It is interesting that the people who most love silver ornaments are the Miaos in Guizhou Province, where no silver has been produced. The source for the silver ornaments comes from silver     ingots and silver coins. That is to say that almost all the silver money the Miaos earned through years of hard work has been thrown into furnaces to melt for processing ornaments. After the 1950s, the central government fully respected the habits and customs of the Miao and allocated special-purpose silver to Guizhou at low price.
    The genuine Miao attires must be the embroidered clothes with thin sheets of silver, worn together with silver crowns, horns, flowers, hairpins, combs, earrings, eardrops, necklaces and other ornaments, called silver clothes by the Miaos. Every Miao girl dreams of the silver clothes when she is going to marry, just like the Han girls dream of wedding dress. So the silversmith is the one who makes beauty-love girls’ dream come true.
    Because of those beautiful silver ornaments, the trade of Miao’s silversmith is very prosperous. In the southeast of Guizhou where Miao people are densely inhabited, there are hundreds of silversmith-households and the number of those who have been engaged in silver ornaments is as many as several thousands. Most family workshops are father-and-son combinations, in which the father passes his skills to his son. But there are also some husband-and-wife combinations. These workshops usually close in busy farming season and start business in slack seasons. The footprints of the silversmith have covered the province as well as the neighboring areas in north of Guangxi and west of Hunan.
    Consequently silversmith village has come into being, where 80 percent of families take the processing of silver ornaments as their sideline production. Such village is a unique phenomenon in Guizhou as well as in the country. In the slack season, there is a busy scene in the village: ding-dong sound can be heard without end and most houses are enveloped in charcoal fire smoke. Some silversmiths go out to do the business and they have become wandering silversmiths. As a result one “silversmith” village can meet the demands for the processing of silver ornaments in the circumference of tens of kilometers.