🧣 54 ethnic groups
The loom above weaves a cloth of 54 threads, one per ethnic group. Below, each group has brocade of its own, as long as its population, sorted into the five language families.
Population: 2019 Population & Housing Census (GSO). Language families follow standard Vietnamese ethnology: Austroasiatic (Việt–Mường + Mon–Khmer branches), Tai–Kadai, Hmong–Mien, Austronesian, Sino-Tibetan (Sinitic + Tibeto-Burman). “Main region” is the historic heartland — many groups now live across several provinces. The cloths come in two kinds. Where a group carries a card marked “Motif”, the palette and the pattern stack follow its documented signature (museum and heritage-authority records): Hmong beeswax spirals, Dao cross-stitch, Ê Đê broad red bands, Cơ Tu bead work, the plain indigo of the Nùng. The remaining cloths are woven from the shared geometric vocabulary of Vietnamese brocade (lozenges, sawtooth, warp stripes, checks, eight-point stars, hooked meanders, bead rows), generated from each group's code so no two repeat: they evoke the craft and are not a facsimile of any one group's pattern.