Photos

Far away from the garment factories in Guangdong province, the Dong women from Zhaoxing in Guizhou province are making their own beautiful clothing.
Especially the stone-blue indigo-coloured clothing, which is worn on festive occassions is particular. The leaf of the Indigo plant (which is also called banlan or malan) is crushed and used as a natural dye. After crushing the leaf, it is soaked in water, in which steamed, white cloth is soaked until reaching a blue colour. Then the cloth is washed with water several times. Generally, the washing, dyeing and drying process is repeated five times. The last step is to coat the cloth twice with an egg-white micture to give it a special sheen.
After the whole process, the dyed cloth is put on a stone and flattened with a wooden hammer, which makes is smoother, lighter and more durable

Here, a Dong woman is folding dyed black cloth.