What is ronghua? The Chinese silk flower behind everything we make

Ronghua (绒花) translates literally as velvet flower. The name describes the material rather than the plant: silk floss is stretched over a thin copper wire frame, then shaped and assembled into petals, leaves and whole branches. The result is lighter than it looks, slightly translucent in daylight, and closer to fabric than to the plastic flowers sold for weddings.

Where it comes from

The craft is associated with Nanjing and the wider Jiangnan region, where silk production made the raw material easy to obtain. Silk flowers appear in Chinese painting, poetry and tomb figures long before they appear in shop inventories, and by the Ming and Qing periods they were worn as hair ornaments for festivals, weddings and formal occasions. A flower that could not wilt had obvious advantages in a climate with four distinct seasons.

Like many hand crafts, ronghua contracted sharply in the twentieth century. Cheaper machine-made ornaments and a change in everyday dress pushed it toward the edges. What kept it alive was a small number of makers who continued to produce for opera stages, temples and collectors, and who later taught the technique to a new generation. Most of the pieces sold today as ronghua come from studios of a few people rather than from factories.

How a flower is actually made

The process has four stages, and each one is slow enough that a piece can be ruined at any of them.

• Dyeing. Mulberry silk floss is dyed in small batches. Because silk takes colour unevenly, a single petal is often dipped more than once to build depth at the centre.
• Stretching. A loop of copper wire is bent into the outline of a petal, and silk is pulled over it by hand until the surface is taut. This is the step that takes years to learn: pull too hard and the silk tears, too softly and the petal sags.
• Shaping. The covered petal is pinched and curled while the silk is still workable, then left to dry in that curve.
• Assembly. Petals are bound onto a stem in layers, and the finished flower is set into a hairpin, comb, brooch back or frame.

Why it costs more than a fabric flower

A single camellia can use thirty petals, each of which is wired and stretched by hand. A bridal crown can take four to five weeks. There is no machine that does the stretching step, and the people who can do it well are few. What you are paying for is time, skill and a material that behaves like silk because it is silk.

It also lasts. Stored away from damp and direct sun, a well-made ronghua piece keeps its colour for decades. We have repaired flowers made in the 1980s that only needed new thread at the stem.

A flower that cannot wilt was never meant to be disposable.