Page 11 - Chiense TExtiles, MET MUSEUM Pub 1934

CHINESE TEXTILES

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTIO
The period we live in has witnessed the destruction of
many things that other men created and fostered with
the whole energy and passion of which human beings
are capable, and that once completed they held precious
and preserved until a young and impatient generation
destroyed them. Among these the fall from power of the
Emperor of China, who bore no less a title than the Son
of Heaven, with the repudiation of the tradition which
had been fostered for four thousand years or more until
it governed the lives of some four hundred millions of
human beings is the most tremendous cultural cata-
clysm in the history of the world. That gorgeous court
whose every ceremony was ordered by sumptuary law
and inextricably interwoven with the thought and life
of the race has been swept away, and we have left only
the inanimate shells, the robes these people wore, the
sterile rules of functions, and paintings, to give us an
understanding of what they were and how they lived.
Of these, the clothes, both ordinary and ceremonial,
are the quickest and most universal, for they appeal to
the instinct for adornment which seems natural to all
life, except that whereas the peacock spreads its tail and
the bright-winged moth flutters its wings with very little

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