Award: Documentary Award

In the past, you could see girls and women making shoe while chatting in the spare time or in the field. A pair of fancy shoes is completed within a day or several. Nowadays, only in rural mountain area or medium or small sized town can you can elderly women making small cloth shoes for their grandchildren.

Before making shoes, people should prepare thin hemp and rags that are pasted together before they are dried in the sunlight. People in central China call pieces of thin hemp pasted together to make cloth shoes “gebei”, which has abrasion resistance. Old rags pasted together are called “quezi”, which is soft to make shoe sides. Authentic shoe bottom, also called thousand layer tread in business, is made of two layers of gebei outside and many layers of quezi inside sewn with thread. Different patterns of cloth pasted onto the shoe sides are selected to be shoe uppers for people of different ages.