Page 14 - Chiense TExtiles, MET MUSEUM Pub 1934

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
All the ancient writers agree in saying that Yao, Chun, and
Y u were clothed in simple cloth in summer and skin in winter.
The silk which the wife of Huang Ti had discovered had disap-
peared. The celebrated and learned author of the Slwo Wen has
proved that all the characters into the formation of which the
ideogram for silk enters do not go back before the Chou dynasty,
and that all those that refer to the clothes of the ancients are only
composed of the ideograms for hair and hemp.
From the Han dynasty on we have more information
about the weaving of silk, chiefly because Europe was
by that time buying it. In the second century B. c. the
Chinese became known to the Graeco-Roman world as
the Ser, or Seres, the people from whom was obtained
the precious fabric known by the Greek-formed adjec-
tive Serika, or Serik, from which is derived the term silk.
A little earlier the name China had also come into use,
beginning in the brief but violent Ch'in dynasty (which
preceded the Han) as Sin or Chin and growing through
the forms Sines and Sinico to "China." This name was
first heard of in the West through the Greek geograph-
ers of the Ptolemaic school. However, for centuries the
scholars of Europe made no connection between the
Seres and the inhabitants of the country known as
China, thinking of them as two distinct peoples, and it
was not until the time of the explorations of the Jesuits
in the seventeenth century that the error was corrected.
Our study of textiles begins with the Han dynasty,
since reliable documentary evidence goes back no fur-
ther, and it is not confined to textiles alone, for we have
also the testimony of the figures in the reliefs from the
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