The initial appearance: the fingertip code in the fireworks of the prosperous Tang Dynasty
In the Laizhou countryside during the Zhenguan period, peasant women leaned over the wheat ridges, using three, five, and seven wheat straws as warp and weft to pinch out the earliest straw weaving genes in China. The flat straw braids they wove with “herringbone patterns” and “reciprocating patterns” are in line with the creation philosophy of “the sky has time, the earth has air, the materials have beauty, and the workers have ingenuity” in “Kaogong Ji”. These straw hats and baskets born in the smoke of cooking, followed the Grand Canal boats to the north and became the hidden plant silk on the “Silk Road” in the Tang Dynasty. By the Yongle period of the Ming Dynasty, in the warehouses of Yuzhou and Zhili at the canal docks, “Laizhou braids” had become a pass – the straw weaving skills radiated to the nine states along the trade route, and the folks had the saying of “southern silk and northern braids”. Since then, wheat straw weaving has been separated from farming and upgraded to a unique branch of Chinese handicrafts.
Rebirth of fission: technological revolution under the splitting knife
In the late autumn of 1896, in the Wuchang Weaving Factory on the banks of the Yangtze River, Wang Shouyi, an old craftsman from Ye County, held a splitting knife in his hand and split the wheat straw with a diameter of 0.4 cm into six 0.07 mm thin slices. This technological revolution brought by Zhang Zhidong’s “specially hired Shandong craftsmen” allowed Chinese straw weaving to break through the shackles of a thousand years: the split wheat straw strips were transformed into sawtooth patterns, centipede whiskers, and zongjiao edges at the fingertips of the peasant woman. The account book of Xiguan Village Bianzizhuang showed that after adopting the splitting braiding process, the export price of a single straw hat jumped from 0.3 silver yuan to 1.2 silver yuan. In 1904, the Jiaoji Railway was completed, and steam locomotives carrying bundles of “Shahe White”, “Shahe Yellow”, “Shahe Saw Blades”, and “Laizhou Flowers” straw braids, four famous products, sailed to Qingdao Port. Customs records showed that the straw braids shipped to Manchester by German merchant ships that year could circle the equator three times, and the silver in exchange was enough to cast half of the bronze pavilion in the Summer Palace.
Peak Showdown: Panama’s Oriental Awakening
On February 20, 1915, in the China Pavilion of the San Francisco Exposition, when Italian straw hat merchant Martini used a magnifying glass to examine the “Laizhou Flower” straw braid, the lens suddenly burst – this three-dimensional pattern woven with 0.2 mm wheat straw has a precision far exceeding the steel mold embossing process of the Milan workshop. When the four famous products conquered the judges with the sharpness of “Shahe Saw Blade” and the golden color of “Shahe Yellow”, surpassing the flexibility of Italy’s “Zhengcao Yellow” and crushing the exquisiteness of Japan’s “Split Straw Goods”, the world knew that Chinese straw weaving had quietly completed the transformation from agricultural and sideline products to works of art. Ye Chunchi recorded in “Shandong Straw Braid Investigation Notes”: In 1910, the export value of Laizhou straw braids reached 13 million taels of silver, equivalent to 1/60 of the annual fiscal revenue of the Qing government. These overseas straw braids not only decorate the summer hat brims of Parisian ladies, but also nourish the lights of thousands of households in Ye County. In its heyday, the 23 braiding shops in Shahe Town were brightly lit all night long, and the silhouettes of peasant women pinching their braids were reflected on the window paper, like a flowing “Along the River During the Qingming Festival”.
Resonance for a Thousand Years: Dialogue of Civilizations in Grass Stems
From the “wheat silk crown” that amazed the Hu merchants in Chang’an West Market to the “Oriental soft gold” in the windows of London department stores, the 3,000-year inheritance history of Laizhou straw braids is actually a micro-epic of the dialogue between agricultural civilization and maritime civilization. Those “industrial grass to save the country” that Zhang Zhidong had high hopes for, and those “cultural swords” that cut down the powers in Panama, have now turned into “A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains” with 0.03 mm wheat straw stickers in the Intangible Cultural Heritage Museum. When modern designers incorporate “centipede-patterned” straw braids into handbags at the Paris Fashion Week, and when NASA laboratories study spacecraft insulation layers woven from wheat straw, this grass stem that originated in the wheat fields of the heyday of the Tang Dynasty is still continuing the legend of creation that belongs to the East.