Yangjiang, and what can actually be said

Xinzuo is a knife maker in Yangjiang, in Guangdong, a city that describes itself as the capital of knives and scissors in China and has been making blades at scale for a very long time. The company's own name in Chinese is 信作.

Most brand pages on this site open with a founding year. This one cannot, honestly. Xinzuo publishes no dated corporate history anywhere. The hardest date available is a United States trademark filing in November 2016 that declares first commercial use on 30 September 2016. Their YouTube handle suggests 2014. We would rather say that than round it up into a heritage story.

What Xinzuo does publish, in detail, is how a knife is made, and that turns out to be the more useful thing.

Twelve steps, and the one they skip

Their process page runs to twelve numbered stages, and it starts somewhere specific: the blade shape is cut from a steel sheet, by laser for short runs or by press for long ones.

That is worth understanding rather than glossing. Xinzuo is a blade maker, not a steel mill. The clad Damascus billet is rolled by a mill and Xinzuo cuts, hardens, grinds and finishes it. This is how nearly every knife at every price is made, including most of the Japanese ones we sell, whose VG10 clad stock comes from a specialist steelworks rather than the knife maker's own forge. The pattern in the steel is real, not etched on. It just is not hammered out by hand, and nobody's is at this price.

The stage they lead on is the heat treatment: vacuum hardening followed by a deep freeze. The vacuum furnace keeps oxygen away from the steel so the surface does not scale or decarburise, and the cryogenic step converts retained austenite, which is the metallurgical way of saying the blade ends up harder and more stable than a plain quench would leave it. Polishing runs in two stages, a water mill then a rubber wheel.

The steels, named properly

Xinzuo's core steel on the Damascus lines is 10Cr15CoMoV, a cobalt and molybdenum stainless that they run at around 60 HRC on the 67 layer knives. It is frequently described elsewhere as a Chinese equivalent of VG10. That comparison is other people's, not Xinzuo's, and you will not see VG10 written anywhere on one of their knives or ours.

Above it the range moves to powdered steels, and the ZDP-189 blades in the Zhen series use one of the hardest stainless steels made anywhere.

In 2025 Xinzuo launched a Star Series developed with Mauro Uliassi, the three Michelin star chef in Senigallia, built around a 73 layer Damascus powder steel. They also run a flagship store in Rome, which is not where anyone expects a Yangjiang knife company to open a shop.

What we carry

Four Damascus families and a composite one, in the usual Japanese shapes.

B37 Lan and X01 Flagship in 73 layer Damascus, across chef's, santoku, nakiri, bread, fillet, utility and paring.

PM8O Zhen in 67 layer Damascus, including a honesuki. X05Z Zhen in ZDP-189.

And under the HEZHEN name, the X05C Retro in a 37 layer copper Damascus, which is the best looking knife on this page by a distance, and the PM8S Retro, a three layer composite that is the sensible one to buy if you want the geometry without the pattern.