1. Why study Tianjin's leather, feather products and footwear

Place leather, fur, feather and down products and footwear on China's industrial map, and Tianjin is neither a modern shoemaking heavyweight by capacity nor a cradle of brands. By pairs of shoes made per year it lags far behind Fujian's Jinjiang and Guangdong's Huidong; by cluster density it has nothing like the vast southern supporting industry where a whole shoe can be assembled within one town. Measured only by today's output and revenue, Tianjin is not conspicuous on this industry.

But that does not mean Tianjin has nothing to say. On the contrary, in studying this industry Tianjin offers another angle. What it holds is the origin, the starting point of China's modern leather tanning and its national sporting-goods making, and several time-honored names and heritage crafts that survive to this day. Its weight lies not in volume but in roots.

So this report will not force together modern shoemaking scale figures for Tianjin, which would be neither truthful nor meaningful. What it sets out is this: in an industry whose main arena is the south, what exactly has Tianjin left behind that nowhere else can replace? The answer lies in three threads, the rise of modern machine tanning, the intangible-heritage shoemaking craft of an old name, and the national sporting-goods industry that grew out of leather.

2. Modern tanning: starting from this treaty port

To understand Tianjin's place on this industry, one must go back more than a century. Tianjin was among the cities in modern China opened early to foreign trade, with trading houses, concessions and new-style industry settling densely here, and tanning was one of the branches that started early.

In the late Qing, the industrialist Wu Maoding founded the Beiyang Tannery in Tianjin, introducing machine tanning to China, after which factories opened one after another elsewhere. According to Republican-era statistics, by 1931 Tianjin had eleven new-style tanneries, of which Yujin was the largest and Huabei and Hongji came next. Yujin's output once made up over half of Tianjin's tanned-leather production, with products including trunk leather and harness leather. Huabei Tannery was then the largest leather plant run by Chinese merchants in Tianjin, strong in sole leather, and the trade once spoke of a north-heavy, south-light divide, the light south being Shanghai's upper leather and the heavy north being Huabei's sole leather.

Most of these factories did not survive to today, but what they left is Tianjin's standing as a hub of China's modern tanning. Tanning workshops once clustered in the southwest of the old city, dozens of them in a row, forming the city's earliest leather quarter. Seen over the long run, the significance of Tianjin tanning lies not in how much capacity it still has but in its being one of the early scenes where this industry in China moved from handwork to machines.

3. Lao Meihua: a century and a heritage in one pair of shoes

If tanning represents Tianjin's industrial origin, then Lao Meihua represents the longest-living and most culturally weighty part of this industry.

Lao Meihua was founded in 1911 by Pang Henian. After market research he found that among Tianjin's many shoe shops, not one specialised in small shoes for bound-feet women, so he opened a shop dealing exclusively in pointed-toe shoes, satin shoes and embroidered shoes, naming it Lao Meihua and filling a gap of the day. From a single overlooked market opening, one pair of shoes was built into a name.

Lao Meihua's firmest base is its handmade shoemaking craft. It covers several traditional shoe types, pointed-toe, embroidered, Hangyuan and camel-saddle shoes, with complex steps and high technical difficulty; its thousand-layer sole is sewn from two layers of white cloth stacked to thirty or forty layers, the hand-stitched hemp bottom running over eighty stitches per square inch. This craft was listed in the national intangible cultural heritage in 2011, and Lao Meihua itself was recognised as a Chinese Time-Honored Brand in 2006.

What is rarer is that this century-old name has not stopped in a museum. After reform and opening, Lao Meihua kept its traditional craft while developing comfortable everyday shoes for older consumers, expanding to over a hundred styles; today it still launches more than a thousand new shoe and apparel styles a year and has built the Huaxia Shoe Culture Museum, keeping an old craft a living business. In a market dominated by athletic shoes and fast fashion, Lao Meihua represents another way to survive, by craft, by name and by cultural recognition rather than by capacity and price.

4. From leather to balls: Lisheng and the national sporting-goods industry

This industry in Tianjin has another easily overlooked yet weighty extension, from tanning to sporting goods.

In 1921 Sun Yuqi founded Lisheng in Tianjin, China's first leather ball factory. Starting from tanning, it sewed leather balls such as basketballs and footballs itself, later adding tanning, string-making and other departments, and growing into one of the largest enterprises in China's early sporting-goods manufacturing. In an era when basketball and football equipment was almost entirely imported, Lisheng's products reached international standard, selling well at home and exported to many countries and regions abroad. The early spread of sport in China owed much to the domestic equipment supplied by national sporting-goods plants such as Lisheng.

Lisheng's significance shows exactly what this leather supply chain can grow. Leather makes not only shoes and bags; it was also the shared raw material of a whole class of early products such as balls, harnesses and luggage. Having taken hold of the upstream tanning stage in modern times, Tianjin naturally grew downstream names such as Lisheng. One hide could be sewn into Lao Meihua's thousand-layer sole or into Lisheng's basketball, which is the inner logic of why this category groups leather, fur, feather products and footwear together.

5. The Institute's view

Tianjin's leather, fur, feather products and footwear industry is not a sample suited to ranking by modern output. The reality is that the large-scale, branded modern shoemaking clusters are not in Tianjin, and the main arena of this industry today is in the south. Admitting this is what lets the research stand.

But Tianjin's value lies on another dimension. It is one of the cities where China's modern machine tanning landed early, the home of a name like Lao Meihua that turned handmade shoemaking into national intangible heritage, and the starting point of a firm like Lisheng that extended leather into a national sporting-goods industry. None of this is piled up by capacity, nor can it be copied by capacity, a thousand-layer-sole craft of eighty-odd stitches, a name a century old, a memory of industry running from tanning to ball-making, are the result of time and culture settling. That is what sets Tianjin apart from the south's capacity heavyweights on this industry: what it holds is not volume but origin and inheritance.

For sales teams supplying upstream to leather processing, shoemaking accessories, luggage and sporting-goods manufacturing, rather than judging by impression whether a city is worth developing, use Tianxia Gongchang to filter the directory of factories genuinely in production on the two dimensions of Tianjin plus the leather, fur, feather products and footwear industry, pull out decision-makers' contact details together, and then decide where to put the effort. Base the judgement on real factory data, not on a city's old reputation or new impression.

Data sources

  • Tianxia Gongchang (directory and industry data for Tianjin's leather, fur, feather products and footwear factories)
  • Public historical material on Tianjin's modern tanning industry (Wu Maoding's founding of the Beiyang Tannery, the count of new-style Tianjin tanneries in 1931, Yujin and Huabei tanneries, the north-heavy sole-leather saying)
  • China Intangible Cultural Heritage website (Lao Meihua's handmade shoemaking craft listed in the national intangible cultural heritage, its steps and shoe types)
  • Public materials on Lao Meihua and reporting on Tianjin time-honored brands (founded 1911, Chinese Time-Honored Brand recognition, number of new styles a year, Huaxia Shoe Culture Museum)
  • Public historical material on Lisheng (Sun Yuqi's founding of China's first leather ball factory in 1921, products reaching international standard and exported to many countries, its place in national sporting-goods industry)
  • Public yearbooks of Tianjin statistical authorities and overviews of Tianjin's modern industry (background on Tianjin's opening to trade and its modern industrial landscape)