Designer's Note: Tang Red 28 Embroidered Orchid Tote
Dear Collector,
My name is Rui, a craftswoman, and one of Artisan Hua Ziyan’s last students.
Today, I want to tell you about a bag I spent the last year creating. Not just as a designer, but as a granddaughter. As a student. As a woman who has spent her life learning how to express feeling through form.
This story doesn’t begin with a sketch or a pattern.
It begins with a quiet and sun-dappled garden, and the soft rustle of moth orchid petals.
When I was a little girl, I would sit for hours beside my grandmother as she tended to her orchids.They were her pride, her ritual. Every morning, she would inspect each stem, whisper to each bloom, shift the pots to follow the light. She treated them as if they were living poems: delicate, noble, and wise beyond their silence. I didn’t know it then, but I was witnessing a kind of devotion that would stay with me forever.
At first, I sat beside her because I loved her.
But slowly, I began to love the orchids too. Their quiet dignity, their strength wrapped in softness. I sketched them constantly, such as the angle of the leaf, the way the petals curled as if mid-whisper.
They became part of my childhood, part of my understanding of beauty.
Years later, when I began my journey as an apprentice under Hua Ziyan, those memories returned to me in waves. Master Hua once told me, "Embroidery is not about decoration. It's about memory made visible."
And I never forgot that.
One evening, after months of training, she handed me a spool of gold thread, warm in the palm, impossibly fine. And said only this: "You’ll know when to use it.”
I didn’t use it right away.
I held onto it for a long time, unsure what memory or moment could be worthy of that golden thread. Until, one day, I sat down to design a new bag, one that would honour not just technique, but emotion.
And the first image that came to my mind was my grandmother’s hands cupping a pale orchid, as though holding a secret the world had forgotten how to hear.
So I began to stitch.
Thread by thread, I tried to capture not just the shape of the flower, but its essence. The way it seems to float rather than bloom, the way it speaks without sound, the way it endures. I thought of the woman who would carry this piece: not someone loud or rushed, but someone who understands grace, who moves through the world with intention, and who sees meaning in the quietest of details.
Someone like my grandmother.
Hence, this is not a bag born from a trend or a season. Instead, it is a bag born from memory, from love, and from the kind of craftsmanship that cannot be rushed.
It took over 40 hours to complete each one.
But in truth, this bag has been in the making for most of my life.
Every mistake I’ve made as an artist, every lesson Master Hua whispered when no one else was listening, every orchid I ever traced as a child; they are all stitched into its seams.
So if you hold this bag and it feels like it remembers something: a gesture, a moment, a woman, that is because it was made to.
I hope, with all my heart, that it reaches you with the tenderness and sincerity that shaped it.
Yours truly,
Rui (睿)
Mentee of Hua Ziyan
Designer of the Tang Red 28 Embroidered Orchid Tote
Discover the Orchid Tote: https://tangheritage.com/products/tang-red-28-embroidered-orchid-tote