Miao ethnic peopleQingman Miao Village is 23 kilometers southwest of Kaili city, in southwest China's Guizhou Province.
One of the highlights in Qingman is the opportunity to witness the whole process of traditional Miao clothes-making.
The main material for traditional clothing is homemade cloth spun, woven, and dyed all by the Miao. The locally popular "cotton song" describes the entire process of looking for cotton seed, selecting seed, reclaiming land, sowing, harvesting, getting rid of seed, bowing, spinning, reeling thread, dyeing, and sewing.
In each household you can see vats used for dyeing cotton cloth. The vats are made of cedar planks, and are approximately 2-and-a-half feet tall and one meter in diameter. The dye vats must be 'raised'; it takes about one month to finish dyeing a bolt of cloth in indigo-dyeing water and this process is called 'raising the vat'.
