Jinling Qipao Making

Name and category

According to the public notice of January 2024, Jinling Qipao Making is one of the new inscriptions in the recommended list for the fourth batch of district-level intangible cultural heritage items, in the traditional craft category.

Applicant

The applicant unit named in the notice is the Lishui Development Zone administrative committee, and the recommended guardian unit is the culture and sports centre of the development zone. Most of the 17 projects recommended in this batch were submitted by town people's governments or subdistrict offices; this is the only one submitted by the development zone committee.

Bearer

The same notice lists Tao Yumei as a bearer in this batch, for Jinling Qipao Making.

According to an article of May 2026 by the Nanjing Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese, Tao Yumei founded the Tao Yumei qipao brand in the 1990s, building on crafts such as Nanjing brocade and Suzhou embroidery, and her daughter Yang Taoran is described as the "fourth-generation bearer of Jinling Qipao Making", now director and chief designer of the brand. This indicates a line of transmission through the Tao family, but the "fourth generation" is the article's own wording; no other source in this library corroborates the full genealogy, so this entry does not extrapolate from it.

Workshop and process clues

According to a reply by the district culture and tourism bureau in November 2025, the Tao Yumei Jinling Qipao intangible-heritage workshop was named a Nanjing municipal-level ICH workshop in 2025; the same reply records that the district recognised 14 district-level ICH workshops in two rounds in 2023 and 2025. This gives the craft a workshop-based venue for transmission.

According to a reply by the district disabled persons' federation in June 2022, the Nanjing Tao Yumei dress design company and a Lishui rehabilitation centre for the disabled cooperated, with the company supplying materials and technical guidance, so that disabled workers made "knot buttons" for Chinese-style garments; in June 2018 the centre put up a plaque for the "Tao Yumei traditional Chinese handicraft training base". Knot-button making is a process clue related to this item, but that reply does not tie it to the district-level project title, and the two matters belong to different documents.

Points in doubt

First, the "fourth generation" is the wording of the Nanjing federation article; no complete genealogy appears in the public notice or other official documents in this library, so it is recorded only as the article's statement.

Second, the workshop and the cooperation matter are not verified against the project title in detail: the workshop name in the culture and tourism reply and the company and knot-button work in the disabled persons' reply are both closely related to this item, but the two documents come from different departments and concern different matters, and this entry does not merge them.

Third, the first part of the item name is a historical place name for the Nanjing region. The notice does not say when or by what route the craft reached Lishui, and this entry draws no inference.

To be added

• the individual steps of measuring, pattern-making, cutting, edging and knot-button making;
• the choice of outer and lining fabrics;
• the relation between the styles made and local dress customs;
• the exact premises of the workshop or teaching site, the line of transmission and the safeguarding measures.

For the first three items above, no source directly describing this project was found after searching this library's seven source layers, namely official web pages, published notices and lists, the local-gazetteer system, academic papers, classical full texts, media reports and maps; this entry adds nothing by conjecture.