Page 19 - Chiense TExtiles, MET MUSEUM Pub 1934

CHINESE TEXTILES
cellent. Besides these T'ang fragments which like the
Han are comparatively recent discoveries, a great wealth
of pieces is to be found in the Shosoin at Nara, a famous
repository of T'ang art. The collection was assembled in
the eighth century by the Emperor Shomu, and it con- I l
tains a preponderance of Chinese material. Illustrations r
of most of the pieces in this collection have been pub-
lished in the Toyei Shuko but the technical descriptions
are so brief that they are practically useless.
The textiles produced in periods subsequent to the
T'ang are scattered all over the world, and no scholar has
ever attempted to correlate the facts about them. Sung
brocades are preserved in the mountings of paintings
and in the coverings of Japanese tea utensils, and a small
llilmher of pictorial k' ~ ssii (silk tapestry) kakemono
exist Yuan and Ming dynasty textiles, mostly made-to-
order church vestments, may be seen among the church
treasures and in museums in Europe, their designs often
incongruous mixtures of Christian saints set among the
phoenixes, the spotted deer, and the floral motives of
China. There are not many other textiles which we can
safely call Ming except some few examples of brocade,
velvet, and k'o ssu to be found in both Oriental and
Western collections.
Textiles of the Ch'ing dynasty are those with which
we are most familiar and their number is legion. They
include practically all of the weaves of earlier periods
but few, if any, new weaves. Variations of the basic
weaves there are, of course, and innovations in color
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