Felt and Leather: The Nomadic Crafts That Still Dress Xinjiang’s Grasslands

Steam rose off the wool and fogged the felt flaps of the yurt door. I had ridden two hours through sleet to reach this herder’s winter camp near Nalati, and the first thing that hit me was not the cold but the smell: wet sheep, woodsmoke, and something sour and alive that turned out to be fermented mare’s milk warming on the stove. Two women knelt on a plastic tarp, rolling bundles of raw fleece back and forth with a reed mat. They were making a syrmak, the felt rug that Kazakh families lay underfoot and hang on the walls, and they barely looked up when I stepped inside. That afternoon taught me more about Xinjiang than any museum. Felt and leather are not crafts here. They are the clothes the grasslands wear.

Inside a Herder’s Winter Camp

The camp sat in a shallow draw where the wind dropped just enough to let the smoke stand straight. The herder, Aman, kept about three hundred sheep and forty horses through the winter, moving them between lower pastures as the snow deepened. His winter yurt was smaller than the summer one, packed tight with felt so the stove could actually win the fight against January.

I watched the women work for most of an afternoon. They laid clean carded wool in thick stripes across a coarse mat, doused it with hot water from a kettle, then rolled the whole bundle and walked on it, dragging it by a rope tied to a post. The wool locked into a single dense sheet. They call the patterned version a syrmak when two colored layers are cut and interlocked before rolling, so the design runs all the way through rather than sitting on top. A small syrmak costs roughly ¥200 to ¥500 if you buy one straight from a family; the big floor pieces with deep geometric patterns can run into the thousands.

What surprised me was the noise. Felt making is physical and loud: slapping wet wool, stamping, laughing over the racket of the mat scraping on frozen ground. By dusk the rug was unrolled and drying on a rack made from two saplings. Aman’s wife pressed a cup of milk tea into my hands and pointed at the rug with a look that clearly meant this is ours, this is how we live.

How Felt Is Actually Made

Felt is the oldest textile in the world and the only one that needs no weaving. You take animal fiber, you add heat, moisture, and pressure, and the scales on each strand hook into its neighbors until the mass becomes cloth. Nomads figured this out on the steppe, and they have not needed to change the method since.

Rolling a Syrmak

The syrmak is the showpiece. Two sheets of wool in contrasting creams and browns are laid down, one pattern piece cut from the top sheet and swapped with its mirror in the other. Roll, soak, stamp, unroll, repeat. The result is a rug with a pattern that cannot wear off because it goes all the way through. Mongol and Kazakh women guard certain motifs, the ram’s horn, the goose foot, the binding knot, and you will see them repeated from Bayinbuluke to the Altai.

The Felt That Holds a Yurt Up

Less glamorous but more essential is the yurt felt, the thick white slabs that wrap the lattice frame. A single yurt eats dozens of these panels, each the width of a woman’s outstretched arms and pressed until it sheds rain and traps heat. In deep winter near Hoboksar I saw felt stacked a hand’s breadth thick on the walls, then tied with horsehair ropes so the wind could not peel it off. The felt is the house. The wood is only the skeleton.

Embroidered Wall Hangings

On top of the plain felt, Kazakh homes hang tus kiyiz, felt backing covered in dense chain-stitch embroidery in red, green, and gold. These are the canvases of the grassland, worked by hand over weeks, and they double as dowry and status. The Mongol version leans toward applique with cut felt shapes sewn flat. Either way the wall hanging tells you who made it and what she values, and a traveler who learns to read them stops seeing decoration and starts seeing biography.

Raw Leather: Boots and Tack

If felt is the house, leather is the gear. Everything a herder rides, carries, and wears is rawhide or tanned skin, and most of it is still made the slow way.

The Boots

The knee-high leather boots worn across the Ili valley are built for horseback, not sidewalks. The sole is soft so the foot can grip a stirrup, the shaft is wide so it slips over thick trousers, and the whole thing is stitched with waxed thread that a man will re-sew himself when it gives. A decent pair from a workshop in Kazanqi, the old Kazakh quarter of Yining, runs about ¥300 to ¥600. The cheap tourist copies crack within a season; the real ones, oiled and kept dry, outlast the rider.

Bridles, Saddles, and Rawhide Knots

The tack is where leather craft gets serious. A Kazakh saddle is a wooden tree wrapped in wet rawhide that shrinks as it dries, locking the frame for life. Bridles are cut from a single hide with as few joins as possible, because a knot is a failure point when a horse spooks at a snow leopard’s shadow. I watched a saddle-maker near Balikun cut and bind a bridle in under an hour, his knife barely pausing. He sells finished sets for ¥400 to ¥1,200 depending on the silver and the carving. For travelers curious about the animals behind all this gear, the Akhal-Teke and Kazakh horse country guide explains where the herds come from and how to ride them responsibly.

Where to Watch Felt and Leather Made

You do not need to trespass on a private camp to see this work. Several places in Xinjiang put the crafts on open display, and a few let you try your hand.

Nalati and the Ili Valley

The Nalati grassland is the easiest entry point. The Kazakh households who keep yurts for visitors often have a woman working felt in the open, especially in spring when new lambs mean fresh wool. Ask before you photograph, and tip in cash rather than handing over a phone for a staged shot. The surrounding Ili valley is also the place to find the deepest, oldest syrmak patterns, because the Kazakh population here is dense and the craft tradition unbroken.

Kazanqi in Yining

Kazanqi, the blue-walled old quarter of Yining, hides leather workshops behind ordinary courtyard doors. Walk the lanes east of the main drag and you will hear the thump of a mallet on wet hide. Some workshops sell finished boots and bridles; others will let you watch a saddle being bound if you buy a cup of tea first. This is the best city stop for leather because the makers live above their shops and have no reason to perform.

Hoboksar and Bayinbuluke

Up on the Mongol grasslands of Hoboksar and around the vast Bayinbuluke wetlands, the felt tradition leans Mongol rather than Kazakh. The yurts are rounder, the applique brighter, and the winter camps more remote. Reaching them means a long drive, but the payoff is watching felt made without an audience, the way it has been for a thousand years. If you want to stay the night in one of these camps rather than just pass through, the Kazakh nomadic life and yurt stay guide covers what to expect and how to book without disrupting a family’s winter.

How to Buy Fairly

The line between a fair purchase and a parasite transaction is thin. A few rules kept me honest on the road.

Buy from the maker, not the middleman. A rug bought at a roadside yurt goes straight into the hands that made it. The same rug in a Urumqi tourist mall has passed through three skimmers and lost its story. Pay the asking price without haggling hard over a thing someone spent a week stitching; the few yuan you save are someone’s dinner.

Learn the difference between hand-made and factory. Real felt has slight irregularities, a soft uneven edge, the ghost of a thumbprint in the wool. Machine felt is too perfect and too light. Real leather smells like an animal and darkens with oil; plastic smells like a garage. If you cannot tell, ask the seller to show you the back of the work, and trust the one who is happy to.

Carry cash in small bills. Many herders have no card reader and no signal. A wad of ¥20 and ¥50 notes bought me boots, a small syrmak, and a felt wall hanging across three camps, and each purchase ended with tea instead of a receipt.

For a wider map of where these crafts sit alongside silk, knives, and Dolan bags, the Xinjiang handicrafts atlas is worth reading before you shop, so you can tell a genuine village piece from a warehouse copy.

Care, Respect, and the Long View

Felt and leather are living materials. They want attention, and they punish neglect.

A felt rug should be shaken out, never beaten, and dried flat away from direct sun or it fades and curls. Leather boots want a light oil every few months and must be kept out of puddles; once rawhide soaks through it stretches and never comes back. I keep my Ili boots stuffed with newspaper through the wet season and they have held their shape for three years.

Respect matters more than care. These are not souvenirs, they are the working dress of people whose grandparents walked the same steppe. Ask before you enter a workshop. Decline the staged photo if the herder looks uncomfortable. Buy because you will use the thing, not because it looks exotic on a shelf. The craft survives only as long as travelers treat it as a living trade rather than a dead one.

If your route runs through the eastern grasslands, the Balikun Kazakh county guide points to a grassland and lake region where leather tack is still cut by hand, and where a patient visitor can watch a bridle take shape over a single afternoon.

The Night the Rug Dried

Back at Aman’s camp, the syrmak was dry by the time the stars came out. The women carried it inside and unrolled it against the felt wall, and under the flicker of the stove lamp the ram’s-horn pattern looked like it was breathing. Aman poured kumis into a cracked bowl and toasted the wool, the winter, and the stranger who had come to watch. I slept on that rug, listening to the wind work at the felt, and understood for the first time that the grasslands are not dressed in felt and leather. The grasslands are felt and leather, pulled tight over a frame of people who refuse to stop making them.

The next morning I rode out as the women already had fresh wool soaking. The camp would move within the week, and the felt would go with it, rolled and tied to a packhorse, exactly as it has for a thousand winters. That is the whole craft in one image: nothing wasted, nothing permanent, everything carried forward.