Caoxian County’s Hanfu industry in Shandong is moving from scale leadership toward brand leadership. Ancailou Town, billed as “the No. 1 town for online Hanfu sales,” is betting on the Ming-style Hanfu wave: riding on the “Guose Fanghua” Hanfu Culture Industrial Park — a 500-million-yuan investment covering more than 200 mu — the town has joined up research, production, exhibition, warehousing and logistics in one integrated chain. Once the park is running at full capacity, annual revenue is expected to exceed 2 billion yuan and more than 2,000 jobs will be added.
The park was built with help from the first secretary and work team stationed by the provincial government office, according to the Caoxian government website. It has already drawn more than 100 merchants, including 7 logistics companies, 5 regional logistics sorting centers and 3 cross-border e-commerce firms, and is helping upgrade more than 50 surrounding Taobao villages. Under a “government pays for the land, merchants build the workshops” model, the project leveraged 300 million yuan of private capital to create a “1-kilometer efficient production circle” for Hanfu, pushing the industry from scattered workshops toward scale, standards and park-based operation.
On the innovation front, the park has guided companies to bring in national-leading printing, embroidery and jacquard machines, cracking the twin bottlenecks of Mamianqun (马面裙) fabric shortages and slow embroidery. CRI Online’s Shandong channel reported that in 2024 the park brought in Heze’s first batch of brocade looms, solving the fabric shortage that had long plagued Mamianqun makers. “In the past we had to buy fabric from other places to make Mamianqun,” said He Xin (何鑫), head of Caozhou Huafu Clothing Co. “Now all the materials can be bought inside the park. Developing together not only lets us seize the market first, it cuts our costs by 30 percent.” The park has also helped enterprises and Taobao households build digital flexible production lines and adopt AI-assisted design, tripling original-design efficiency and halving the time-to-market for new items, while building bridges to Shandong University, Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology and other universities, and bringing in established Hanfu designers and marketing experts for on-site guidance.
This year the town has added 8 enterprises making high-end Ming-style Hanfu from Xiangyunsha (香云纱) and real silk, plus 16 pet-clothing firms, forming a diversified growth mix. On the export side, the park relies on its digital warehousing and logistics network to clear cross-border bottlenecks; the “Suyu Huashang” brand founded by returning entrepreneur Wei Ping’an (魏平安), which builds premium Ming-style Hanfu from wool-blend fabric with gold-woven technique, has become an overseas bestseller. The town also uses the platform of the third Caoxian Hanfu Culture Festival to put Ancailou Hanfu on the international stage — industry going abroad and culture going viral at the same time.
Ancailou Town has 37 Taobao villages, the most of any town in China, and reached full Taobao-village coverage in 2022. County-wide figures underline the scale: from January to May 2026, Caoxian’s online Hanfu sales reached 3.687 billion yuan, up 13.1 percent year on year; the county now counts more than 2,800 Hanfu enterprises and over 15,000 online shops, with 2025 sales topping 13 billion yuan and holding roughly half of the national Hanfu market. Caoxian products have entered 18 “Double First-Class” universities, 72 national 5A scenic areas, and more than 20 domestic and international exhibitions, and are sold in over 30 countries and regions. Infrastructure keeps pace: more than 40 million yuan has been pooled for 32 assistance projects, including nearly 110,000 square meters of new roads, 4,600 meters of drainage pipes, 500 solar street lamps, and four industrial workshops covering 8,400 square meters in total — facilities that complement the Hanfu park and feed a “returning-geese economy” that draws young people back to the industry.