Ruixing Lu

Wuxi Chinese Blue Calico Museum is the first privately owned museum in Wuxi. It was built by a successful businessman Ruixing Lu. He has spent over ten years to set it up. It is about 17000 square meters in size. He collected thousands of valuable blue calico handcrafts from the Qing Dynasty to the 1960’s in the twentieth century. They are precious resources for research of Chinese traditional cultures. The most valuable material is Jia Xie, the woodcarving board and Jia Xie handiworks. They are the ancestors of Chinese Blue Calico.

Unbound

The book for which the video below is a companion, Unbound by Dean King, tells about the women who were part of the Long March of Mao’s army through Western China. This book will be many things to many readers, depending on perspective. For me, it is an extraordinary story of a relatively recent human migration and an example of the role of straw sandals in history and culture from tens of thousands of years ago to the present.

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