分类： society

Nestled in the blocks surrounding Beijing’s Forbidden City — the centuries-old imperial residence that housed China’s final two imperial dynasties, the Ming and Qing — a fast-growing niche creative industry is thriving, driven by young Chinese people’s surging enthusiasm for reviving and experiencing traditional Chinese culture. At the heart of this trend are makeup artists like Chen Jiao, whose daily work involves turning ordinary visitors into elegant imperial figures straight out of ancient Chinese history.

Every day, streams of tourists flood into these nearby costume studios, eager to step into the ornate robes embroidered with intricate phoenix patterns, adorn themselves with jade pendants, pearl accessories and gilded fingernail guards that once were exclusive to noblewomen in imperial courts. After artists carefully apply traditional-style makeup and sculpt elaborate hairstyles decorated with flowing tassels and delicate hairpins, visitors head out to the historic walls and moat encircling the Forbidden City to capture photos and short videos for their social media feeds. Blending the charm of imperial-era aesthetics with modern lifestyle touches, many even pair their historic costumes with casual sneakers and trendy sunglasses while sipping popular bubble tea, creating a unique fusion of old and new.

The immersive experience comes at an average price of 300 yuan, equivalent to roughly $45, though high-end customized packages can cost more than 1,000 yuan, or over $150. For makeup artists like Chen, business rarely slows down. She notes that peak seasons — public holidays and weekends — bring nonstop crowds, and on a recent busy working day, she started her shift as early as 6 a.m. and completed styling for more than 20 young women in a single day. “There is no real off-season for us, only a short break when the Forbidden City itself is closed,” Chen explained.

This booming trend of immersive traditional costume experience has taken hold among young Chinese people over recent years, with Beijing’s scene centered heavily on Ming and Qing dynasty aesthetics, drawn directly from the adjacent Forbidden City that anchors the experience. To understand the historical context: the Ming Dynasty, which ruled China for more than 270 years until 1644, oversaw the construction of the Forbidden City and the reinforcement of the Great Wall. The Qing Dynasty, established by China’s Manchu ethnic group, collapsed in 1912, bringing an end to more than 2,000 years of imperial rule across the country.

For young travelers, the experience is more than just a photoshoot — it is a personal way to connect with Chinese history and cultural heritage. Chen Xiao, a college student from China’s eastern Shandong Province, traveled through the night to Beijing during this year’s Qingming Festival holiday to participate, wearing a soft pink costume matching that of a *Gege*, or Qing dynasty princess. “If you are standing on the grounds where history actually happened, you should wear clothing that fits the setting,” she said, adding that her interest in the trend grew out of her love for popular Chinese historical costume dramas that have dominated streaming platforms in recent years. “I’ve watched so many of these shows, they’ve definitely shaped my interest. Lately, I’ve been really fascinated by Qing dynasty history,” she added.

Another visitor, Liu Ruitong, a college student from neighboring Hebei Province, chose a solemn black Ming-style imperial outfit for her experience. “This whole styling feels so elegant and dignified, especially the color palette,” she explained. “I picked black because it complements the architecture of the Forbidden City and all the traditional Chinese scenery here so well.”

The explosive growth of the industry is visible in the neighborhood where Chen Jiao’s studio is located. Local media reports show that back around 2020, only a handful of these costume styling studios operated in the area. Today, that number has surged to more than 100.

Industry observers and cultural enthusiasts say the trend reflects a broader shift among young Chinese people. Cai Zehong, founder of Hanfu Beijing — one of China’s earliest non-profit groups established by enthusiasts to promote traditional culture and clothing of the majority Han ethnicity — notes that young generations have increasingly recognized the unique aesthetic value of traditional clothing while deepening their understanding of China’s extensive cultural heritage. Beyond that, the sustained popularity of historical television dramas and online series across Chinese streaming platforms has also served as a major catalyst, bringing imperial-era aesthetics to mainstream young audiences and sparking their desire to experience the culture firsthand.

As India readies for its 16th national census – the eighth since achieving independence in 1947 – a new curated exhibition has pulled back the curtain on a little-known chapter of the country’s demographic history: how its sprawling postal network served as an unexpected foundation for nation-building and public trust in the world’s largest statistical exercise, long before smartphones and digital government apps transformed data collection.

Curated by Vikas Kumar, an economics professor at Bengaluru’s Azim Premji University, the exhibition draws on rare archival materials including commemorative stamps, promotional postmarks, letters, and pre-census postcards to trace how the postal service turned routine mail into a tool for mass public mobilization. For the newly independent Indian republic, a reliable national census was far more than a bureaucratic task: it was an urgent foundational requirement. Reliable demographic data was needed to run fair elections based on universal adult franchise and to lay the groundwork for a centrally planned economy. So critical was this project to the new nation that the Constituent Assembly passed the Census Act in 1948, more than a year before the country’s final constitution was formally adopted.

From the very first post-independence census in 1951, the Indian government turned to the post office to solve two critical, immediate challenges: reaching a dispersed population across a vast, mostly rural and low-income nation, and convincing ordinary people to participate – a hurdle shaped by the legacy of distrust left by colonial-era censuses. Parts of India had boycotted the 1931 and 1941 colonial headcounts, and the 1941 count in Punjab and Bengal was tainted by widespread allegations of communal manipulation, making public trust a non-negotiable priority for the new republic.

At the time, India’s postal network was the most expansive unified communication system the state operated, growing faster than nearly all other public services including banking in the decades after independence. By 1968, more than 100,000 post offices delivered mail daily to 300,000 villages, with weekly service reaching an additional 300,000 rural communities. Postmasters and postmen also served as informal community intermediaries, often acting as readers and scribes for low-literacy villages – making the network perfectly suited for spreading census messaging.

The exhibition showcases how this outreach evolved alongside the nation across decades. In 1951, one of the earliest known bilingual postmarks, stamped on an envelope mailed from Nandikotkur to Madras (now Chennai), featured a portrait of a three-person family alongside ‘Census of India, February 1951’ printed in both Hindi and English. For the 1961 census, inland letter cards posted across Assam carried clear, approachable postmarks urging recipients to ‘Get yourself & family counted’ and encourage friends to join in. A 1971 commemorative issue marked the centenary of modern Indian censuses, printing 3 million stamps that wove diverse Indian faces into the shape of the number 100, framing the census as a source of national pride and noting that data processing had transitioned to electronic computers for the first time.

By the 2001 census, messaging framed the headcount as a ‘Mirror of the Nation’ and a ‘Group Photograph of the Nation’, with multilingual promotional postcards printed in 13 languages distributed across the country to emphasize the exercise’s role in national development. The 2001 commemorative stamp featured a four-person family under the slogan ‘People Oriented’, with a first day cover illustrating India’s diversity through a vibrant crowd scene, and a postmark depicting men, women and children holding hands in a semi-circle to symbolize the nation counting itself. Later messaging also began to tie population counting to public policy priorities like population control, reflecting the social anxieties of the era. The 2011 census marked a transition toward the digital age, with a commemorative stamp showing families linking hands with an enumerator alongside the census emblem, paired with a first day cover that paired a pixelated map of India with the official census symbol.

For Kumar, these fragile, fading postal artifacts are more than a collection of bureaucratic memorabilia: they capture how the Indian state worked to build legitimacy and public trust through everyday, routine communication, weaving the census into core national narratives of development, diversity, and collective identity.

That core challenge of building public trust remains just as relevant today, as India prepares to launch its first fully digital census. The upcoming headcount, which will cover 36 states and union territories, more than 7,000 sub-districts, over 9,700 towns, and nearly 640,000 villages, remains a staggering undertaking. Millions of households will be surveyed by enumerators drawn from local government staff, teachers, and community officials. For the first time, enumerators will use mobile apps to collect and upload data in real time, replacing pen and paper methods of the past. The new census will also deliver critical data for policy planning, welfare distribution, and political representation in the world’s most populous nation, and will mark the first time in decades that the exercise will collect detailed caste data – a politically sensitive project in a country where caste continues to shape social and economic opportunity.

While digital tools promise faster data processing, Kumar warns that technology alone cannot replace the work of building public confidence. As the reach of the traditional postal network has faded, he argues, the government must develop new strategies to raise awareness and earn the trust of ordinary Indians. From family illustrations on postmarks to instant digital data uploads, India’s census has changed dramatically in 75 years. Yet the core challenge that the postal network solved decades ago – convincing more than a billion people to trust the state enough to add themselves to the collective story of the nation – remains unchanged.

For generations, tattooing in South Korea existed in a legal gray area, forcing skilled tattoo artists to ply their trade in hidden underground studios, cut off from mainstream recognition and legal protections. That long chapter of secrecy has finally come to a close, and now hundreds of tattoo creators from every corner of the nation have converged on the capital city of Seoul to mark a historic turning point for their craft. BBC correspondents on the ground captured the jubilant atmosphere of the gathering, where artists shared their stories of decades working off the grid, displayed their intricate, culturally rooted work, and celebrated the hard-won legal status that opens a new era for South Korea’s tattoo community. The shift to legalization caps years of advocacy from tattoo artists who argued their work is a legitimate form of creative expression, not a regulated medical service as previously classified under South Korean law. For many attendees, the gathering in Seoul is more than a celebration—it is a public declaration that tattoo art has earned its place in the country’s cultural mainstream.

Long before food delivery apps, ride-sharing services, and on-demand urban convenience, Mumbai’s dabbawalas built a logistical legend that captured global attention. For more than 130 years, these uniformed delivery workers, recognizable by their signature white caps and shirts, have navigated the chaos of India’s financial capital to deliver thousands of hot, home-cooked lunchboxes (called dabbas) to office workers every single day. Today, however, this centuries-old tradition is on the brink of collapse, devastated by shifting work patterns and new digital competition.

Every morning, long before the city wakes to its usual frantic pace, dabbawalas cycle through Mumbai’s sprawling suburbs collecting dabbas packed with rice, lentils, curries, rotis, and fresh seasonal dishes, all cooked in family kitchens across the city. They load the stacked boxes onto suburban trains, sort them according to a simple but incredibly precise alphanumeric coding system, and deliver them on foot or by bicycle to office workers across the city by midday. After workers finish their meals, dabbawalas collect the empty boxes and reverse the route, returning them to the original homes by early afternoon. What makes this system remarkable is that it relies on no apps, no GPS, and no advanced technology – just generations of tacit knowledge of Mumbai’s streets and railways, passed down from worker to worker.

The origins of the dabbawala network stretch back to the late 19th century, when British-ruled Bombay was rapidly expanding as a commercial hub. At the time, restaurants were scarce, and cultural and religious dietary customs made home-cooked meals non-negotiable for many office workers. The model first began when a Parsi banker hired a local man to deliver his home lunch to his workplace, and the concept quickly spread. By 1890, organizer Mahadeo Bachche formalized the modern network with roughly 100 workers. Over the decades, the system grew to its peak, with nearly 4,500 registered dabbawalas delivering 50,000 lunchboxes across the city every single day.

Its legendary precision earned the dabbawala network global acclaim. Harvard Business School analyzed the system as a world-class case study in low-cost, high-efficiency logistics. Even Britain’s King Charles III, then Prince of Wales, spent time working alongside dabbawalas during a 2003 visit to Mumbai. For decades, the network became a point of civic pride for Mumbai: a reminder that amid the city’s unending noise and chaos, some core institutions still operated with unrivaled reliability.

But that reputation now offers little protection from the disruptions that have shaken the network in recent years. The turning point came with the Covid-19 pandemic, when widespread office shutdowns forced millions of Mumbai workers into remote work arrangements. Overnight, demand for daily lunchbox deliveries collapsed. Dabbawalas who once served 20 to 25 clients a day were left with just a handful of customers, or none at all. With little in the way of savings, hundreds of workers left the trade permanently.

Even after offices reopened, the shift to hybrid work models gutted demand. Many office workers now only come into the city two or three days a week, eliminating the need for daily lunch delivery. The Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Association reports that registered dabbawala numbers have plummeted from roughly 4,500 in 2018 to just 1,500 today.

Competition from the digital economy has compounded the crisis. Today, major food delivery platforms such as Swiggy and Zomato offer on-demand delivery of everything from traditional biryani to fast food at competitive prices, while a booming cloud kitchen industry has expanded affordable restaurant options for city workers. Where dabbawalas once faced almost no competition for home-style lunch delivery, they now struggle to compete with the convenience of a tap on a smartphone screen.

For workers who have left the trade, the transition has been difficult. Balu Bhagu Shinde, 41, worked as a dabbawala for 20 years, earning roughly 20,000 rupees a month – enough to support his wife and three children in one of India’s most expensive cities. By the end of 2020, he was left with just two regular customers. After waiting in vain for customers to return, he switched to driving a tuktuk, where he earns just 15,000 rupees a month. “There are no customers, no money – what should we do?” Shinde said. “We are struggling to survive. I am cutting down on household expenses, but I have three children whose education matters the most. At times I have had to borrow money.”

For the dabbawalas who have stayed in the trade, survival now requires working 15-hour days across two separate jobs. Mauli Bachche, a third-generation dabbawala with 20 years of experience, completes his full morning collection, delivery, and empty box return route by 2 p.m. every day, then starts a second job collecting small daily savings deposits for a local finance company, not returning home until 10 p.m. He travels more than 100 kilometers across Mumbai every day, and still only has 15 regular customers left, down from 25 before the pandemic. “Income from dabbawala work is very low,” Bachche said. “Everyone is doing more than one job.”

Longtime workers say the biggest long-term threat is the lack of interest from younger generations. With Mumbai’s cost of living rising steadily, young people have little incentive to enter a low-wage trade with an uncertain future. “In our time, we managed to survive,” said Baban Kadam, who has worked as a dabbawala for 35 years. “But with today’s cost of living, the younger generation will not come into this work. Everyone wants a better-paying job or business.”

Industry leaders are now scrambling to implement changes to keep the network alive. The Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Association is considering restructuring work into shift-based schedules, which would allow dabbawalas to take on part-time work or small side businesses alongside their delivery routes. Even with these adjustments, however, the future remains uncertain. “We are continuing for now,” said Ramdas Baban Karvande, the association’s president. “But we cannot say what will happen in the future.”

For now, the dabbawalas still load their stacks of steel dabbas onto Mumbai’s crowded suburban trains every morning, keeping alive a tradition that has long been woven into the identity of India’s most iconic city. But as the city evolves around it, this legendary logistical institution is at risk of being left behind by the very pace of change it once helped power.

Last Saturday, on a rooftop in Seoul’s trendy Seongsu neighborhood, over 90 South Korean tattoo artists gathered for a celebration decades in the making. For 34 years, tattooing as a profession had been restricted exclusively to licensed medical practitioners in the country, forcing the entire industry to grow in the shadows. But following landmark rulings from the nation’s top court and legislative action from lawmakers, that era of criminalization has finally come to a close. When veteran tattooist Kim Tae-nam took the stage to open the Ink Bomb festival, his relief and joy were palpable to every attendee. “This was only possible because of our effort, all your sweat and tears,” he told the cheering crowd. “Let’s hear it from everyone: Tattoos are art!”

The path to legalization began decades ago, when South Korea’s Supreme Court ruled in 1992 that tattooing qualified as a medical practice, citing public hygiene and safety concerns. This ruling aligned with long-standing conservative social norms that framed body art as unseemly, reinforcing outdated stereotypes that linked tattoos to organized crime and gang activity. Violations of the restriction carried severe penalties, including heavy fines and even jail time, forcing thousands of artists to operate in secret. When Kim started his career in 2004 under the pseudonym Sunrat Tattoo, he ran his first studio out of an unmarked basement, accepting clients by invitation only. When he launched the Ink Bomb gathering in 2008, every event was shut down by police, who threatened arrest and criminal charges for participants. This year’s open, public festival marks the first time the event has been held legally since 2014.

The decades-long crackdown did not just push the industry underground—it created dangerous conditions for artists, particularly women. Disgruntled clients often exploited the illegal status of tattooing to blackmail, harass, or threaten artists, who could not turn to police for help without incriminating themselves. According to Kim Do-yoon, founder of the South Korean Tattoo Union who works under the pseudonym Doy, the vast majority of these harassment victims were young women artists. “The shock from these losses is what moved me to found the union and fight for our right to work safely and legally in Korea,” Doy stated, noting that some targeted artists died by suicide as a result of their exploitation. Each year, the union provided legal support to at least 50 prosecuted tattoo artists, with many more facing unreported fines. Despite the constant risk, the industry grew steadily: 2021 government data estimates there are roughly 350,000 tattoo artists working across South Korea today.

For many artists, the legalization brings an end to a constant state of anxiety. Tattooist Kali, who has never faced criminal charges herself, said she lived with constant hypervigilance from seeing peers prosecuted. “I was constantly working with anxiety. It still feels surreal to me that I no longer have to worry about this,” she said, describing her “ecstatic” reaction to the Supreme Court’s recent decision overturning the 1992 ruling. Just months before the court decision, in September, South Korean lawmakers passed legislation formalizing the legality of tattooing by non-medical professionals, capping off a years-long campaign by artists to end harassment and criminalization.

Shifting social attitudes laid the groundwork for this policy change, driven by younger generations of Koreans who have embraced body art as a legitimate form of self-expression. Over the 2010s, South Korean tattoo art gained global acclaim, particularly for its distinctive delicate fine-line style, which spread to global audiences via social media. High-profile South Korean celebrities—from K-pop idols like BTS’s Jungkook, Girl’s Generation’s Taeyeon and HyunA, to Olympian diver Woo Ha-ram and actress Han Ye-seul—have also helped normalize tattoos by displaying their body art publicly. Even as the legal framework changes, however, social stigma persists: many workplaces still hold negative biases against tattooed candidates, some public gyms and saunas maintain “no tattoo” policies, and mainstream conformist culture still marginalizes people who choose visible body modification. Still, artists note that younger generations are actively breaking down these long-standing norms.

While the end of criminalization is a historic win for the industry, uncertainty remains. South Korea’s Ministry of Health has announced plans to roll out a new licensing and testing system for tattooists in 2025 to standardize the profession, and dozens of older criminal cases against artists are still pending. Doy, who was charged under the old Medical Act for tattooing actress Han Ye-seul in 2019 (and has also inked high-profile clients including Brad Pitt and Steven Yeun), expects his charges and those of other artists will be dismissed following the Supreme Court ruling. For Doy, the moment is bittersweet: “Things are finally back where they should be,” he said. “But I can’t help but think of the fellow artists who aren’t here with us.”

Attendees at Ink Bomb reflected the growing mainstream acceptance of tattoo culture in South Korea, drawing a diverse crowd that included working artists, punk rock fans, and even parents accompanying their teenage children. Though no permanent tattoos were offered at the celebration—given the time and space the practice requires—attendees could pick up free custom sticker art from participating creators. For many in the crowd, the day was far more than a festival: it was a long-overdue recognition of decades of hidden work and cultural contribution. “It makes no sense that tattooing should be seen as a medical act. Nobody is going to medical school to become a tattooist,” said 48-year-old tattoo enthusiast Jay Hur. “Korean tattooists had to take risks to do their job to sustain this beautiful underground culture.”