Lung Tam is a commune in Quan Ba district, about 50 km from the center of Ha Giang city. Here, the Mong people still preserve the traditional linen weaving profession with natural materials and handmade processes.
Lung Tam linen weaving cooperative was born in 2001, not only a place to preserve and develop a unique culture, helping to improve income for local people but also a place visited by many Western tourists when traveling to Ha Giang. Coming here, in addition to learning about the linen weaving process, visitors also have the opportunity to directly experience the steps to create a cloth.
In Lung Tam, visitors can admire handmade linen weaving products created by Mong women. Not only shirts, skirts, linen today are also present in many products such as tablecloths, bags, and wallets.
Linen plays an important role in the culture and spirituality of the Mong people. Knowing how to weave linen is considered a criterion for evaluating the talent, ingenuity and hard work of a Mong woman. When returning to her husband's house, the daughter had to wear linen clothes to be blessed by her husband's ancestors. When coming to Ha Giang, it is easy to see that Mong women always carry a flax bun with them to spin and connect yarn anywhere, when going to the market or going to the farm.
The main raw material for making linen is flax. The process of weaving linen goes through 41 steps, including sowing seeds, harvesting flax plants, peeling the yarns, sewing flax, splicing the yarns, spinning the reels, weaving the fabric, washing, drying... requires a lot of time and effort.
To have a beautiful piece of fabric, the worker must love the craft, be persistent and skillful. The linen fibers from the peeling step must be even, so that the woven fabric is durable and beautiful. The flax fibers after peeling are pounded to soften, then joined together to have long fibers. The Mong people also invented a spinning tool that coordinates between the legs and hands to spin 4 flax threads at the same time.
After that, the yarn is put into a rotating frame to be removed and bundled into bundles and then boiled with kitchen ash, soaked and washed. This is repeated until the white flax yarn is dried and then put into a frame for weaving. When putting yarn into the frame, depending on the size of the fabric, the worker counts the number of yarns accurately.
The Mong people still weave handmade fabrics with looms. The weaving stage is usually undertaken by older artisans with a lot of experience to be able to handle broken and bad yarns.
The finished woven fabric is placed between a stone slab and a wooden pillar. The worker stands up on the stone slab and rolls it back and forth until the entire surface of the cloth is rolled flat, soft and smooth, then soaked with wood ash for a week to whiten and then dried. A beautiful linen sheet must have even, white, smooth fibers. Linen fabric is durable, absorbs moisture, so when worn it feels cool.
In addition to weaving, Mong women in Lung Tam also have beeswax painting and indigo dyeing techniques. The craftsman paints traditional Mong motifs on white cloth with heated beeswax. When the fabric is dyed, the color-impermeable beeswax line will accentuate the pattern on the fabric. Meanwhile, the indigo dyeing technique produces colorful fabrics. The dye colors used are also completely natural.
The products of the craft village have followed many tourists to all parts of Vietnam and have also been exported to more than 20 countries, in which, there are particularly popular markets such as the United States, Japan, France, Switzerland, etc. These products go all over the country to receive the favor of customers because of the uniqueness of the product with natural traditional materials.
Photo: Xuan Phuong
According to VnE