of Quang Ngai Deparetment of Science and Technology and Da Nang University have ever over the past years been conducted for H’re women.
Girls wearing brocade made by Teng Village
And it is fortunate enough for these courses to have several among few alive brocade artisans as the main trainers.
These “endangered” artisans are proud of their own people’s brocade, and happy to pass on skills to younger generations just to preserve their cultures.
Visiting Teng Village, visitors could feel how the local people weave their brocade to live, not only their own lives but that of the whole community.
M.T
