[Photo provided to China Daily]

"You have to find very experienced people to do all this work so as to guarantee quality. Their labor is expensive," he says.

Another problem Qian found is that bamboo products were previously mainly used by ordinary people, especially farmers. Bamboo goods were sold at low prices so every family could afford them.

"In our village, each family used to weave only one kind of bamboo product. But when you put all the products together, you can see the whole picture of people's lives in old times," he says.

"So even if you pour a lot of time and energy into the quality of a bamboo product, it's not china or gem stones, so people will not pay high price for it－not to mention that people use almost no bamboo products in daily life nowadays," he says.

For Qian, apart from mastering skills to develop fashionable products for modern taste, another important task is to promote a "bamboo lifestyle".

He found wool-felt toys from the West have become popular in China because "people find them interesting and lovely", so he repositions bamboo products as goods that are fun.