Browsing recently in Beijing's Silk Market, a narrow street lined with stalls selling clothing and footwear with brand labels, a friend came across a duncoloured blouse marked "Irish Linen" with an "Edward" logo.
It looked like the real thing. It felt like the real thing. She bought it for 80 yuan, the equivalent of £8, about five times less then she would have expected to pay in a reputable store. Intrigued, I acquired the same article and posted it off, in its transparent wrapping, to the Irish Linen Guild in Hillsborough, Co Down. Is this genuine, I inquired?
Marketing manager Cathy Martin wrote in reply: "I have examined the blouse and found it to be of a quality which is not up to the usual standards of Irish Linen manufacturers. The `Irish Linen' label on the garment is a (very bad) copy of a label that was once used by Paul Costelloe, and secondly, upon opening the packing, I found the fabric in the back of the blouse to be filled with holes." Mr Costelloe is one of Ireland's leading fashion designers.
She was "99 per cent sure that this is not genuine Irish linen", Ms Martin said, adding that she asked all the guild's member company weavers to check their sales order books for any record of a clothing company or label named Edward and had drawn a blank.
So the blouse was pirated Irish linen. This poses a threat to one of Northern Ireland's traditional crafts at a time when it is pushing hard to increase sales world-wide.
The Irish linen industry "went very flat for a long time", said the chairman of the Northern Ireland Industrial Development Board, Dr Alan Gillespie, recently, but "has re-invented itself with modern products and is out marketing itself with confidence around the world". With Irish Linen enjoying an international reputation beside Waterford Glass as a quality Irish product, it was inevitable that it would join the most frequently-copied labels such as Polo, Ralph Lauren and Dunhill in a country "drowning in counterfeits", to quote China's own State Council Development Research Centre.
The raw material is easy to find, as flax, the crop from which linen is produced, is widely grown in northern China, mostly in Heilongjiang Province. Known here as the "empress of fibres", linen has been used in China for centuries. Clothing made from flax is often discovered in ancient tombs, and linen cloth was used until the 20th century in the cruel practice of tightly binding young women's toes to make their feet more dainty.
Untreated linen is sent to Shanghai where it is processed and sold to enterprises. Ninety per cent is exported to Europe and America, accounting for some 175 million metres of cloth each year, valued at $250 million, making it a formidable competitor in the world linen market.
The use of "Irish Linen" labels on inferior locally-processed garments is naturally damaging to the quality image of the genuine product. This aspect of pirating deeply worries foreign companies based or trading in China.
Inevitably when a new commodity is introduced, fake versions with the foreign label appear, selling at a lower price.
"The counterfeiters make huge profits because they don't have any quality standards to maintain or marketing costs, and our reputation suffers, especially if the goods leave the country," said a tool company representative, explaining that codes and warranties are constantly changed to enable dealers to identify the real thing.
The pirated goods range from Japanese cigarettes, soap and cellphone batteries to university diplomas, instant coffee, and even Kiwi fruit.
The Chinese government is co-operating with foreign multinationals, 28 of which this year formed the China Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition, in trying to counter the problem. The State Administration for Industry and Commerce, which acknowledges that counterfeiting has become a "major problem" in clothing, footwear, soft drinks, cosmetics, cigarettes, audiovisual items and pharmaceutical and agricultural products, said that in the first half of this year it prosecuted nearly 140,000 cases of fake, pirated, counterfeit and inferior products and recovered $64.5 million in economic losses for customers.
Chinese officials carry out frequent raids on underground factories, often identified by agents of foreign companies. This sort of pressure will likely intensify when China joins the World Trade Organisation next year, and Beijing is called to account for the loss to foreign companies through pirating of an estimated $20 billion annually.
In the meantime, many Chinese and foreign visitors are not complaining. The fake products are often of passable quality, and some may be genuine rejects with minor flaws. Silk Alley this weekend was, as usual, full of happy Europeans and Americans, buying up cheap gear with Gucci and Polo labels.
"I know they are not genuine but I'm delighted," said my friend, who bought three of the "Irish linen" blouses. "To me they are a good bargain."