22 Songok Ryu

Traditional Korean Clothing in China

Johanna Kuhn-Osius

“Please wait a few minutes while I call Pyongyang. They are very particular about being called on time,” says Songok Ryu, the premier hanbok (traditional Korean clothing) designer and manufacturer in China, as she dials Pyongyang on her iPhone. From here in her office in Yanji—the capital of China’s Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture—she conducts business in China, North Korea, and South Korea, without ever missing a beat in transition.

Ryu has always been ahead of the market. When everyone else in Yanji was still selling hanbok exclusively in outdoor markets, she opened a store—Yemi Hanbok.¹ And, although at first everyone told her it would be impossible to sell hanbok from a store, there are now thirty other hanbok stores in Yanji. Still, Ryu is at the top; and she does not mind that others have taken part of the market share because she has already thought of new ways to increase the market size. “The first mover doesn’t earn more money. But who remembers the second mover later on?” she says. Ryu now has stores in three cities in China and more than fifty distributors across the country. She employs more than eighty people and produces about 18,000 sets of hanbok annually.

Moreover, Ryu is a celebrity in the Korean Autonomous Prefecture, and her work has been recognized nationally and internationally. Politicians from the Korean Autonomous Prefecture always wear her clothes on formal occasions (see Figure 22.1), and she appears frequently on television and radio. Her clothes have been worn by Jackie Chan, CCTV announcers, and other Chinese celebrities. She has met two South Korean presidents,

Figure 22.1 Tying the Traditional Hanbok

Source: Photo by Laura Elizabeth Pohl.

Noh Moo-Hyun (2006–2008) and Lee Myung-Bak (2008–2012), and has appeared on television in South Korea. She has also received awards in North Korea and was honored by the North Korean minister of culture. In 2003 Ryu was selected to represent ethnic Koreans at a juried Paris fashion show that showcased the traditional clothing of all fifty-five minority groups in China. She was placed first.

Ethnic Koreans in China

Songok Ryu is one of approximately 1.9 million ethnic Koreans living in China. Their population is concentrated in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, a self-governed region in northeastern China’s Jilin Province. This is a territory of approximately 43,509 square kilometers, a bit larger than Belgium; and the capital,Yanji, where Ryu’s business is located, is a city of about 133,000 inhabitants. It is important to understand that the Koreans in Yanbian, far from being recent immigrants trying to assimilate into the larger Han Chinese culture, have been living in this area for generations, carrying out traditional agrarian lifestyles indistinguishable from those found in Korea. At the same time, their current struggle is to find a new place in the world now that the agrarian era is clearly over.

Although parts of modern northeastern China—where the ethnic Koreans live today—belonged to early Korean kingdoms hundreds of years ago, those areas were populated by other ethnic groups or only sparsely populated until the late Choseon Dynasty. During the latter part of Korea’s Joseon Dynasty (1392–1910), farmers from the northern provinces of the Korean peninsula began to migrate to Manchuria to engage in wet paddy rice cultivation. The earliest record of their arrival in the area is from the seventeenth century.² Repeated famines in the late 1800s in northern Korea spurred migration.³ By 1910, when Japan annexed Korea, 250,000 Koreans were living in Yanbian.⁴ This number grew to 1.3 million by the end of the Japanese colonial period as a result of Japanese resettlement policies.⁵

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) officially recognizes fifty-five ethnic minority groups and accords members of these groups certain privileges—such as exemption from the one-child policy. In addition, the PRC has five minority autonomous regions at the provincial level and twenty-nine minority autonomous prefectures, of which the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture (Chinese: Yanbian Chaoxianzu Zizhizhou, Korean: Yeonbeon Joseonjok Jachiju) is one. Even though the autonomous regions and prefectures are, in reality, hardly “autonomous” from the central government, they provide certain benefits to the local minority group, such as an official bilingual policy—including minority-language education, in Yanbian’s case all the way to the tertiary level. Among the ethnic minorities in the PRC, Koreans have enjoyed especially close relations with the Chinese Communist Party, and Koreans have been well-represented in the central government.

Since they were overwhelmingly engaged in the agrarian economy, reform and opening-up did not bring as many changes for the inhabitants of the Korean Autonomous Prefecture as they did for residents of other parts of China. The biggest changes for Yanbian came as a direct result of the commencement of diplomatic relations between the Republic of Korea (South Korea) and the People’s Republic of China in 1992. For nearly 50 years South Koreans and Koreans in China had had almost no contact with each other. Throughout this period, each side was constantly told that the other was the enemy. Suddenly the floodgates opened, and Yanbian was dramatically affected by inflows of capital and outflows of people. South Korean investments and tourists flooded into Yanbian. At the same time, attracted by the much higher wage rate, ethnic Koreans from Yanbian went to work at menial jobs—such as restaurant work or construction—in South Korea, both legally and illegally, sending home their earnings. Also at the same time, as more people attained a tertiary education, young people went to study overseas and in other parts of China. In addition, many young women went to South Korea for marriage. As a result of a combination of these factors, the Korean population of Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture is currently suffering from twin brain-drain and low birthrate problems. Most blue-collar jobs in the prefecture are now done by Han Chinese, who receive a lower wage since there is less opportunity for them to do equivalent work in South Korea. The decrease in the number of Koreans and the increase in the number of Han Chinese is causing the continuation of a long-term demographic shift in the Korean Autonomous Prefecture: the fall in the proportion of the Korean population from over 60 percent in 1952 to less than 40 percent in 2007.⁶ As a result, the economic and social profiles of the prefecture are in the midst of a radical transformation.

Hanbok

Hanbok, literally meaning “Korean clothes,” is a term that refers to all traditional Korean clothing. Hanbok was the exclusive clothing style for all Koreans until contact with the West began to gradually change tastes in the nineteenth century. Today, in both North and South Korea and in China’s Korean Autonomous Prefecture, hanbok is reserved mostly for special occasions, although some people may wear it on a daily basis or as a uniform, especially in a culture-related workplace. Special occasions for which people usually wear hanbok include, but are not limited to, weddings, a baby’s 100th day of life, a baby’s first birthday, 60th birthdays, new year celebrations, and harvest festivals.

Hanbok for women consists of a slip, a floor-length full skirt with a high waist (chima), and a short, long-sleeved jacket with a long tie (cheoggeori). Hanbok for men consists of long pants tied at the ankles (baji) and a long-sleeved jacket (also called cheoggeori). The hanbok colors are typically bright, and different color combinations signify the wearer’s position within his or her family. For example, a green jacket and red skirt signify a newly wed woman.

Hanbok can be divided into two principal style categories: traditional and simplified (gaeryang). “Traditional” refers to hanbok worn for special occasions that is made of silk or ramie and can be lavishly embroidered or embossed with gold or silver. “Simplified” refers to hanbok with a simplified design, typically a shorter, less full skirt with a lower waist and a longer jacket. Simplified hanbok is usually made of more durable and less delicate fabrics, such as cotton, and is used for uniforms and daily wear.

Becoming an Entrepreneur

Ryu grew up in Ryongjeong, a farming village near Yanji, and began her career as a seamstress there. “I couldn’t study because of the cultural revolution,” she explains.

In recent years Ryu has participated in and completed several executive business education courses in Yanji.

Before starting her hanbok business, Ryu made daily-wear clothing and blankets. She studied embroidery, cutting, and dressmaking from the best teachers she could find in Ryongjeong and Yanji. In 1984, at age 27, she decided to design her own outfit, consisting of matching pants and an embroidered shirt. “I was young and very self-confident, and I thought that my design was very beautiful,” she says. With the help of five other women, she sewed 4,000 outfits. Her husband was a buyer for the government store, and she used this connection to persuade twelve other buyers to take 100 outfits each. She brought the rest to the market in Yanji and passed them to a trader there. Within 2 months all of the outfits were sold. As a result of this great success, her family became the first in the entire Korean Autonomous Prefecture to buy a television. Inspired by the success of her first original design, she made her next design in thirty-six different colors and five different sizes. She traveled to different cities and chose the most expensive price she saw anywhere as the price for her outfits. For a week not a single outfit was sold, and she became nervous. People told her her price was too high, but she would not lower it. Finally, someone from a village came and bought seven outfits, which he managed to sell in his village in just one day. After that, everyone wanted the outfit. Ryu says she realized early on that people want something that others do not have and that people with money are willing to pay a significant premium for this type of unique product. This insight guides her to this very day.

During this time, when most people in the Korean Autonomous Prefecture had never even left the area, Ryu traveled all over China, going as far afield as Guangdong and Shanghai, to learn about different techniques of clothing manufacture.

Ryu had to face competitors, imitators, and dishonesty early on. One day she found another trader in the market selling her clothes. She confronted the person, who insisted the clothes were not made by her. Ryu knew otherwise and eventually learned that one of the five women working for her had been stealing one outfit per day and giving them to that trader. Competition from copycats who charged lower prices was serious. Whenever Ryu came out with a new design, it would soon be imitated. After 3 years, in 1986, she decided she was tired of the business and turned to something new: blankets.

Koreans traditionally sleep on a heated floor and use a traditional blanket, called an ibul. Ryu’s passion is embroidery, and she thought blankets would be a perfect canvas to showcase her skills. At first the business was very successful; but, again, imitators moved in. One competitor in particular, Han Okhee, began bribing traders to sell her goods, thereby completely spoiling the market for the other blanket makers. As a consequence, in 1988 Ryu decided to return to hanbok. Eventually, Han Okhee was found guilty of swindling investors of 107 million RMB, or approximately US$13.5 million, and publicly executed by firing squad in Yanji in 1997.⁷

Ryu went into hanbok with a friend who invested money in the business and managed sales while Ryu concentrated on the design and manufacture. She always loved her work and describes this time as both exciting and stimulating. At the same time, she faced family problems. As her relatives and her husband’s relatives saw her financial success, they asked for her help. She also argued with her husband about work because he is more family-oriented while she is more extrovert. After a period of some struggle, she eventually became the chief decision-maker for both families. Numerous family members also joined the business. Seven extended family members currently work for Ryu.

A turning point for Ryu came in 1998. Her only child, a daughter, firmly told her mother that, although she was interested in the hanbok business, she would never manage the factory. As Ryu’s business partner had been in charge of sales, her daughter’s decision led Ryu to break up with her business partner of more than 10 years and to train her daughter in sales.

Around this time, Ryu also went on her first trip to South Korea. When she saw how well people lived there, she cried for two weeks. “I was so sad that we were living like animals in China, while South Koreans enjoyed such high standards of living.” She thought hard about leaving China and moving to South Korea, as many Koreans from China were doing at the time. In the end, she decided to stay in Yanbian and ended her trip to South Korea by taking advantage of the 1997–1998 Asian financial crisis to buy a used German-made computerized embroidery machine at a fire-sale price. Initially, the machine caused Ryu a great deal of grief for two reasons—no one in the company could read the English-language instruction manuals and, because it was an old machine, it kept breaking down. Ryu had to fly a repair technician in from South Korea at great expense. Although the machine was a sinkhole for the first year, it was the first computerized embroidery machine in Yanbian, and Ryu’s investment turned a profit in the second year.

In 2003, after several store and factory visits by government officials, Ryu was selected to represent Koreans at a juried fashion show in Paris that showcased the traditional clothing of all of China’s fifty-five official minority groups. She was nervous. She recalls, “I felt that if I did not do a good job, I would shame my people [Koreans] and my country [China].” She spent months preparing a dozen hanbok outfits for the show, showcasing different patterns of lavish embroidery, hanbok worn in Korean drumming performances, and even hanbok in the style worn by the royal court during Korea’s Joseon Dynasty. At the end of the show, Ryu’s work was chosen as the most outstanding, and she was awarded first place.

Competitors and Advertising

As Ryu’s fame increased after the Paris fashion show, so too did the jealousy of other hanbok makers in the Korean Autonomous Prefecture. In 2003 her store was broken into three times. The first time, photos from the Paris show were stolen; the second time, new samples were stolen from mannequins; and the third time, the one sample that had been left behind in the second break-in was also stolen. No cash was taken. Although Ryu suspected who the perpetrator might be, the police said they would not intervene unless the thief was caught red-handed. As a result, Ryu decided to keep her store exterior plain, so as not to fan her competitors’ jealousy. She also never displays new samples in the store window.

Although Ryu was the first in the prefecture to sell hanbok from a storefront rather than at the market, thirty other stores now sell hanbok in Yanji, with some differentiation between competitors. For example, as the ethnic Koreans in China have become more oriented toward South Korea, South Korean goods are perceived as trendy and high-quality; and several of Ryu’s competitors specialize in selling hanbok imported from South Korea. Ryu differentiates herself through her styles, which combine North and South Korean influences, the high-quality embroidery on her hanbok, and her very strong brand.

In the early years of her hanbok business, Ryu frequently advertised. At one time, she even paid for the exteriors of an entire fleet of Yanji city busses to be painted in bright yellow with a picture of her favorite model— her daughter—in hanbok. Because her brand has become so well-known, she no longer needs to spend as much on advertising. Instead, her personal appearances on local and even South Korean TV and media coverage of government officials and popular stars wearing her clothes serve as free publicity.

Organization and Workflow

Ryu’s daughter, Aehwa Park, is the store manager; and her niece, Mihwa Ryu, is the factory manager. The Yemi Hanbok factory has seventy employees in four different manufacturing groups and an office group. The manufacturing groups are (1) computerized embroidery, (2) sewing for uniforms and simplified hanbok, (3) custom hanbok, and (4) crafts— for norigae (a type of hanbok accessory), wrappers for traditional wedding boxes, floor pillows, belts, and decorations, among other items. All the products are made to order. Hanbok fabrics are imported from South Korea because of the superior quality that can be found there. They are ordered in the necessary colors or else dyed in the factory. The variety of products made in the factory is staggering. On average, a new design is created every day.

Traditional hanbok, especially for weddings, is the most profitable business segment, as all the work is made to order. A customer comes into a Yemi Hanbok store, chooses a design and colors, and is measured. The fabric is then sent to Pyongyang in case it needs to be hand-embroidered, and is returned to the factory to be completed. Prices range from 1,400 to 2,800 RMB, representing a month’s wages for the well-to-do inhabitants of the prefecture and two months’ earnings for those less well-off. The hanbok uniforms are not as profitable as the traditional hanbok, but the orders are substantial.

Yemi Hanbok is in a unique position in that it can work with both North and South Korea. As Ryu explains, “The salary here in Yanji is 1,400 RMB per month. In Pyongyang it is 200 RMB per month. We simply can’t afford to do the hand-embroidery here.” At the same time, factory salaries in South Korea are seven times higher than those in Yanji. As a result, Yemi Hanbok can design an item, have the embroidery done in North Korea, cut the fabric in China, and sell either unfinished hanbok or crafts to South Korean customers. Currently, Ryu has a contract with Yedan, the largest hanbok company in South Korea for unfinished products.

The main store is in Yanji; and there are two branches, one in Dalian and one in Shanghai, that sell Yemi Hanbok clothes exclusively. In addition, more than fifty stores, spread throughout China, carry Ryu’s designs.

The Yemi Hanbok factory workers enjoy above-average monthly salaries and every Sunday off. Although they were all ethnic Koreans in the past, today this group prefers not to do factory work in China and would rather go abroad, where they can earn much higher salaries. As a result, the proportion of ethnic Koreans has fallen to about one half. The other half are Han Chinese workers from as far afield as Hubei Province, in south-central China. When asked if she had been familiar with hanbok before coming to work in the factory, one Han Chinese worker from Heilongjiang Province answered, “No, I had never seen it before I came to work here, but now I think it is very beautiful!” Ryu has clearly become a cultural ambassador even beyond the ways she had originally intended.

Ryu’s style and business model are unique in the global hanbok industry. As Mihwa Ryu, Ryu’s niece and business manager, explains, since the Korean populations in China, North Korea, and South Korea were largely isolated from each other for about 50 years, hanbok styles had developed separately in these three countries. Ryu’s designs are based on the Chinese style, but with inspiration and influence from both of the other two styles; and she also makes ample use of embroidery. In addition, she has developed a special style, wedding hanbok, based on traditional hanbok for festive occasions but in white, recalling the Western-style wedding dresses preferred by most modern brides for the wedding itself. She makes traditional hanbok, royal hanbok, hanbok for performances, simplified hanbok, hanbokinspired clothing colored with natural dyes, and various traditional accessories and bags.

Ryu’s business model is also unique in its high level of vertical integration. In South Korea, where the market is larger and there are more competitors at every step of the value chain, one company would never engage in activities as diverse as dying fabric, doing embroidery and silk screening and making ornaments, Ryu explains. Because the Korean Autonomous Prefecture market is smaller and there are no competitors, she can fully express her creativity by experimenting with different methods at each stage of production.

Politics and Government Influence

Unlike many other business people in China, Ryu has not used member-ship of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to enhance her success. “I never was interested in that kind of thing,” she says. “In politics, I would only do politics. I prefer studying and researching clothing.” Nevertheless, she has shrewdly leveraged politics and politicians. For example, when she started Yemi Hanbok, she gave ethnic Korean politicians free outfits to wear for government occasions and events, and to this day she still lends politicians clothes for government occasions if they ask for them. She has also joined several government committees, such as the Yanbian Women in Business Committee, and gives free outfits for committee portraits and events. As a result of her fame, she also knows important local as well as national politicians, including the minister for minority affairs, who is an ethnic Korean.

Although many ethnic Koreans from the Korean Autonomous Prefecture have emigrated to South Korea, Ryu says she is glad she lives in China. She says that, particularly after the 2003 Paris show, she realized she enjoys certain advantages in China. The costs of the fashion show were covered for the most part by the Chinese government, for example. There are also funds earmarked specifically for minority-owned businesses. In her factory she shows off a brand-new computerized embroidery machine which she purchased with the help of 400,000 RMB (approximately US$50,000) in government support. Another new business she started in the last few years also relies on the prefectural government’s support of Korean culture. Ryu has won contracts to supply simplified hanbok to the prefectural government for daily wear by all government employees, as well as uniforms for students and teachers in five schools in the prefecture.

Looking Forward

Ryu is a woman with many plans and visions for the future. After her daughter decided she wanted to be part of the design and marketing side of the business, Ryu sent her and her son-in-law to South Korea to study hanbok design and business. Now that the next generation will be ready to take over the business in the next few years, Ryu is thinking about the future.

Several years ago Ryu initiated a project to color fabrics using natural dyes. Although she has a great passion for natural dyes and fibers and had expended serious effort on this project, she finally concluded that she was ahead of her time. She may try to launch this venture again in a few years.

In the meantime, Ryu has purchased a plot of land in the countryside near her birthplace. She envisions building a traditional Korean farmhouse there and turning it into a hanbok museum. The land is situated perfectly according to the principles of feng shui, with a mountain in the back and a stream in front. In addition, the property is close to the route tourists must take to visit the birthplace of Dongju Yun, one of the most beloved poets in South Korea. Could a museum be her next undertaking?