1. First, What This Industry Actually Looks Like in Inner Mongolia

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, with orders following export trade and fast-moving consumer goods.

Turn the lens to Inner Mongolia and the picture is entirely different. On the modern-manufacturing side, Inner Mongolia has formed almost no publicly documented clusters in sports equipment, pen-making, toys or large-scale instrument production. This is not an oversight but the real situation: Inner Mongolia's resource endowment and industrial base are concentrated in heavy sectors such as energy, metallurgy and the processing of farm and livestock products, never in these light-industry tracks driven by export orders and fast-moving consumer goods. Scan this category 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 Inner Mongolia would be a misreading. Because the category also contains two things — musical instruments and arts and crafts — that are precisely rooted in the culture of the grassland. The morin khuur and the dörben tatlaga and other Mongolian bowed instruments; leather carving, grassland silverware, Mongolian embroidery and felt embroidery — nearly every one of these carries the label of national intangible cultural heritage. They are not products off a factory line but crafts that grew out of nomadic life, and which are now being slowly turned into industries. So in studying this industry in Inner Mongolia, what truly deserves study is not what it lacks, but how these distinctive crafts move from the grassland 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. Morin Khuur and Dörben Tatlaga: The Grassland Turned an Instrument into a Craft

You cannot discuss the musical instruments of this industry in Inner Mongolia without the Mongolian bowed instruments.

They are not one isolated object but a family. Mongolian bowed instruments include the chuur, the morin khuur and the dörben tatlaga; the morin khuur, named for the horse head carved at the top of its neck, is the most typical emblem of Mongolian musical culture, while the dörben tatlaga has long served as accompaniment for storytelling arts such as ulger and holboo, bound tightly to the narrative tradition of the Horqin grassland. Their cultural weight is considerable: Mongolian morin khuur music was inscribed on the first batch of the national intangible cultural heritage list in 2006, and Mongolian dörben tatlaga music subsequently entered the national list as well; by 2011, the "craft of making Mongolian bowed instruments" was inscribed as a separate project on the third batch of the national list — a rare case in which the very craft of making the instruments is singled out for protection.

Its industrialization heartland is Horqin Right Middle Banner in Hinggan League. Sitting in the heart of the Horqin grassland, it is one of the most typical inheritance sites for the craft of making Mongolian bowed instruments. According to public reports, the banner has more than twenty handicraft workshops of varying scale making Mongolian bowed instruments, with over a hundred skilled craftspeople, of whom more than fifty have become professional makers and craft artisans by trade. Making a single morin khuur passes through a series of steps — selecting materials, building the sound box, stretching the skin (or fitting the soundboard), mounting the neck, carving the horse head, fitting the bridge — all by hand; what is made is an instrument, and what is fed is a livelihood.

Pieced together, the making of Mongolian bowed instruments presents a textbook "heritage industry" form: no large factories, made one instrument at a time by craftspeople scattered across the grassland market towns, with scale coming from the accumulation of workshop numbers and artisan skill rather than the capacity of any single factory. Its value lies not in quantity but in the fact that this craft is still alive, still being passed down generation by generation on the grassland.

3. Mongolian Leather Art: From Hide Vessels and Horse Tack to Leather Carving

If the bowed instruments are a niche treasure locked by culture, Mongolian leather art represents the branch of grassland craft with the most deliberate sense of industrialization.

Leather is itself the base material of nomadic life. For generations the Mongols have used camel, sheep and cattle hide to make daily utensils, horse tack and ornaments; what most draws market attention today is the leather carving that has grown out of this tradition — drawing and carving on the hide with an iron stylus, then finishing through dozens of steps of coloring, layered dyeing, scorch-toning, polishing and shaping, entirely by hand, carving nomadic patterns and stories into the leather surface. Leather art (Mongolian leather art) was inscribed on the fifth batch of the national intangible cultural heritage list in May 2021 with State Council approval. In Alxa, the traditional Mongolian leather-shaping craft is mainly transmitted in Alxa Left, Alxa Right and Ejina banners, using camel, sheep and cattle hide, and has also been listed among the local heritage-protection projects.

The deliberateness of its industrialization sense shows in the fact that there are already players actively pursuing "research and development." The "Mongolian Leather Art Innovation R&D and Industrialization Project," undertaken by Inner Mongolia Gerile Leather Art Culture Industry Development Co., Ltd., was listed under the national Culture and Tourism Science and Technology Innovation Program; its public project description states that the goal is to research and innovate on inlay, color application, the layering, pasting, openwork and relief effects of leather crafts, and to design culturally creative tourism goods with regional character. This shows one thing: grassland leather art is unwilling to remain at the workshop level of mere replication, but is trying to turn an old craft into an industry with design, product lines and an orientation toward the tourism and cultural-creative market.

Of course, its form remains dominated by handwork and micro-workshops; the added value per piece rests on the intricacy of its process and the ingenuity of its design rather than a standardized production line. How to establish design and branding while preserving the handmade texture is the threshold it must cross to move from "heritage project" to "cultural-creative industry."

4. Silverware and Embroidery: Two Models of Turning a Craft into a Living

The bowed instruments rely on craftspeople and leather art on R&D; silverware and embroidery offer a third model — organizing a traditional craft into a stable living.

The craft of making Mongolian gold and silver ware is a deep-rooted vein within grassland arts and crafts. Silver bowls, silver pots, drinking vessels, headdresses, the saddle ornaments of horse tack — silverware is closely tied to every link of Mongolian daily life. Among these, the Wulate copper-and-silver-ware craft has entered the list of representative national intangible cultural heritage projects. The industrialization path of this craft runs from scattered silversmiths toward enterprise-led workshops: public reports note that a silverware enterprise in Hinggan League has turned the old craft of grassland silverware into a closed loop of "heritage plus industry plus employment," with annual sales reaching 2.1 million yuan — a modest figure, yet real proof of turning a craft into a genuine business.

Embroidery is the branch with the strongest capacity to carry employment among these crafts. Mongolian embroidery was inscribed on the second batch of the national intangible cultural heritage list in 2008; it embroiders not only on soft fabrics but also, with camel-down thread and ox sinew, on hard surfaces such as wool felt and leather boots, its work plain and bold, its contrasts strong, its northern-ethnic regional character distinct. The Mongolian embroidery of Horqin Right Middle Banner originates from Tushiyetu embroidery, which entered the fifth batch of the national list as an extension project in 2021. Its employment effect is considerable: public reports show that over the past three years Horqin Right Middle Banner has trained an average of 2,000 embroiderers a year, with more than 3,000 first-class embroiderers achieving flexible employment and average annual sales of about 2 million yuan, while the locality has also helped embroiderers open shops through e-commerce platforms. Of the same root as embroidery is felt embroidery — Sonid felt embroidery is a typical example of Mongolian felt embroidery, with more than 500 local artisans engaged in the trade according to public materials.

Read together, silverware and embroidery reveal a pathway for the industrialization of Inner Mongolia's grassland crafts: from scattered artisans, to organization led by enterprises or cooperatives, to sales channels opened by e-commerce and cultural tourism. Both are still small, and the added value per piece is limited, but they prove that these grassland crafts need not stay at the level of personal use and gift-giving — they can be organized into livelihoods with sales channels and the capacity to carry employment.

5. A Shared Predicament: Rooted in Culture, Hard in Succession and Scale

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

Their common ground: rooted in nomadic culture, 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 succession — once the young are unwilling to learn, the risk of a broken lineage is real; the dwindling number of inheritors of the morin khuur's historic playing schools, and the loss of its repertoire, are a portrait of that very risk. Their market is also highly dependent on cultural tourism and festivals, with sharp gaps between peak and slack seasons, lacking the ballast of stable industrial orders. None of these challenges can be solved simply by pouring in more investment.

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

For sales teams supplying these ethnic-instrument workshops, leather-art and embroidery studios, and silverware enterprises upstream — whether horsehair string material, skin and neck wood for instruments, or leather, silver stock, embroidery thread and felt, carving tools, packaging and display materials — Tianxia Gongchang lets you filter the directory of factories and decision-maker contacts in Inner Mongolia'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: The Weight of This Industry Must Be Measured in the Grassland's Culture

Inner Mongolia'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 instruments and arts and crafts and it possesses something hard to replicate elsewhere — the sound of the morin khuur and the dörben tatlaga, the patterns an iron stylus carves into leather, the saddle ornaments on silverware, the grassland under the embroidery needle. Each bears the national-heritage label; each is still alive, still feeding people.

The view of the Tianxia Gongchang Industry Research Institute is this: in studying this industry in Inner Mongolia, rather than fretting over the missing output figures, it is better to take seriously each morin khuur, each leather carving, each piece of silverware and each stitch of embroidery. They do not yet convert into handsome statistics, but what they carry is the part of a frontier pastoral region's confidence that can stand on culture and on its own hands, off the main track of light-industry manufacturing. What truly matters is not to ask "Is this industry in Inner Mongolia large enough," but to watch whether these crafts can keep being passed into the hands of the young — as long as the grassland's songs are still sung, the instruments must still be made, and this industry still has its days ahead.

Data Sources

  • Tianxia Gongchang (directory of factories and industry data for Inner Mongolia's cultural, educational, art-craft, sporting and recreational goods manufacturing and its upstream suppliers)
  • China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network: project notes on Mongolian morin khuur music and Mongolian dörben tatlaga music
  • China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network: project notes on ethnic-instrument-making craft (Mongolian bowed-instrument-making craft, morin khuur-making craft)
  • Inner Mongolia News Network (Hinggan League) and People's Daily Online Inner Mongolia channel: reports on morin khuur and bowed-instrument making in Horqin Right Middle Banner and cultural talents driving rural revitalization
  • Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the PRC: introduction to the Mongolian Leather Art Innovation R&D and Industrialization Project (national Culture and Tourism Science and Technology Innovation Program)
  • China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network: project notes on leather art (Mongolian leather art)
  • Inner Mongolia Intangible Cultural Heritage Protection Center: project notes on the Wulate copper-and-silver-ware craft
  • Inner Mongolia News Network (Hinggan League): reports on grassland silverware enterprises' "heritage plus industry plus employment" and selection as an "Inner Mongolia Gift"
  • Project notes on Mongolian embroidery (second batch of the national intangible cultural heritage list) and on the Tushiyetu embroidery extension project
  • People's Daily Online and Xinhua Net Inner Mongolia channels: reports on Mongolian embroidery training, employment and e-commerce sales in Horqin Right Middle Banner
  • Inner Mongolia Intangible Cultural Heritage Public Service Platform: project notes and employment scale of Sonid felt embroidery (Mongolian felt embroidery)