Female entrepreneurs embroider golden future for rural women

Despite running a 1,500-square-meter embroidery workshop, Brkez Saymu is more proud of the fact that she helps nearly 200 rural women earn a living through their own skill.

In 2002, the then 32-year-old businesswoman opened an embroidery shop in Kashgar prefecture, Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. After enjoying initial success, she expanded her business and set up a rural cooperative a year later.

"Since I made money out of the business, I wanted to build the cooperative and mobilize the women in our village to join me," she says. "They all have the embroidery skills but never thought they could use them to make money. I wanted to offer them an opportunity."

Currently, the workshop of her cooperative has nearly 200 female embroiderers and more than 50 pieces of production equipment.

Brkez is not alone. After nearly 10 years of development, the company founded by Bahguli Olaltei, another female entrepreneur from Altay prefecture, has 12 workshops staffed by more than 6,800 professional embroiderers.

"My mom is a famous embroiderer in our village, so, influenced by her, I have enjoyed embroidery since I was a kid," she says. "I had already mastered the basic skills of making clothing and tapestries by the age of 15."

Bahguli's company provides free training for local rural female embroiderers to help them enhance their skills. They can do their work at home for their own convenience.

As a perfectionist, Bahguli has not ceased striving to improve her embroidery skills since starting her business. Every year, she travels to Beijing, and Hangzhou of Zhejiang province, among other places, to learn the latest skills in a bid to better combine traditional Xinjiang embroidery with modern craftsmanship.

"Only by constantly learning can we design better products," she says.

In recent years, Xinjiang's culture and tourism, and other departments, have adopted a slew of measures, including advancing the protection of embroidery production and training of embroidery inheritors, to attract more rural female embroiderers and help them increase their income.