Nantong Blue Calico Museum (南通蓝印花布博物馆)

Blue calico printing and dyeing traces back over a thousand years, with Nantong emerging as a major cotton-textile center during the Ming and Qing dynasties, when as many as nineteen registered dye workshops operated in the city's Dyeing and Weaving Bureau district. The craft uses a resist paste of lime and bean flour applied through a hollowed pattern plate, followed by repeated soaking in fermented indigo-vat dye and scraping away the paste to reveal white-on-blue patterns.

Wu Yuanxin, a craftsman from Qidong under Nantong's jurisdiction, comes from a family that grew cotton and wove and dyed calico for generations -- his grandmother wove the cloth and his grandfather dyed and printed it. Recognized as a Chinese arts and crafts grandmaster and among the first national intangible-cultural-heritage inheritors, Wu has worked in blue calico for more than forty years and founded the Nantong Blue Calico Museum in 1996 (some Chinese-language sources cite 1997) as the country's first museum to combine collection, exhibition, research and production of the craft under one roof.

The museum's holdings include more than 60,000 traditional printed-textile pieces dating to the Ming and Qing dynasties and over 200,000 patterns, alongside a full set of historic production tools. Its contemporary arm, the Yuanxinlan brand -- run by Wu together with Wu Lingshu and Ni Shenjian -- designs blue-calico patterns and craft goods that pair the millennium-old technique with present-day aesthetics.