Shanghai’s Haipai qipao tradition takes center stage at the 9th Qibao (七宝) Ancient Town Culture Week, which opened on the evening of August 17 at Bell Tower Square in the town’s Minhang District (闵行区) location and runs through August 23. The week is folded into Minhang’s “Our Festival: Qixi” program, and its anchor show is a Haipai qipao art exhibition, on view from August 14 to 23, that unpacks the construction methods behind the city’s signature dress: piping, insertion, rolled edging, contrast banding and Pankou (盘扣) knotting, all intangible cultural heritage (ICH) techniques. Visitors can also commission a made-to-measure qipao on the spot and take the style home.
Opening night led with a digital revival of local shadow puppetry. An AI-animated shadow-puppet short film about a golden rooster and family values brought Qibao’s puppet craft into a new medium, followed by a stage drama tracing hometown roots and a folk song, “The Swallow Returns to Its Nest,” performed over guzheng accompaniment. The theme — heritage passed down through families — carried into the week’s community programming.
The event spreads dozens of activities across Bell Tower Square, Puxi Bookstore (蒲溪), Qibao No. 2 Middle School, Link Plaza, PowerLong Art Museum, Minhang Museum and nearby communities. A “ticket-stub” voucher program strings 16 town merchants into one stamp-collecting route: scan, collect, and claim no-minimum consumption coupons. A coffee from Postal Coffee, a Qixi art salon at Jijin Zhai (吉津斋), and a themed book display at Puxi Bookstore (“Qixi in Books: A Meeting on Paper”) fit into a single afternoon loop.
Qibao itself frames the week: the thousand-year-old water town in Minhang is built around an old street lined with tea houses, craft shops and food stalls, and its puppet tradition dates back generations. That local texture is why the organizers folded the culture week into Minhang’s “Our Festival: Qixi” series rather than staging it as a stand-alone fair. A qipao street parade, a Dunhuang lecture hall, Chinese-style elegance gatherings, a heritage craft market, museum special exhibitions, calligraphy and painting sessions and community shows are all on the calendar, so different parts of the town host different pieces of the program each day.
On August 19, the town becomes an open-air venue for “Love in This Young Summer,” a Qixi dating concert. Around it, a qipao street parade, a Dunhuang lecture series, Chinese-style elegance gatherings, a heritage craft market, museum special exhibitions, calligraphy and painting sessions and community shows fill out the calendar. Link Plaza hosts a giant pipa exhibition devoted to Dunhuang music, Minhang Citizens’ Culture Square sets up a “Bookish Summer Breeze” neighborhood market, and the old-town Jijin Zhai studio offers classes in Chinese painting, calligraphy and seal carving. Minhang Museum schedules seven folk-music lectures across the week.
For the fashion-minded, the qipao exhibition is the draw: it walks viewers through the tailoring grammar of Haipai style — how a single dress carries piping that traces the collar, insertion lines that structure the waist, and rolled edges that finish every seam, all before the Pankou buttons are set. The made-to-measure service turns the exhibition into a fitting room, letting shoppers leave with a custom piece rather than a catalog photograph.
The week also links shopping to culture digitally, with Dianping users earning no-minimum red packets by checking in at the venues. Taken together, the program turns a thousand-year-old water town into a retail-and-heritage circuit that runs from museum lectures to fitting-room appointments until August 23.
