Makers › Inventor
Huang Daopo
Woman of Wunijing near Songjiang who, according to Yuan writers, came back from Hainan and taught local people to gin, bow, spin and weave cotton
In a workshop, a craftsman at a wooden vat lifts a bamboo-framed sheet from the pulp beside stacks of white paper and a tub of pulp, while others hang sheets to dry and work at a long table of carved printing blocks, and a water wheel turns outside the window.
Also known as Huang Po
Huang Daopo came from Wunijing near Songjiang, and what is known of her comes from Tao Zongyi's *Nancun chuogeng lu* and Wang Feng's *Wuxi ji*. Tao writes that the poor soil of Wunijing was planted with cotton, but the people had no tools for removing seeds or fluffing fibre, so they picked the seeds out by hand and beat the cotton with a small string bow. Returning from Yazhou on Hainan, she taught them to make devices for ginning, bowing, spinning and weaving, and showed them how to combine coloured yarns and set up pattern heddles, producing figured quilts, belts and kerchiefs. Once they had learned, the villagers sold their cloth in other prefectures and prospered, and after her death they built a shrine and offered sacrifices to her each season. Wang Feng says she had drifted to Yazhou as a young woman and came home in the Yuanzhen years, which is why later writers suppose she learned her craft from Li women there.
Life and times
Dates Dates unknown; returned from Yazhou in the Yuanzhen era (1295–1297)