In the final years of the Southern Song, a girl named Huang A Xiu was sold into a farming household in Songjiang Prefecture as a child bride because her family was poor. Unable to bear the abuse, she escaped under cover of night and hid aboard a barge on the Huangpu River, drifting with it all the way to Yazhou on Hainan Island. Along the way, she met Song Jia Yuan, a scholar fleeing south to escape disaster.
In Yazhou, she took shelter in a dilapidated Taoist temple and became a nun. While going out to beg for alms, she met Song Jia Yuan again, who was running a school in the area, and they fell in love. After A Xiu left the temple, the two married. To make a living, she became a tailor and learned the distinctive weaving techniques of the local Li people. By combining them with Jiangnan weaving methods, she became a highly skilled weaver.
In the early Yuan Dynasty, after peace returned to the land, the couple sailed back to their hometown of Wunijing in Songjiang. A Xiu selflessly taught the local villagers the weaving techniques she had developed over many years, and boldly improved the weaving tools, creating a complete and sophisticated cotton-spinning and weaving process.
This process quickly spread throughout Songjiang, advancing the handmade cotton textile industry in Jiangnan and across China, and changing the industrial landscape of southern China during the Yuan and Ming dynasties. Songjiang Prefecture became China's cotton textile center, earning a reputation as the place that "clothes the whole world."
After A Xiu died, the local people built a shrine in her honor and affectionately called her Huang Popo. Later generations honored her as Huang Daopo and revered her as the founder of the cotton textile industry.
Theme: From child bride to reformer of the cotton textile industry, the rebirth of a poor girl.
