Preface
Brick by brick, grass and tree, people and things, the houses in the city, like square Chinese characters, write the vicissitudes of the city for a hundred years, and the great changes. They came together into a beautiful poem, a generous passage, the content of the text, the story that belonged exclusively to the house and its owner.
In the streets and alleys of Huangpu, there are many buildings with stories like this.
That room, that person, that thing, is the exclusive text that belongs to Huangpu.
There is a nursery rhyme circulating in Shanghai: "Yellow Mother-in-law, Yellow Mother-in-Law, Teach Me Yarn, Teach Me Cloth, Two Tubes, Two Horses of Cloth." The so-called "Yellow Lady" here is the Taoist veneration of the textile god "Golden Silk Lady" Zodiac.
Huang Daobo, also known as Huang Po or Huang Mu, was a native of Wunijing Town, Songjiang Province (present-day Huajing Town, Xuhui District, Shanghai). It is admired by the people for teaching advanced textile technology and promoting advanced textile tools. Taoism respects him as the god of weaving, and the textile colleagues in the world respect him as the ancestor of the cloth industry.
Zodiac woman image
Huang Daobo was born into poverty, and as a teenager, she lived in Yazhou (present-day Hainan Island), took the Taoist Temple as her home, worked, lived among the Li sisters, and learned from the Li people to use cotton-making tools and the method of weaving Yazhou quilts, so the people called her "Daobo". During the Yuan Dynasty, Huang Daobo returned to his hometown and taught and popularized advanced weaving techniques in wunijing town, east of Songjiang Province. Because the people around Wunijing and Songjiang quickly mastered advanced weaving technology, for a while "Wunijing was not shined away and spread widely in the north and south of the great river". At that time, Taicang, Shanghai and other counties were imitated. Cotton textiles come in an unprecedented variety of colours. Matsue Province once became the largest cotton textile center in the country, and Matsue cloth has the reputation of "clothing under the heavens".
Because of the outstanding contribution of the Zodiac, the people of Songjiang thanked her for her kindness, built a shrine for her, and enjoyed the worship when she was old, and The Taoists regarded her as the "Golden Silk Lady". There was once a pre-cotton ancestral hall in Shanghai, and in Shanghai Yu Garden, there was a weaving pavilion that served as a cloth office in the Qing XianFeng period, all of which were dedicated to The Zodiac as the ancestor.
Late Qing Zodiac Po Temple
Cloth Industry Office, also known as Qizaotang. During the Kangxi Dynasty of the Qing Dynasty, the owners of Buzhuang built the Yue Lou and Qizao Hall in the Yi Temple, which were used for deliberation and worship of the gods. In the 30th year of Daoguang (1850), a public office was created because of the undertaking of Kampot to the imperial court, and the site was located in DeyueLou. The public office identifies the grades of the goods supplied, standardizes the ruler, prohibits inferior cloth, and develops and prepares real estate and performs charitable deeds one by one. The office has a director to preside over the affairs, and the secretary is in charge of the two accounts.
Stone plaque of the Cloth Office
From the seventeenth year of Guangxu (1891), the cloth industry colleagues raised funds to build the house, which lasted for 3 years, adding a weaving pavilion, an east corridor, a back building, and building a wall and beams, making the garden exquisite and beautiful. The public office has built a shrine to enshrine, and set up a "return to the edge of the residence", set up the ancestral tablets, and offer sacrifices at the age of the year. At the end of the 19th century, foreign cloth gradually occupied the cloth market, the distribution of native cloth was weak year by year, and the cloth industry colleagues gathered in the public office to "do not have jealous selfishness, do not trick the art of migration, make peace with each other, benefit each other, and wealth is abundant", encourage each other, and firmly believe that "people seek good and heaven is lucky".
Interior view of deyue building in Shanghai Yu garden in 1983
Nowadays, the "Wunijing Cotton Textile Technique" has been listed as a national intangible cultural heritage protection project. The brocade is draped on the body, and the mother of clothing and food is not forgotten. The exploits of the Zodiac will always be remembered by future generations.
Reporter / Gao Lei
Editor / Shan Zhang
Source / Shanghai Collection Association
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