A small Bai village a few kilometres north of Xizhou, locally famous for traditional indigo tie-dyeing. Several family workshops welcome visitors — you can watch dyers folding and binding cloth, dipping it in vats of fermented indigo, and hanging finished fabrics to dry in courtyards.
The Duan family workshop and the Zhang family workshop are the two best-known operations. Both sell finished cloth, scarves, and tablecloths at reasonable prices, and run short workshops where you can dye your own small piece of cloth. Allow a few hours to combine Zhoucheng with Xizhou on a day trip from the old town.
A story
Bai indigo tie-dye (zharan) uses dye made from the leaves of the local indigo plant Polygonum tinctorium, fermented in lime water for weeks until it produces the deep blue characteristic of Bai textiles. Patterns are bound with thread by hand before the cloth is dipped; each pattern takes hours to bind and the binding is its own art form. The technique was inscribed on China's national list of intangible cultural heritage in 2006. A handful of family workshops in Zhoucheng still produce traditional zharan for serious customers; the bulk of what is sold in tourist markets in the old town is mass-produced and chemically dyed.