Chapter 1: The Code of Grass-Laizhou Weaving for Three Thousand Years
The monsoon of the Yellow River Delta swept across the green gauze tent, and the peasant women of Ye County picked up the wheat straw left over from the Sui and Tang Dynasties, and pinched three, five, and seven strands to make the earliest civilized knotted ropes. This skill, called “grass work” in “Qimin Yaoshu”, went north with the grain boats during the Yongle period, and gave birth to the trade spectacle of “Southern Silk and Northern Braids” in the Zhili Commercial Port. By the 16th year of Guangxu (1890), the copper scales in the Bianzizhuang of Xiguan Village no longer weighed grass, but silver-when Zhang Zhidong introduced the Laizhou grass splitting technique in the Wuchang Weaving Factory, he probably did not expect that this agricultural technique of “saving the country through industry” would be woven with 0.07 mm wheat straw sheets at the 1915 San Francisco Expo. The “Hundred Birds Paying Homage to the Phoenix” allowed the West to see the precision and romance of Eastern agricultural civilization.
What Ye Chunchi recorded in “Shandong Straw Braid Investigation” is not only the flow of silver (export value increased by 767% from 1904 to 1910), but also a micro-history of globalization: the wavy curve of the hat brim of a Manchester lady is actually a transoceanic imprint of the fingerprint of a Jiaodong peasant woman.
Chapter 2: The Birth of Laiyin – When the Ancient Method Meets the Quantum Age
In the spring of 2015, Xu Yongan, the third-generation inheritor of intangible cultural heritage, stood in front of the haystack of his ancestral home, holding a grass-chopping knife that his great-grandfather used at the Panama Expo. The moment the blade touched the smartphone, the “Laiyin” brand emerged – this is not only a tribute to Laizhou’s ancient name “Ye”, but also a metaphor for “the oriental gift on the banks of the Rhine”.
Cultural decoding equation:
-Traditional genes (T) × modern variables (M) = eternal value (E)
-T=72 ancient processes (from “three hours of wheat harvest” to “nine steaming and nine drying”)
-M=laser cutting + AI pattern database
-E=”Quantum Straw Weaving” installation permanently collected by New York MOMA
In Laiyin Workshop, you will see such a scene: a post-90s designer uses Rhino software to reconstruct the “centipede pattern” straw weaving topological structure, while in the next workshop, an octogenarian is weaving an engagement token with a 0.03 mm error standard. This “cross-time and space collaboration” allows NASA to incorporate corn husk weaving structure into the research of space capsule insulation, and also allows Balenciaga’s 2023 spring and summer series to appear in the “Shahe saw blade” diamond pattern handbag.
Chapter 3: Sustainable Poetics – The Second Life of Plants
Laiyin’s raw material warehouse is a United Nations ecological archive:
-FSC-certified papyrus (goodwill from Scandinavian forests)
-Jiaodong corn husks (reducing methane emissions by 3.2 cubic meters per ton)
-Photovoltaic irrigation wheat straw (carbon footprint is 67% lower than traditional planting)
Here, the “Twenty-Four Solar Terms Production Law” that is more stringent than the EU Ecodesign Directive is practiced: wheat straw harvested during Grain in Ear is used for dyeing the Spring Equinox series, and raffia stocked during the Winter Solstice is woven into a limited edition for the Summer Solstice. When you carry a Laiyin water grass woven bag in Omotesando, Tokyo, the NFC chip embedded in the bag will tell you: before these plant fibers became works of art, they once fixed 8.6 kilograms of carbon for Shandong farmland.
Chapter 4: New Straw Weaving Movement – Chinese Grammar in the Global Living Room
Laiyin’s ODM solution is a cross-civilization dialogue:
– Milan order: Combining “Laizhou Flower” three-dimensional weaving with Murano glass
– Dubai customization: “One Thousand and One Nights” clutch with golden thread woven into date palm fiber
– New Yorker demand: Reproduce the bamboo weaving pattern of Chinatown in the 1930s with biodegradable polypropylene
On Amazon’s “Eco-Luxury” category list, the secret of Laiyin’s straw weaving storage box and Hermès rattan furniture is hidden in the Morse code of the product label – that is the contemporary translation of “The sky has time, the earth has air, the materials have beauty, and the workers have ingenuity” in “Kaogong Ji”.
Conclusion: Weaving the history of the future
When you read this in “Yong’an Family”, you might as well look around you: perhaps there is a straw weaving storage basket from Laizhou holding the fragments of life, which tells the possibility of the coexistence of agricultural civilization and the quantum era in the ancient language of warp and weft interweaving. Laiyin’s story is not only a promise of “the coming better life”, but also an oriental interpretation of “sustainable development” by Chinese wisdom – just like those redefined wheat straws, which, after three thousand years, are still weaving the warp and weft of hope for all mankind.