Page 346 - Chinese Art, Vol II By Stephen W. Bushell

100 CHINESE ART.

view of the Taoist paradise. These pictures, for the most part,
date from the early part of the reign of Ch'ien Lung, about the
middle of the eighteenth century.
After this cursory notice of flowered velvets, brocades and
woven silks, we pass on now to embroideries (hshi hua), where
the work is all done by hand with the needle, without the aid of
the loom or any other kind of machinery. The Chinese are skilful
embroiderers and devote infinite patience and ingenuity to the
task, stretching the material upon a frame which is placed on
pivots, the design being first sketched on the plain surface. There
are many styles of work, with silk thread, braid, or floss silks, and
every variety of stitch, plain or knotted ; in one of the most finished
styles the design is made the same on both sides of the stuff, the
ends of the threads being neatly concealed. There are books
prepared for the use of the embroiderers, with woodcuts of con-
ventional designs and patterns, which contain all the ordinary
motives of decoration with their technical names attached. The many
sumptuary laws and restrictions in this connection have already
been alluded to. The embroidered robes worn by the emperor,
the empress, the princes, princesses and other court ladies, at
the different seasons of the year, and on various ceremonial occasions
were all remodelled in the reign of Ch'ien Lung. A copy of an
MS. album painted at the time, and sealed with the imperial seal,
was brought from the Smnmer Palace of Yuan Ming Yuan ; and
many of the illustrations, complete in every detail, now hang on
the walls of the museum, where they are available for comparison,
and for the classification of the many official robes and their appen-
dages in the collection.
One of the embroidered imperial robes is exhibited in Fig. ii8.
It is of pale green satin, worked with satin stitch in coloured silks
and laid, stitched down, gold thread ; the collar and cuffs are of
dark blue satin, similarly worked ; it is hned with pale blue silk
damask. The lower border is worked with a line of waves with