1. Placing Gansu in this industry calls for a change of view

Leather, fur, feather and down products and footwear is a long-named industry. It packs together leather tanning, fur dressing, feather and down products, and shoemaking. When studying the coastal provinces, the focus almost always lands on footwear, on finished-shoe clusters like Jinjiang, Putian and Wenzhou. Carry that lens to Gansu and it comes up empty. Gansu has no athletic-shoe or leather-shoe cluster of any scale, and the shoemaking segment can almost be skipped here.

What Gansu truly holds is an earlier, more overlooked part of the chain: the early-stage processing of cattle and sheep hides and wool, and the trading and export built around it. This is an industry whose direction is set by pastoral raw materials. Gannan and Linxia sit on the eastern edge of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, a belt where farming meets herding. Yak, Tibetan sheep and Tan sheep are slaughtered year-round, and raw hides and wool are this land's natural by-product. Whoever holds the raw material holds the start of this chain, and what Gansu holds is exactly that start.

So this report does not benchmark Gansu against the coastal finished-shoe provinces; comparing scale would be meaningless. What it sets out to explain is something else: how an inland province that makes no famous shoes has, on the strength of pastoral raw materials and centuries of fur-trading tradition, secured a hub position in the northwest in the front end of the leather industry.

2. Guanghe: the northwest's largest leather-processing hub

To understand this industry in Gansu, there is no going around Guanghe County in Linxia Prefecture. It is currently the largest leather production and processing concentration area in the northwest, and an important fur sales distribution center for the region, a position built up bit by bit over decades.

Guanghe's leather industry began in the 1980s on the back of trade and commerce, and now has more than forty years behind it. Today the county has twenty-four leather and wool-textile enterprises, five of them above designated size; it processes over ten million cattle and sheep hides a year and about 36,000 tons of washed wool, with annual output value of about 2.748 billion yuan, more than 75 percent of the county's total industrial output. Leather and wool textiles are, without exaggeration, this county's pillar industry. In 2024, the Guanghe leather-and-wool industrial cluster was named a provincial-level SME characteristic industrial cluster, which is the provincial level acknowledging its role as a hub.

Guanghe's product line has stretched outward from a single raw hide in both directions. At the front are tanning and finishing, from raw eco-leather and blue wet leather to finished leather; in the middle come leather goods, luggage, footwear and apparel; at the back the chain reaches into food-grade gelatin, industrial gelatin and other biological products, turning trimmings and hide scraps once treated as waste back into products with added value. Among the local leading firms are large-scale tanning lines with sizable annual capacity, as well as supporting plants dedicated to washed wool and wool textiles. A chain running from raw material to tanning to products to bio-gelatin is being filled in, segment by segment, in this northwest county town. Guanghe has set itself a clear direction: to move toward higher-end products such as bag leather, sofa leather and automotive-seat leather, aiming to build a ten-billion-yuan leather cluster by 2035.

It must be stated plainly that Guanghe's strength has always been in the front and middle segments of leather tanning, fur and wool textiles, not in finished shoemaking. It makes footwear, but is far from forming a branded shoemaking cluster like those on the coast. Its weight is captured accurately only under the heading "the northwest's largest leather processing and distribution center."

3. Sanjiaji and Zhangjiachuan: a fur-trading tradition on the Silk Road

Guanghe's rise did not come from nowhere; it inherits centuries of fur-trading foundations in this region.

Sanjiaji, a town in the eastern part of Guanghe County, was historically known as "the northwest's largest market," with a wide commercial reach, and serves as the eastern gate of Linxia Prefecture. It sits on the southern route of the ancient Silk Road and has long been called a western "dry port", with no water transport, yet, on the strength of trade routes and personal networks, it became a distribution port for fur and leather goods. Today Guanghe's leather products set out from this dry port to markets in Central and West Asia, South Asia and even Central and Eastern Europe, keeping ties with neighboring fur markets such as Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan. An inland county with no coast and no river relies on having extended the Silk Road's old trade routes into today's foreign-trade channel.

Eastward, in Zhangjiachuan Hui Autonomous County in Tianshui, lies another fur town. The Zhangchuan and Longshan area has been known across the northwest as a fur-trading center since the Qing dynasty; during the war years, fur from here was sold in large quantities to Chongqing and Chengdu, an important raw-material source for the wool-textile industry of the rear region. Today Longshan's fur market is one of the largest in the northwest and ranks among the top nationally as a specialized wholesale market for hides, fur, down and their finished and semi-finished goods. The traditional handcraft of turning raw cattle and sheep hides into fur mats, fur coats and fur hats has been listed as a Gansu provincial intangible cultural heritage, which shows that fur processing in Gansu is not only capacity but also a craft with inheritance and skill behind it.

The two markets of Sanjiaji and Longshan, together with the processing concentration in Guanghe, form the real skeleton of Gansu's fur industry: raw material comes from the pastures, gathers in the markets, is processed in the county towns, and then leaves through the dry port. This thread explains Gansu's place in the industry better than the scale of any single enterprise.

4. Upstream: pastoral raw materials and the pull of a full chain

The root of Gansu's leather and fur industry is planted in the cattle and sheep of the pastures.

In recent years Linxia Prefecture has worked hard to build a full cattle-and-sheep industry chain, seizing the policy opportunities of the "Gannan-Linxia million-head beef-cattle belt" and the "central Yellow-River ten-million-head mutton-sheep belt." On a 2023 basis, the prefecture marketed about 710,000 head of cattle and about 4.2 million sheep. Raising livestock is a "family trade" here, and meat, milk, hide and wool are different industries drawn from the same animal: meat and milk go into food processing, raw hides into tanning, and wool into wool textiles. Linxia has set itself the role of a production and supply base of food and ethnic-specialty goods for Central Asia, South-Central Asia and Central and Eastern Europe, and leather and fur products are a heavy part of those "ethnic-specialty goods."

The significance of this upstream is that it gives Gansu's leather industry an advantage hard to copy elsewhere: the raw material is local, so there is no need, as with coastal tanneries, to import large volumes or haul raw hides over long distances. Livestock is marketed in the pastures, hides are collected nearby, gathered in the markets, and processed in the county towns; the links are short and the radius small. This is the underlying support that lets Guanghe process over ten million cattle and sheep hides a year, with the herds of all of Gannan, Linxia and the Yellow-River belt behind it.

This upstream also carries the limits common to inland pastoral industries: front-end processing has thin added value, deep processing and branding are relatively weak, and tanning faces hard constraints on environmental protection and water use. Guanghe's push into bio-gelatin and higher-end leather products, and Linxia's drive for a full cattle-and-sheep chain, are in essence answers to the same question: how can a province that holds the raw material avoid stopping at selling raw material and rough processing, and keep the more profitable links at home as well.

5. The Institute's assessment

Gansu's leather, fur, feather products and footwear industry is small but clearly structured, and cannot be measured with the yardstick of the coastal shoemaking giants. Its story is not in shoes but in hides and wool: in the processing concentration of over ten million cattle and sheep hides at Guanghe, in the centuries of unbroken fur trade at Sanjiaji and Longshan, in the steady stream of raw hides and wool from the pastures of Gannan and Linxia. Joined together, these three segments make Gansu's role clear: it is the northwest's hide-and-wool corridor, a hub of the raw-material end and the front-end processing, not a brand source for finished goods.

This role has its ceiling and its roots that cannot be moved. The ceiling lies in added value and brand: however large the front-end processing grows, the margin stays thin, and until deep processing and end-market brands are filled in, the position in the value chain is hard to lift. The roots that cannot be moved lie in raw material and location: the pastures' cattle and sheep will not migrate away, and the Silk Road dry port's networks and trade routes into Central and West Asia cannot be conjured up elsewhere. Gansu's task is not to fight Jinjiang and Putian for finished shoes, but to deepen processing concentrations like Guanghe and add value, letting pastoral raw materials pass through a few more local steps before they leave.

In studying this industry, what most deserves remembering is not any single output figure but its provenance: a northwest hide-and-wool corridor whose start is set by pastoral raw materials and whose exit is set by Silk Road trade routes. The scale is modest, yet it has truly existed for decades and is still moving deeper into the chain. This cannot be rushed; it rests on splicing together raw material, craft and trade route, inch by inch.

For upstream sales teams supplying tanning chemicals, wool-textile equipment, leather machinery and bio-gelatin inputs to Gansu's leather and wool-textile factories, rather than canvassing the scattered workshops and markets of Guanghe, Linxia and Zhangjiachuan one by one, you can use Tianxia Gongchang to filter prospective factory clients on the two dimensions of Gansu Province plus the leather, fur, feather products and footwear industry, obtain decision-makers' contacts in bulk, and turn client development from a needle in a haystack into following a map.

Data sources

  • Tianxia Gongchang (directory of Gansu leather, fur, feather products and footwear factories and industry data)
  • China Leather Association and Chinanews Gansu (Guanghe leather industry annual cattle and sheep hide throughput, enterprise and stall counts, output value and sales revenue, the "northwest's largest leather processing hub" framing)
  • Gansu Economic Daily and China Linxia Net (Guanghe leather-and-wool cluster named a provincial-level SME characteristic industrial cluster, twenty-four enterprises, over ten million hides and 36,000 tons of washed wool processed a year, output about 2.7 billion yuan, more than 75 percent of county industrial output, the 2035 ten-billion-yuan target)
  • China Today and China Leather Association (Sanjiaji as a Silk Road dry port, leather products sold to Central and West Asia, South Asia and Central and Eastern Europe, ties with Mongolian and Kyrgyz fur markets)
  • Tianshui Bureau of Culture and Tourism (Zhangjiachuan fur craft as a Gansu provincial intangible cultural heritage, scale of the Longshan fur market)
  • War of Resistance memorial archive and related historical sources (Zhangjiachuan as a northwest fur distribution center since the Qing dynasty, fur sold to Chongqing and Chengdu during the war)
  • Gansu Daily and Xinhua Gansu (Linxia full cattle-and-sheep industry chain, the Gannan-Linxia million-head beef-cattle belt and the central Yellow-River ten-million-head mutton-sheep belt, livestock marketing figures, the positioning as a production and supply base for Central Asia, South-Central Asia and Central and Eastern Europe)