Second chance

The art is booming in the factory today, but Chifeng's weaving business was not always this robust. According to Sun, who once worked in the city's largest among the 300 carpet factories, lack of creativity and dull color and style variations made the industry plummet in the 1990s.

"It is crucial to get closer to modern people's aesthetic standards," says Wang Guoli, the general manager of the factory. "The tapestries with unchanged themes on grasslands' sceneries and Mongolian ethnic group's daily life look fabulous in museums, but we must innovate and involve more elements to survive."

Wang, who once ran a factory making artistic bronze wares, began his weaving dream by establishing the workshop in 2000. Though he does not reveal the exact annual turnover, he says the expanding demand from the high-end market soon turned things around.

"We never established a sales department," he smiles. "Everyone comes here to order tapestries upon hearing our name."

Many fine works are even given to foreign leaders as "national gifts".

After attending fiber-arts exhibitions around the world, Wang is ready to expand overseas. He has an ambition to be established in Europe within five years.

"Europeans prefer abstract themes, so we have to make some adjustments. Having some artists create more original blueprints for us becomes a necessity," he says. "Nevertheless, these tapestries can be a good channel to let Chinese values become better known worldwide. We will mix in the Oriental philosophies, like tea culture and Zen."

And in the artisans' eyes, their works are not perfect yet.

"We are studying how to create the feeling of reliefs - to take designs that appear to be three-dimensional to the naked eye and weave real 3-D images," says Sun, the chief engineer. "The ways to explore for extremely delicate work will have no end."