Craftvillage Hạ Thái

Hạ Thái village is in Duyên Thái commune, Thường Tín district, Hà Tây province. It’s already 200-year-old and specializes in making lacquer, red-lacquer-trimmed-with-gold products. With traditional experiences handed down by ancestors and the patience, hard-working spirit, creative minds and skills, the villagers have made their homeland new developments.

Photo: Văn Chương

For generations now, Hạ Thái villagers prepare the paint in their traditional ways, but nowadays they have applied new technology to make paint shinier and more lasting. They also use crude lacquer to make red-lacquer-trimmed-with-gold products. So it always needs skills, patience and experiences.

Paintings, home tools or artistic products made in Hạ Thái have won the hearts of customers at home and abroad even the hardest-to-please ones. Hạ Thái products are sold not only in domestic markets but even in Eastern Europe, Western Europe, America and mostly in ASEAN countries, that have brought them stable income and created jobs for the villagers of all ages. Hạ Thái has reaffirmed their trade mark due to highly-skilled craftsmen.

Nearly 80% of the villagers are involved in making lacquer, and red-lacquers products have been turned out annually up to millions. The stability of the carftsvillage and their products of high values both physically and spiritually have helped to make Hạ Thái one in two villages in the whole country selected by JICA to be pilot villages in developing sustainable crafts until 2010.

                                                                KIỀU TRINH

Source : http://www.vtr.org.vn/vtr.php?ml=923&pid=839