Page 322 - The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology: Celebrated Discoveries from the People’s Republic of China

FIG. i. Brocade bands
securing the wrapped body.

patterned silk garments, yet she was buried with thirty-five astonishingly well-preserved pieces
of silk clothing, shrouds, and other articles of excellent quality. Her burial outfit is the earliest
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known example of its kind from China, and it ranks among the best and most spectacular early
textile finds ever made.
The body was tightly wrapped in layer on layer of shrouds and garments (figs, i and 2).
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Over a pair of open-seat trousers (the earliest example of underwear found in China ), she
was dressed in, successively: a skirt; a lined robe; a short, embroidered gown; and a lozenge-
patterned shenyi (the long, padded robe worn by aristocratic men and women for ritual and
official ceremonies) (cat. H2a). Dressed in the garments that she would have worn in life, her
upper and lower body were covered with special burial textiles (mao and sha), and she was
wrapped in a silk cloth, two shrouds (qin) of embroidered and weave patterns; and a padded

coverlet of woven brocade 11 in a pattern depicting dancers and imaginary creatures (cat. H2b).
The coverlet was secured by nine woven silk brocade bands in the so-called pagoda pattern
(cat. H2c), wrapped in a shroud, and, finally, covered with another padded coverlet.
Several features are striking but unexplained. The woman's arms were fixed at breast level
with a ribbon, her thumbs were tied to each other with red cord, and her big toes were tied
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with yellow cord; the ribbons and cords may been intended to keep the body intact. Her
hands held small silk rolls, fastened with strings to her middle fingers. (The use of such black-
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and-crimson silk rolls is described as "hold tight" [wo] in the ancient ritual texts. ) Her face

321 I T E X T I L E S FROM M A S H A N , J I A N G L I N C