A Thousand Years in Bloom: The History of Chinese Velvet Flowers
"Ronghua" — velvet blossom — is a homophone for "glory and splendor" (荣华). For more than a millennium, the Chinese pinned that wish directly into their hair.
The exact birth of the Nanjing velvet flower is contested. Some historians, citing a Tang-era encyclopedia's note that Qin-dynasty palace women "wore five-colored straw-and-silk blossoms," trace its earliest form back to the Qin. But that is text without artifact — and so the story properly begins where the evidence does: the Tang.
THE TANGFrom tribute to "palace flower"
By the Tang dynasty, velvet flowers entered the imperial court as tribute. Because they never wilt and symbolized eternal youth — and because their name echoed "glory and splendor" — they quickly became the fashion of the inner palace, earning the name gōnghuā, the "palace flower." The Tang miscellany Youyang Zazu records that each Lichun (beginning of spring), Emperor Zhongzong would have colored blossoms brought from the palace and bestowed on consorts and ministers to welcome the new year.
THE SONGFlowers for the common street
As Nanjing's silk and handicraft industries grew through the Song, velvet flowers slipped beyond the palace walls; the well-to-do among commoners began to wear them too. A Song record of the capital describes the streets crowded with flower-wearing strollers — and on festivals, wearing a blossom out for a walk became a genuine craze. Men included.
YUAN · MING · QINGWorkshops, then a city of blossoms
The Yuan dynasty set up eastern and western weaving-and-dyeing bureaus in Nanjing, mass-producing silk and feeding the craft its raw material. By the Ming, as Nanjing's famous cloud brocade (Yunjin) flourished, velvet flowers — a "by-product" of that industry — gained their own dedicated workshops; a Ming novel even describes "velvet-flower pomegranates bursting into flame."
In the Qing, Nanjing's San Shan Street through Zhonghua Gate filled with ronghua workshops and shops. The Draft History of the Qing notes that Empress Xiaoxianchun, known for her frugality, "ornamented herself with straw and velvet flowers in daily life, and wore no pearls or jade" — a quiet endorsement from the top of the empire.
THE MODERN FALL — AND RETURNNear extinction, then a second spring
The Republic era kept the craft alive, but war nearly severed the lineage. After 1949 came revival and a flush of export prosperity; yet in the 1990s, when Nanjing's state craft factory disbanded, ronghua nearly vanished a second time. What saved it was the stubborn persistence of a few artisans, the rise of the internet, and a growing national commitment to protecting intangible cultural heritage. The never-wilting flower bloomed back into daily life.
It had never really left the screen, either. In the beloved 1986 Journey to the West, the Queen of the Women's Kingdom wore a full-red velvet phoenix crown, crafted by master Zhou Jiahong. And the craft's biggest modern moment came with Story of Yanxi Palace (2018): of the 128 consort headpieces in the series, nearly half were Nanjing velvet flowers.
Velvet flowers have risen and fallen many times, but they have never been absent from the Chinese sense of beauty. They are not just an art of appearance — they are the inheritance of a human spirit.
That is Yunqing's own ambition: to recover the making techniques, to bring the beauty back, and to let more people know ronghua and own a piece of this never-wilting splendor.
This story was adapted from our Chinese-language journal 云青非遗造趣社 (Yunqing Intangible Heritage Club) on WeChat · Photos: classical paintings, the Palace Museum, period dramas, and the Yunqing studio.