GUIYANG, May 6 (Xinhua) -- In Sandu Shui Autonomous County in southwest China's Guizhou Province, Wei Yingli stitches horsetail on a shoe.

The horsetail embroidery craftsmanship is a distinctive tradition in the county, with a population of 400,000. The Shui people make up a big chunk of the local population.

"In the past, we mainly used horsetail embroidery for ourselves," said Wei, a provincial-level inheritor of the craftsmanship. "We made the embroidery when children were born or when our daughters married."

The embroidery was just something to kill time when the Shui women were not working in the fields, said Wei, head of an association engaging in the industry.

These days, however, the art has become a cash cow, helping locals cast off grinding poverty.

So far, there are two horsetail embroidery associations and five studios in Sandu, with more than 20,000 embroiderers. The number of small businesses engaging in the art has exceeded 80, creating more than 10 brands. More than 1,000 families have already bid farewell to poverty.

Last month, the county was taken off the poverty list.

The art took shape a long time ago. In Sandu, the ethnic minority has the tradition of keeping horses, and along with it formed the unique craftsmanship of horsetail embroidery.

Locals usually encapsulate horsetails with cotton threads and stitch them on garments, shoes and hats.

The process is quite complicated. An embroiderer usually takes three to four pieces of horsetail hair and wraps them with white cotton thread. Then the embroiderer stitches the threads on the outlines of pictures drawn in advance. After that, colorful threads are used to fill the inside of the pictures.

The horsetail embroidery is hard in texture and does not deform easily, Wei said. They form clear and bright lines and "touch like sculptures." The traditional art is known as "living fossils" of Chinese embroidery.

For a long time, horsetail embroidery stayed quiet in the lush green mountains of Guizhou without making any commercial gains due to the complicated and time-consuming process, in addition to the hit from modern machines in the embroidery industry. Many local embroiderers simply went to big cities searching for better-paying jobs. The passing-down of horsetail embroidery stalled.

As China's anti-poverty campaign has gained steam in recent years, transportation and infrastructure projects began to take shape in Guizhou. More tourists and business people came to the province. This has created conditions for the art to regain momentum.

Currently, the horsetail association launched by Wei Yingli has employed more than 900 embroiderers. The association sells on average more than 300 pieces of horsetail embroidery worth more than 100,000 yuan (14,164 U.S. dollars) on a monthly basis.

In the past, the styles of handmade products were quite simple. To change the situation, the association provides exchange and training sessions for local embroiderers.

To meet customer demands, they reinvented the art by adding modern elements. Besides making ornaments, the embroiderers also stitch the horsetails on clothes, suitcases, bedsheets and couches.

"Out of farm work, I am basically doing the stitches," said local embroiderer Shi Hongsi. "In the past, it took half a year to a year to finish a piece, but now I focus more energy on the embroidery, and the sales channels are good."

In the village of Bangao, Pan Xiao'ai is also an inheritor of the art. She has launched a horsetail embroidery studio, focusing on the production, processing and sales of the products. Almost every woman in the village has jumped on the bandwagon to make some extra perks from their once kill-time art.

Purely handmade, the products count on the high-end market to turn a profit, Wei said, adding that it is hard to make products in quantities.

"It makes sense to lift people out of poverty based on their distinctive culture and tradition," said Wei Zhuping, head of the research institute of the Shui people culture in Sandu.

"The traditional art has increased our salaries, while the business also helps pass down traditional culture," We Yingli said.