“Finding a heritage craft workshop used to mean asking around a dozen Hanfu group chats,” Zhang Yuhui (张宇慧), the project lead, said at the opening. “Selling the Guofeng jewellery you made yourself meant hauling it through a dozen markets.” On September 28, Huashang Yaji, a traditional-culture industry platform built in Xi’an, went live with a mini-program mall meant to put those scattered needs in one place. The launch was held in the city and streamed online, with craft workers, merchants and several thousand Guofeng enthusiasts attending in person and remotely.
What the platform gathers has until now been spread across Xi’an’s alleys and market corners: Hanfu styling and rental, bookings for heritage craft workshops, Guofeng goods, and organised outings for people who want company in costume. The pitch to small Guofeng businesses is a low-threshold channel, so that a maker no longer has to sit at a fixed stall waiting for customers to walk past.
Han-Tang Dance Opens the Launch
The programme began with classical Han and Tang dance. The Chang’an Zhezhi Han Dance Studio, which has worked in Xi’an for years, performed. The troupe was put together by its founder Ziqing after she came to Shaanxi from Sichuan in 2011, and it describes itself as the city’s first professional group teaching introductory classes to Hanfu enthusiasts with no dance background. In five years it has drawn about a hundred members, reviving classical Han and Tang repertoire and writing new pieces that beginners can learn. Audience members, several of them in Hanfu, remarked afterwards that the performance felt like standing inside a Tang-dynasty hall.
A costume show followed, running through Qin-Han, High Tang and Song-Ming dress. Shenyi came out plain, Qixiong Ruqun elaborate, Mamianqun formal, and between them the segment set out the etiquette the garments carried. The closing set was a Loulan haute couture show built on Silk Road aesthetics, reconstructing the dress of the western deserts and drawing a response from the room.
Moving Scattered Guofeng Resources Online
Zhang laid out the plan as a step up: take the offline practice and run it across the cloud, breaking down the barriers of geography and time, consolidating Guofeng dress, heritage crafts, cultural experiences and industry connections into one digital ecosystem, and giving practitioners, enthusiasts and merchants an efficient way to find each other while lowering the operating threshold for small cultural ventures. The idea the platform states for itself is culture at the core, digital tools as the wings and industry as the foundation.
A Fee Waiver for the First 50 Merchants
Founding merchants got their own terms at the launch. The deposit is set at 10,000 yuan and the booth fee at 10,000 yuan, and the first 50 merchants to sign nationwide have the booth fee waived, paying only the deposit, with additional benefits in platform traffic and priority access to offline brand events. Within the session, dozens of Guofeng companies and craft studios from Shaanxi and beyond signed on and took their places.
For the people behind it, the mini-program going live is a starting point rather than an arrival. Huashang Yaji grew out of Xi’an, and the company states it will keep iterating, working with craft workers and merchants to bring heritage techniques and traditional dress culture back into wider use, and using a digital business to carry a cultural inheritance that had been sitting in a small circle out to a much larger audience.
