Silver ornaments are the favorite traditional ornaments of the Miao minority, and they are mainly adopted by women for make-up. There are many types of ornaments that could be used to adorn a girl from head to feet, including headwear, facial ornament, neck ornament, shoulder ornament, breast ornament, waist ornament, arm ornament, foot ornament and hand ornament. These ornaments coordinate with each other very well and show a perfect overall adornment effect. Silver phoenix coronet and silver flower-trimmed bonnet are the major headwears and also the beginning of a complete suite of silver ornaments, so they have long been renowned as "Head of dragon and tail of phoenix". Their manufacturing process is rather intricate and at least 150 small accessories or even as many as 200 are used, so they are quite valuable. Miao's silver ornaments are exquisite and beautiful. Leishan County of Guizhou Province and Fenghuang County of Hunan Province are typical representatives for silver ornaments. In the former, silversmiths mainly concentrate in Kongbai, Maliao and Wugao of Xijiang Town.
Miao's silver ornament manufacturing technology has a long history and has undergone the evolution from primordial ornament to stone and shell ornament, from plants and flowers to gold and silver. Today's silver ornaments with basic fixed patterns and shapes are the result of so many years' passing down and inheritance. Their type and pattern are still renovating ceaselessly today. The ornament chain formed on such basis has already become one of the symbols of Miao's social progress. The Miao people worked hard all the year round and made nearly all the silver currency they had earned into ornaments. Therefore, the silver content of each place' ornament is equivalent to that of local silver currency. For instance, in the period of Republic of China, the southeastern area of Guizhou Province could be divided into two parts by Leishan Mountain. In the north area, people used Dayang (a kind of silver currency) to make ornaments, so their silver purity was high, while in the south area, Erhao (a kind of silver currency) was used, so the ornaments they made contained less silver. Since the 1950s, the Chinese government has showed great respect to Miao people's custom and appropriated dedicated silver to them at a low price every year.
