Page 324 - The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology: Celebrated Discoveries from the People’s Republic of China

1123 (196 centimeters long and opening to a width of
detail
276 centimeters), trimmed with lozenge-patterned
jin brocade at the cuffs, neck, and lower hem,
composed the sixth layer of the Mashan tomb
occupant's body wrappings.
The robe's design of real and imaginary animals
embroidered in various colors — reddish brown,
brown, yellowish green, yellowish brown, black, gray,
and a radiant orange — is the only gauze-weave
embroidery from the tomb; the other embroideries
were stitched on a tabby ground. The robe is evi-
dence of a demand for intricate motifs, executed in
luxurious materials, that could only be created by
hand. Although other fabrics from the tomb testify
to remarkable advances in weaving, such delicate
patterns of rich color and material diversity could
not have been produced on a loom, nor could a
loom have produced the lively and formally bal-
anced rhythmic patterns of the hand embroidery. 3
Gauze fabrics (luo) are light, very delicate, and
almost transparent weaves with many netlike holes.
(Luo originally meant a net for catching birds, a

112 meaning transferred to the gauze fabric with its
hexagonal holes.) The complex weaving technology
a. Embroidered luo gauze weave sleeve of gauze weaves can be traced back as early as the
3
4
Length ii4 (44 A), width at cuff 32 (12 V 2), Shang period. Such translucent and lustrous silk
width at shoulder 49 (19 'A) was a luxury clothing material in China, and, a few
centuries later, in classical Rome, where its price
b. Fragment of jin brocade body shroud
5
3
Length 73 (28 / 4), width 50 (19 A) matched that of gold.
A single pattern-unit measures 29.5 centimeters
c. Jin brocade band with woven "pagoda" by 21 centimeters. The silk threads used for the
pattern chain stitches range between 0.2 and 0.4 milli-
5
Length 84 (33 ft), width 23 (9 ft) meters in diameter; the stitches themselves vary
from 2 to 2.4 millimeters in length and from i to
Late Warring States Period
(between 340 and 278 BCE) 1.2 millimeters in width. The excavation report
describes this four crossed-warp plain gauze
From Tomb i at Mashan, Jiangling, Hubei Province
(sijingjiao suluo) as a weave composed of groups of
Jingzhou Prefecture Museum, Hubei Province four comparatively coarse (0.15 millimeters) warp
threads repeating the weave structure over the
1
6
This sleeve (cat. ma) was originally part of an entire width of the fabric. The weft thread was
unlined robe tailored from grayish white silk gauze fine and untwisted. The warp and weft threads were
and embroidered with a complex design of dragons, given an S-twist of 3.000 to 3.500 turns per meter,
phoenixlike birds, and tigers (longfenghu wenxiu) which added to the elasticity needed in the weaving
against a background of lavish, almost zoomorphic, process. In Han and pre-Han times the four
2
flowering tendrils. The partially damaged robe crossed-warp threads consist of two fixed ends

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