1. First, What This Industry Actually Looks Like in Gansu

The manufacturing of cultural, educational, art-craft, sporting and recreational goods is a category that bundles together many seemingly unrelated things: pens and stationery, sports equipment and athletic gear, musical instruments, toys, amusement goods, and arts and crafts. In some coastal provinces, almost any one of the first several items can sustain a sizeable industrial chain — the east has clusters of sporting-goods bases, pen-making towns and instrument hubs.

Turn the lens to Gansu and the picture is entirely different. On the modern-manufacturing side, Gansu has formed almost no large-scale, publicly documented clusters in sports equipment, instruments, pen-making or toys. This is not an oversight but the real situation: Gansu's resource endowment, industrial base and location were never aligned with these light-industry tracks driven by fast-moving consumer goods and export orders. Scan it with the conventional approach of "find the leading firms, read the output figures," and you will mostly turn up a blank.

Yet to conclude from this that the industry is negligible in Gansu would be a misreading. Because the category also contains one thing — arts and crafts — that happens to be exactly Gansu's strength. Tao inkstones, Qingyang sachets, Linxia brick carving, Tianshui carved lacquer, Lanzhou gourd carving: nearly every one of these names carries the label of national intangible cultural heritage. They are not products off a factory line but crafts that grew out of the soil of the Loess Plateau and the banks of the Tao River, and which are now being slowly turned into industries. So in studying this industry in Gansu, what truly deserves study is not what it lacks, but how these distinctive handicrafts move from the family kang and the workshop into the market. That is precisely why the Tianxia Gongchang Industry Research Institute has singled it out.

A caveat first: this is an industry dominated by individual workshops and micro-scale studios, with scattered statistical coverage; many links have no public output or enterprise data. This report addresses only what can be verified; where data cannot be found, it would rather write briefly and leave a blank than fabricate.

2. Tao Inkstones: One River That Feeds an Entire Township

You cannot discuss Gansu's arts and crafts without the Tao inkstone.

Known formally as the Tao River green-stone inkstone and named after the Tao River, it ranks alongside Guangdong's Duan inkstone, Anhui's She inkstone and Shanxi's Chengni inkstone as one of China's four famous inkstones. Its history reaches back to the Tang dynasty, more than 1,300 years ago. The scarcity of its stone is its foundation: the finest Tao inkstone stone comes from a roughly 40-square-kilometer mineral belt where the townships of Taoyan, Zangbala and Bailin meet in eastern Zhuoni County, with the "duck-head green" from the old Lama Cliff pit the most prized. The inkstone is precious because the stone is; from the outset the industry has been locked to the two banks of the Tao River by its resource.

Its degree of industrialization must be read from the working population, not from enterprise scale. The craft of making Tao inkstones was inscribed on the national intangible cultural heritage list in 2008 and is distributed across Zhuoni, Lintan and Min counties. Min County is the production heartland: public reports note that more than 2,000 local people work in the trade, with annual output value exceeding ten million yuan, making it one of the area's pillar industries; in earlier years, the Weixin town area of Min County alone supported several thousand people living off Tao inkstones. In Zhuoni's Taoyan township, almost the entire population revolves around this single stone.

Pieced together, the Tao inkstone presents a textbook "heritage industry" form: no large factories, everything carved blow by blow by craftspeople scattered across the townships, modest total output value yet a genuine livelihood for a whole locality. Its ceiling is also clear — the stone is non-renewable, and over-quarrying has made the old-pit stone ever scarcer; how far this craft can go depends largely on whether stone conservation and carving skills can be passed down together.

3. Qingyang Sachets: A Needle and Thread Turned into a Living for a Hundred Thousand People

If the Tao inkstone is a niche treasure locked by its resource, the Qingyang sachet is the most industrialized branch of this sector.

Qingyang lies in eastern Gansu, and sachet embroidery is a women's handicraft passed down there for generations; it was inscribed on the national intangible cultural heritage list in 2006. Qingyang paper-cutting, closely tied to it, entered the national list in 2008 — before a sachet is embroidered, a paper-cut usually serves as the underlying template, so the two crafts share one root.

The most direct measure of the Qingyang sachet's industrialization is its working scale. Public reports indicate that more than 100,000 local people work primarily in sachet embroidery, the folk-culture products have grown into more than twenty broad categories and over five thousand varieties, and the goods are sold to dozens of cities across China and exported to over twenty countries and regions including Japan, the EU, Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. The Qingyang Sachet Folk Culture Festival that has formed around it has become a platform driving local culture and tourism: according to public disclosures, on-site sales during the eighteenth festival reached more than 33 million yuan, pulling in nearly 400 million yuan in comprehensive tourism revenue.

A hundred thousand people and five thousand varieties — a scale rare in arts and crafts. It shows one thing: a women's handicraft once passed down only on the kang can, once it finds stable sales channels and festival-style market outlets, be organized into a genuine industry. Of course, its form remains dominated by households and micro-workshops, the added value per piece is limited, and scale comes from the accumulation of head-count rather than the depth of any single item. How to raise design and branding while preserving the handmade texture is the threshold it must cross to move from "large in scale" to "high in value."

4. Linxia Brick Carving and Tianshui Carved Lacquer: Two Models of Turning a Craft into a Company

The Tao inkstone relies on individual hands and the sachet on a sea of people; Linxia brick carving and Tianshui carved lacquer offer a third model — actually organizing a traditional craft into companies.

Linxia brick carving was inscribed on the first batch of the national intangible cultural heritage list in 2006 and represents how the Linxia area has built a craft into a pillar cultural industry. Public materials show that Linxia has successively established leading firms such as Shenyun, Nengcheng, Xiangtai and Qingyun, supporting more than 1,800 people in carving and installation, with annual output of over 50,000 square meters of brick-carving products. Among them, Linxia Qingyun Brick Carving Co., Ltd. was designated by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in March 2024 as a 2023–2025 national-level productive-protection demonstration base for intangible cultural heritage; the company's annual output value reaches more than 50 million yuan, and its workshops include both ordinary artisans and senior arts-and-crafts masters. Brick carving's shift from a decorative component attached to buildings toward independent crafts and cultural-creative products has been the key step in its industrialization.

Tianshui carved lacquer represents the marriage of Gansu craft with the "time-honored brand." It was inscribed on the national intangible cultural heritage list in 2008; the craft coats an object in layer upon layer of natural lacquer and then carves it, and a single piece often passes through more than ten — even more than a hundred — steps of body-forming, lacquering, sketching, carving and polishing. The "Gu Feitian" brand lacquerware produced by the local leader, Tianshui Feitian Carved Lacquer Arts & Furniture Co., Ltd., is a Gansu famous-brand product sold to more than forty countries and regions. In scale, Tianshui carved lacquer remains a "small but refined" presence — public reports note that about 300 local people work in the making and selling of carved lacquer, across more than thirty production workshops or studios. Its value lies not in quantity but in the intricacy of its process and the costliness of each piece.

Read together, these two reveal a pathway for the industrialization of Gansu's arts and crafts: from scattered craftspeople, to workshop clusters led by anchor enterprises, to branded products and demonstration bases. Linxia brick carving and Tianshui carved lacquer are still small, but they prove that these crafts need not stay at the workshop level — they can be organized into industries with brands, exports and the capacity to carry employment.

5. A Shared Predicament: Hard Succession, Small Scale, Value Yet to Rise

Gathered together, the arts-and-crafts side of Gansu's industry shows highly consistent features — and faces highly consistent difficulties.

Their common ground: rooted in local soil, reliant on the hand, grounded in heritage, dominated by individuals and micro-workshops. This is both their charm and their ceiling. Handwork means production is hard to standardize and scale; however high the value of a single piece, total output is capped by the number and energy of the artisans. Heritage means the transmission of skill depends heavily on master-to-apprentice word of mouth — once the young are unwilling to learn, the risk of a broken lineage is real. The Tao inkstone is constrained by non-renewable stone, brick carving and lacquer by the long years of apprenticeship, the sachet by the balance between "large volume" and "high price." None of these challenges can be solved simply by pouring in more investment.

As for the modern-manufacturing part of the category — sports goods, instruments, pen-making, toys — Gansu currently lacks publicly available data on large-scale clusters, and this report neither speculates nor invents a presence for it. Leaving this side honestly blank is precisely what lets the arts and crafts that truly hold up the industry be seen more clearly.

For sales teams supplying these arts-and-crafts workshops and cultural-creative enterprises upstream — whether stone, lacquer, embroidery thread and fabric, or carving tools, packaging and display materials — Tianxia Gongchang lets you filter the directory of factories and decision-maker contacts in Gansu's cultural, educational, art-craft, sporting and recreational goods manufacturing along the two dimensions of region and industry, turning upstream customer development from scattered inquiry into following a map.

6. Conclusion: What Is Worth Remembering Is Not the Scale, but Where These Crafts Come From

Gansu's manufacturing of cultural, educational, art-craft, sporting and recreational goods is an industry hard to measure by conventional logic. By the volume of modern manufacturing, it does not register nationally; yet train the lens on arts and crafts and it possesses something hard to replicate elsewhere — four or more crafts bearing the national-heritage label, each with a thousand-year or centuries-long origin, each still alive, still feeding people.

The view of the Tianxia Gongchang Industry Research Institute is this: in studying this industry in Gansu, rather than fretting over the missing output figures, it is better to take seriously that river, those sachets, those carved bricks and lacquered pieces. Their industrial value may not yet convert into handsome statistics, but what they carry is the part of an inland province's confidence that can still stand on its own hands, off the main track of light-industry manufacturing. The real question is not "Is this industry in Gansu large enough," but "Can these crafts keep being passed into the hands of the young" — and the answer to the latter is what will decide what remains of this industry a decade from now.

Data Sources

  • Tianxia Gongchang (directory of factories and industry data for Gansu's cultural, educational, art-craft, sporting and recreational goods manufacturing and its upstream suppliers)
  • China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network: project notes on inkstone-making (Tao inkstone making)
  • Gansu Economic Information Network: Zhuoni Tao inkstone industry empowering rural revitalization; Guazhou migrants' carving road to prosperity
  • People's Government of Zhuoni County: Zhuoni Tao inkstone industry culture and carving
  • China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network: project notes on Qingyang sachet embroidery
  • CCTV "Economic Half-Hour" and The Paper: reports on Qingyang's heritage sachets becoming a major industry
  • Silk Road International Culture Expo Network: results bulletin of the 18th Qingyang Sachet Folk Culture Festival
  • China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network: project notes on Linxia brick carving and the list of national-level productive-protection demonstration bases
  • Gansu Daily: reports on the Linxia brick-carving heritage workshop
  • Tianshui carved-lacquer-making craft (Baidu Baike), and The Paper and Gansu Daily reports on Tianshui carved lacquer
  • Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the PRC: reports on Lanzhou gourd carving and other Gansu heritage projects
  • China Gansu Network: interpretations of the 2024 Gansu Statistical Communique on National Economic and Social Development (scale of Gansu's cultural and related industries)