Yan Hong, a vlogger with millions of followers from Chengdu, southwest China's Sichuan Province, has made herself a craftswoman of traditional aesthetics, inspiring more and more young people to fall in love with these crafts.
Born in 1989 and trained as a nurse at North Sichuan Medical College, she spent five years studying a profession that never quite captured her heart. After two years working as a nurse in Chengdu, she decided to follow her true calling: creative work.
With a flair for design and nimble hands to match, she enrolled in a makeup course and became a bridal makeup artist, later designing custom hair accessories tailored to each bride's features that won her a devoted clientele.
Her journey as a craft vlogger began with a single velvet flower.
"In 2018, a period drama was airing and everyone was talking about the velvet flower hairpieces the characters wore," Yan recalled. "I thought I'd try recreating one with chenille stems — and it actually worked. So I uploaded the process to the popular video-sharing site Bilibili."
From there, her projects grew ever more ambitious. Drawing on a mobile game's depictions of Peking Opera costumes, she spent nearly 200 hours crafting a phoenix crown from 18 ring-pull cans.
For another project, she hand-dyed 3,000 nutshells a gleaming electroplated gold and glued them one by one onto an armor template.
These creations drew a growing audience, but a comment in her feed brought an unexpected turning point.
"A viewer once told me my filigree inlay work wasn't authentic," Yan said. She had been teaching herself entirely through trial and error, and only after the viewer mentioned the traditional silver filigree craft did she realize how much more there was to learn.
Determined to do it properly, she set out to find a master. When she posted a half-finished piece online, fans pointed her to Ni Chengyu, a leading inheritor of the Chengdu silver filigree craft.
Ni was 79 at the time, long retired, and uninterested in new students. Yan visited repeatedly, and her devotion eventually won Ni over — in May 2021, she formally became her apprentice.
To carry the tradition forward, Yan established a team dedicated to silver filigree in 2023. That year, 23-year-old Zhang Yuejun joined her from Guangdong Province in south China.
The seven-member team also includes Hu Weibing, another recognized inheritor of the craft, now in her 70s.
"A lot of our pieces are finished under Hu's guidance. Take this coreless vase — I still haven't mastered it. Only she can pull it off," Yan said.
Yan has combined the craft with elements that resonate with younger audiences, creating designs such as her "half-face makeup" headdresses.
Through a combination of online and offline channels, Yan has turned her artistry into a viable business. He Qiang, her team's photographer and business manager, said the team has adapted to how modern audiences watch content: videos once over 10 minutes are now trimmed to around two, with tutorials giving way to faster-paced, shareable storytelling that is no less rigorous.
In recent years, Yan has been thinking about how silver filigree can find a place in everyday life. In her view, the only way to bring the craft into daily use is to strike the right balance between tradition and modernity — transforming silver filigree from something people admire behind glass into something they can actually use and wear.
Today, her silver filigree catalog includes dozens of products, sold both online and in stores.
In Sandaoyan town, Pidu district, Chengdu, Yan runs a traditional crafts studio showcasing around 300 handmade accessories.
To help drive rural development, in 2025 Yan turned an intangible cultural heritage museum just a few hundred meters from her studio into a multipurpose cultural space combining exhibitions, hands-on experiences and creative product development.
Dozens of intangible cultural heritage items are on display, including filigree inlay, mineral pigment painting, paper-cutting and Shu embroidery, alongside courses in mother-of-pearl inlay and bamboo weaving.
"Since we opened last October, more than a thousand people have come to visit," He said.
The museum has also given young people from nearby Gucheng village a new place to work, attracting a steady flow of visitors, students and villagers eager to learn bamboo weaving or try their hand at silver filigree.
The village, once quiet, has begun to hum with activity. Yan has also helped local residents sell handmade birdcages.
Looking ahead, Yan plans to collaborate with Chengdu Film and Television City to develop simple hair accessories that villagers can make by themselves.
"The more orders come in, the more villagers we can get involved — and the more people who can live a better life through silver filigree," Yan said.