CHINA ARQUEOLOGIA golden-age-chinese-archayeolog

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