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Custom shoes for the Mid-Autumn Festival? Hong Kong craftswoman keeps the dying traditional art of hand-embroidered shoes alive with workshops
- Hand-embroidered slippers, not mooncakes, used to be a popular item to give to elderly family members during the Mid-Autumn Festival
- Miru Wong keeps the traditional art alive in Hong Kong with Cantonese embroidery workshops that teach designs for slippers, high heels, flip-flops and more
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Around the world, traditional crafts are falling victim to technology and globalisation. In Hong Kong, Miru Wong Ka-lam is doing her bit to keep the art of hand-embroidered shoes alive.
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Wong’s shop, Sindart, in Jordan, Kowloon, is one of just a few in the city to have survived the industry’s shift to mainland China, with its cheaper labour costs and mass-manufacturing capabilities.
To share her skills, the third-generation owner of the 63-year-old small business holds weekly workshops for people keen to learn the vanishing art of Cantonese embroidery.
One of the designs students learn is a marigold and moon bead embroidery, which traditionally represents the Mid-Autumn Festival.
“The marigold in the middle signifies the full moon during the Mid-Autumn Festival, while the bats circling the marigold signify luck. This is because, in Chinese, the words ‘bat’ and ‘luck’ sound similar. There are five bats, because in Chinese culture, five blessings are considered extremely auspicious,” Wong explains. “This design is usually embroidered on either a black or a blue background, the colours of the sky behind the moon.
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