On June 10, the Ministry of Culture announced the Fifth National List of Representative Elements of Intangible Cultural Heritage of China, six years after the fourth list was released. 

Changzhou’s random-stitch embroidery, a nomination proposed by the Cultural Center of Zhonglou District, was among the 185 items added to the latest list. 

The items are in nine categories: Folk Literature, Traditional Music, Traditional Dance, Traditional Opera or Drama, Narrative or Storytelling Traditions, Traditional Sports or Recreational Activities and Acrobatics, Traditional Arts, Traditional Handicraft Skills and Folk Customs.

Random-stitch embroidery, one of the “three treasures” of Changzhou, got inscribed on both the municipal and provincial ICH lists in 2007. Unlike the other two treasures (green-retaining bamboo carving and Jintan paper-cut), it took the embroidery art more than a decade to enter the national ICH list. 

Its creator, Yang Shouyu, was admitted to Wujin Normal University in 1912, where she invented the embroidery style with her artistic insights as a student majoring in painting. For over a century, Yang’s unique techniques--stitching colorful embroidery designs that look like oil paintings--have been passed down from one generation to the next, gaining fame worldwide as one of the five major Chinese embroidery styles.

In Zhonglou, currently, there are five provincial, five municipal, and 16 district-level inheritors of this embroidery art. Across the city of Changzhou, 17 dedicated studios and exhibition venues have rolled out apprenticeship programs throughout the year, involving over 200 young trainees, with more than 1,000 works done every year. 

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