Inside the Qinhuai Intangible Cultural Heritage Hall, at 21 Chaoku Street in Nanjing’s Qinhuai district, a cluster of blossoms sits under glass without water and still holds a soft sheen. The petals are silk. In the cases, Ronghua, or velvet flowers, appear as hairpins, brooches, bouquets and desk ornaments, with birds, fish and insects worked into a space no wider than a palm.
On October 1, reporters from Yangtze Evening News and Ziniu News visited Zhou Hong (周虹), a district-level inheritor of the craft, to watch how a strand of silk is turned into something a visitor can wear, display, and try to make.
Six Steps from Silk Thread
Colour is what stops people first. Bright yellow, lake blue, peach pink and vermilion blooms open layer by layer behind glass and in wooden frames; some gather into a single sprig, some form a potted arrangement with leaves, and others make three-dimensional pictures with butterflies among the flowers. Up close, the petals are not the flat grain of cloth but a dense pile of velvet filaments, and the light falls on them softly.
Zhou sums up the material in one line: copper as bone, silk as velvet. Nanjing Ronghua is built from silk and brass wire, and the two halves are prepared separately before anything is assembled.
Raw silk is boiled in alkaline water until it softens and takes on a sheen, becoming cooked silk. That silk is dyed and dried to the design’s needs; where plant dyes once limited the palette, modern reactive dyes now widen the range of colours. The brass wire, on the other side, is annealed over a low flame so it loses some hardness and can be twisted into shape. Zhou points out that most visitors start watching at the twisting stage, but the earlier steps of cooking, dyeing and wire-making cannot be skipped.
Gou tiao, the twisting, looks like a small transformation. The dyer’s cooked silk is split into even thin sheets, clamped between two brass wires, and the two ends are turned in opposite directions. The flat sheet rolls into a cylinder, and after it is rubbed tight between two wooden boards it becomes a rong tiao, the basic unit of a velvet flower. Twist too lightly and the filaments loosen; apply uneven force and the thickness and direction drift. It takes only a few turns, but doing it well depends on the eye and the hand.
Then comes da jian, the step best appreciated by ear. Scissors fall along the rolled strand in quick, crisp snips, and the cylinder takes on a shape: a waisted drum, a sharp corner, a rounded edge. Zhou says the sound of trimming is soothing and the shape emerges little by little in the hand. Trimmed strands move to chuan hua, where tweezers bend and combine them and silk thread and glue hold the result in place, until plum, peach and cherry blossoms form. Beyond flowers, she adds, the same method makes birds, fish and beasts.
What the Name Carries
The name carries a blessing of its own: Ronghua puns on “glory and prosperity.” The craft is said to date from the Tang dynasty, flourished in the Ming and Qing, and later entered weddings and festival life. In 2006, Ronghua making was added to Jiangsu’s provincial intangible heritage list. Where it once appeared as a head ornament or a blossom set in the hair, younger buyers now meet it as a brooch, a hairpin or a bouquet for a desk, so the object has grown smaller while the range of places it is worn and used has widened.
Nanjing Ronghua has moved through a production group, a cooperative and a factory before returning to studios and experience classes. Zhou recalls that in 1953 the veteran artisan Zhou Jiafeng organised the Maxiang Ronghua production group, which became the Nanjing Yimei velvet ceremonial flower cooperative in 1956 and later the Nanjing craft artificial-flower factory. The trade declined in the 1990s. With the rise of Guochao consumption in recent years, flower-and-bird designs have returned as ornaments and display pieces, so a small brooch carries both the memory of the old factory and today’s gift market.
Booking Numbers and Young Buyers
To bring first-timers in, Zhou developed material kits graded by age and skill, moving from a single simple flower to pieces that need more assembly and shaping. Visitors can finish one small work and then understand why cooked silk must not be over-boiled, why the wire has to be annealed and why the two hands turn in opposite directions. The experience no longer stops at looking; it adds a chance to touch silk and pick up tweezers.
Media citing Nanjing’s culture and tourism bureau report that in the first three days of the 2026 National Day holiday, bookings for the hall’s Ronghua experience area rose 278 percent year on year, with visitors aged 18 to 35 making up 64.3 percent. Zhou’s team also offers a graded “Ronghua growth kit”: the entry set is a single magnolia brooch, the next level adds a butterfly with moving wings, and the top set reproduces part of a Ming-dynasty “three abundances” crown.
Offline, visitors shape the flowers by hand; online, Zhou explains the materials, steps and cultural background. On social platforms she posts pieces such as “Ronghua Is Not a Pipe Cleaner” and “A Short Introduction to Nanjing Ronghua,” using plain titles to unpack the craft and move its entry point from the museum case to the phone screen and everyday dress. For holiday visitors, the way in is a brooch or a first small flower. What holds them a moment longer is the slow, precise handwork behind the soft silk.
