Jiang Qiong Er: a designer with a mission for tradition

Jiang Qiong Er is a designer with a mission, and it’s written in the name of her Chinese lifestyle company, Shang Xia. It literally translates as “above, below”, or “up, down”, but Jiang says, “Its true meaning is about heritage: to use heritage to open the future.”

Based in Shanghai, the luxury furniture, homeware and fashion brand is reviving traditional Chinese craftsmanship through contemporary design.

The furniture, for example, is made from walnut wood by master craftsmen using Ming-dynasty techniques such as mortise-and-tenon joints instead of nails, and is polished – and polished again, and again – until it’s as smooth as silk and just as pleasing to touch.

Sure enough, wandering hands are drawn to its elegant, satiny surfaces at Lane Crawford, where a Shang Xia range is now sold.

Emblematic of the brand is a reclining rocking chair, which takes five months to make by hand. That painstaking care shines from every grain in its sinuous frame of silky walnut and bed of braided, highly polished saddle leather.

Shang Xia, born in 2008, is the progeny of Jiang, its artistic director and CEO, and French luxury giant Hermes. The daughter of architect Xing Tonghe (who designed the Shanghai Museum), Jiang trained in Shanghai and Paris, and as a student won a young entrepreneur award from Xintiandi developer Vincent Lo that came with a prize of 100,000 yuan (US$14,500) and work space.