Ramie: A Native Fiber Making a Comeback

1. What Ramie Is

If you grew up in the countryside, you have probably seen this plant. Its leaves have a gray-white underside, which makes it easy to recognize. That plant is ramie. It grows across much of China, especially in regions that have had dense populations since ancient times.

Ramie spread so widely in China because it was one of the most important crops in ancient agriculture. For generations, people made room for it wherever they could grow it. The old saying, “Plant mulberry and ramie before and behind the house,” refers to this very plant.

Before cotton reached China, people mainly relied on two kinds of fabric: silk and ramie cloth. Silk was scarce, so ordinary people mostly wore clothes made from ramie. In practice, ramie fiber became the main raw material for everyday cloth.

Although people once cultivated ramie all over the country, very few people grow it today. What we usually see now is mostly wild ramie, left unmanaged. That is why many people mistake it for a weed. So what exactly is ramie, and why did people stop growing it?

2. China’s “Ancestor-Picked” Crop

People often say our ancestors knew how to choose well. Ramie is one of the best examples of that idea.

Ramie is also called “China grass.” It originated in China and ranks among the world’s best bast fibers. It is also one of the earliest bast fiber crops ever cultivated, although scholars still debate whether ramie or flax came first.

Its exact place of origin in China is still unclear. Another challenge is that bast-fiber textiles do not preserve well, so it is hard to trace when Chinese people first began growing it.

Archaeological evidence shows how old its use is. Ropes excavated from the Hemudu site in Yuyao, Zhejiang, were mostly twisted from ramie bast fiber. At the Qianshanyang Neolithic site in Zhejiang, archaeologists also found plain-woven fine ramie cloth, which suggests that people in the region were already using ramie as a clothing material about 4,700 years ago.

In short, China has a very long history of growing ramie. It has passed the test of time, and its quality as a bast fiber is beyond doubt.

Over time, ramie also became stronger through generations of breeding. It shows excellent resistance to cold, drought, and pests, which is why it can grow in many parts of China, from east to west and from north to south.

3. The “Achievement” and the “Trouble”

We have used the term “bast fiber” several times. In simple terms, it means fiber taken from the bark of a plant stem.

To get usable fiber, the bark must go through degumming. Some people may have done “retting” work before, which means leaving bast plants in a pond for ten days or half a month until they rot naturally. The purpose is to remove the gum and separate the fibers.

That work is hard and unpleasant. People who have done it usually never want to do it again. Most of the hemp retted in this way was not ramie, but jute, which was widely grown in China before and after the reform era because of its high yield.

After the fiber is extracted, workers still need to twist it into yarn. When people make rope, the yarn does not need to be very fine. When they make cloth, however, they need a much finer and more careful process.

Ramie fiber is one of the strongest natural fibers in the world. It works well for clothing and rope, but it also has obvious drawbacks. It has low elasticity and is brittle, so it is durable but not very flexible.

A lot of people today still remember ramie cloth, especially xia bu, a handwoven summer fabric made from pure ramie. It is now used in some high-end clothing, but demand is limited.

4. Ramie’s Second Spring

Because demand for ramie cloth dropped sharply, ramie went from being one of China’s most important cash crops to something many people now treat like a weed.

Even so, ramie may be about to return. More accurately, it is already on the path to a second spring.

In the past, people grew ramie only for the bark on its stem. That was a very wasteful use of the plant. It is said that only about 5% of a ramie plant’s weight was actually useful. If ramie were not easy to grow and able to be harvested several times a year, it probably would never have spread so widely in ancient China.

Ancient breeders focused almost entirely on getting more and better bast fiber, so they overlooked the other uses of the plant.

In fact, ramie leaves have a high plant-protein content, usually above 20%, and a relatively low crude-fiber content, usually below 18%. In some regions, people even use ramie leaves to make Qingming festival cakes. Even if people do not always eat ramie leaves today, the livestock industry already uses them as feed raw material.

As more uses have been developed, a harvested ramie plant can now be utilized at more than 80%.

Ramie also produces a large amount of biomass. One mu of ramie can reportedly yield more than 1.8 tons of dry matter, which means it has strong carbon-sequestration potential.

With high utilization and strong carbon capture, ramie is attracting more and more attention as China moves toward its carbon goals.

Conclusion

Ramie is not just a plant from the past. It is a native fiber with a long history, strong structure, and new potential. For centuries, people valued it for cloth. Today, they are beginning to value it again for food, feed, biomass, and carbon reduction.

That is ramie’s real second spring.