Fine Arts China Textiles Silk Embroidery Thousand Bird Congratulatingm the Emperor
Silk
Although it was only one of many products traded, silk perhaps all-time encompasses the history of economic and cultural exchange across Eurasia along the "Silk" Road. The value of silk gave it particular appeal as a political and religious symbol, it was widely accustomed as a currency, and it served every bit a medium for artistic exchange. The complex history of silk is both well documented and in some ways but poorly known.
When nosotros speak of silk, in the first instance we mean that produced in Cathay, where some time probably in the quaternary millennium BCE, the Chinese learned the secret of unraveling the fine, rounded filament of the cocoons spun by a worm (Bombyx mori) which fed on the leaves of mulberry trees. There are other species of silk worms (for example, ones native to India), which produce a flatter filament or chew through the cocoon, leaving brusque fibers. It is the unbroken thread secreted past the mulberry worm which produces the finest fabrics. Silk is almost miraculous in its strength, light weight and insulating characteristics. Information technology provides a medium for writing and reproducing visual images; it is likely that the noesis of silk processing led to the discovery of how to make paper from institute fibers, another Chinese invention. Early examples of silk textile preserved in Chinese burials are decorated with "cheering symbols" suggesting that the material had religious significance connecting humans with the natural and supernatural world.
Discoveries in Egyptian tombs bespeak that some Chinese silk made its way to the Mediterranean world at least equally early on every bit thousand BCE. The routes of manual presumably were the same which developed more than extensively in later centuries, overland across the heart of Asia or via the coastal trade around Southeast Asia and into the Indian Ocean. In most histories though, the real beginning of the "Silk" Route dates to the establishment of the Xiongnu (Hun) nomadic empire on the northern borders of People's republic of china around 200 BCE and the development of a human relationship between the Xiongnu and the Han Imperial courtroom whereby large quantities of silk were shipped to the nomads to purchase peace forth the frontiers and ensure the supply of horses and camels for the Chinese armies. This manual of silk into Inner Asia established the pattern for later centuries, the nomads receiving both finished garments, embroidered or woven with Chinese designs, and raw silk yarn and unfinished cloth.
Hit evidence of the Xiongnu's appreciation for the silk has been uncovered in the royal burials at Noin-Ula in Mongolia, dating from the 2nd and outset century BCE. The fabrics discovered at that place include woolens and silk embroidered with silk thread or busy with silk appliques. Of particular involvement is the fact that some of the embroidery depicts faces of individuals who have distinctly "western" features, suggesting the possibility that even at this early on phase in the history of the Silk Road weavers from farther west were employed by the Xiongnu in processing the "raw materials" imported from China. Such a blueprint of the exchange of craftsmen involved in silk processing recurs throughout the history of the Silk Road. We cannot be sure who were the "westerners" depicted in the Noin-Ula embroidery, but at that place is substantial archaeological prove even from some centuries earlier documenting the presence in Inner Asia of people with "Indo-European" features and documenting too interactions between the Achaemenid Empire of Persia and the peoples of the steppe regions of Southern Siberia and Mongolia.
The quantities of Chinese silk shipped on a regular basis to the nomads down through the centuries were substantial, often tens of thousands of bolts of silk or packages of silk floss annually. Possibly the peak of this substitution was reached in the T'ang Dynasty in the 8th and early ninth centuries, when every bit much as one-7th of the authorities's almanac tax revenue paid in silk was being used to obtain horses for the regal army. The silk was important to the nomads, who acquired a taste for the luxury it provided. The process of building and maintaining a nomadic confederacy of the numerous tribes in the steppe was dependent in office on the power of the nomadic ruler to distribute on a regular basis to his allies and relatives luxurious silks. Nevertheless it seems quite articulate that the quantities of silk sent to the nomads far exceeded their needs. The surplus has to have provided one of the important ways for the nomads to acquire other appurtenances they sought past trading the silk to those further west. Thus it is no coincidence that Roman sources from around the beginning century BCE begin to indicate a sizeable influx of silk into the Roman Empire, within a century or and then following the initial agreements by which the Han supplied the Xiongnu with silk on an almanac basis. By the first century CE, Roman moralists complained that the sense of taste for the luxury (and for other luxuries imported from the east, such equally spices) was bankrupting the empire.
Another factor in the need for Chinese silk was the spread of Buddhism. From its ancestry in northern India around 500 BCE, Buddhism spread throughout south, key and east Asia. Of particular involvement for the history of the Silk Road are the paths which brought that faith into what is at present northern Pakistan, Transitional islamic state of afghanistan, the river valleys of Fundamental Asia and then the haven cities surrounding the Taklamakan Desert in Xinjiang. The Buddhist communities in these regions were sizeable: travellers such as the Chinese monks Faxian and Xuanzang in the middle of the first millennium CE reported several g monks at some of the oasis cities. Some scholars speak of the Buddhist "conquest" of People's republic of china, where the adherents of the organized religion at its tiptop would have numbered in the millions. Silk occupied an important identify in Buddhist rituals. Stupas (relic shrines) would be draped in silk and painted silk banners commissioned as donations by laymen. We see examples of these banners in the paintings and relief sculptures of the caves at Yungang and Dunhuang, and many of the striking banners themselves were preserved in the famous Library Cave at the Mogao temples near Dunhuang.
Donations of sizeable quantities of silk guaranteed that prayers would continue to be said for deceased individuals to ensure their favorable rebirth. Graves excavated along the northern Silk Road (for instance in the Turfan region) incorporate lists of objects which presumably were to accompany the dead. Yet, the large quantities of silk in some of the lists generally were non in fact buried with the dead only seem to correspond symbolic (and to a caste, real) donations. There was a belief that silk thread provided a link between this life and rebirth in one of the Buddhist heavens; the symbolic loads of the camels among mingqi, sculpted grave figurines, seem to include bundles of such thread. Buddhist imagery both of holy figures and of laymen beingness memorialized in the cavern temples of places such as Dunhuang, Kizyl and Bezeklik frequently preserve for us a precise visual record of material designs. While Xinru Liu'southward argument almost the causal relationship between the spread of Buddhism and the development of the Silk Road merchandise may exist somewhat forced, there is no denying that a growing demand for silk was connected with the spread of that faith.
Some take argued that the Chinese tried to keep the technique of silk production a closely guarded hugger-mugger. One of the near striking bits of evidence for this is a small painted board excavated by Aurel Stein at Dandan Oilik, in the Taklamakan Desert non far from the important center for jade export, Khotan. The painting depicts what Stein adamant was the story of the "silk princess," who smuggled silk worms out of China in her hairdo when she was sent off to marry the local ruler. The painting clearly is connected with silk production, since it shows some of the implements used; one effigy is a possible "god of silk," depicted separately in another of the paintings found by Stein at Dandan Oilik. Whether or not the story of the silk princess is true, there is good reason to believe that silk production did begin in Key Asia by the second or third century CE. A silk industry also developed in the Persian Sasanian Empire, which was founded at the commencement of the third century. Fabrics produced by the Sasanians and Sogdians (the inhabitants of merchant metropolis states in the region effectually today'south Samarkand) were woven with designs based on before Persian ones, designs which then would exist emulated all the way from Kingdom of spain to People's republic of china.
By the sixth century, silk product was established in the Byzantine Empire. Co-ordinate to Byzantine sources, the silk worms had been smuggled from the Eye Due east by monks--probably Nestorian Christians--who hid them in their staffs. Silk production and trade in Byzantium and Christian Europe had a shut connectedness with the Church, analogous to what we notice in the Buddhist earth. Clerics would wear silk garments, silk would exist used for chantry cloths, and silks were preserved in church treasuries. Information technology is largely thanks to some of these pieces that we tin can larn well-nigh silk produced in regions such equally the Middle East, where climate conditions have not favored preservation of the fabric. In Byzantium, as in China, silk production was closely regulated by government prescript. Sumptuary laws (that is, ones which determined what people of varying status were entitled to wear) were important in maintaining the elaborate hierarcies of these imperial courts. In the case of Byzantium, equally much equally annihilation the regulation had to do non with silk itself, but specifically with the silk dyed in the "regal purple." Color and/or design were an integral part of the symbolic condition of wearing silk.
The farther spread of silk industry and consumption from the Middle E on through the W is continued with the ascent of Islam, since the early Muslim governments created conditions favorable to economic development and widely ranging international trade. Muslim merchants replaced the Sogdians on the routes of Inner Asia and established big communities in the main cities of China. The Muslim conquest of Spain brought silk manufacture to the Iberian Peninsula in the eighth century. In the Mediterranean earth, Jewish merchants played a key part in the silk trade of the Islamic lands. The weaving industries of the Middle East (Syrian arab republic, for instance, was an important textile centre) revived and expanded. Islamic rule in North India was probably responsible for the establishment there by the twelfth century of the production of significant mulberry silk product alongside of the existing silk industry based on the native silkworm. As Xinru Liu has suggested, in the Islamic world the use of silk was not so closely restricted as it was in Byzantium or in China. Wearing of silk garments past the elite was widespread, irrespective of rank. What the Islamic governments tended to control, through what was known as the tiraz arrangement, was the weaving in silk of the Standard arabic inscriptions with the rulers' names, which busy the borders of textiles.
With so many centers of silk product across Eurasia by the terminate of the start millennium CE, one might think that the demand for silk produced in Red china would take disappeared. We know, still, that right down to the Mongol conquest in the thirteenth century, us on the northwest borders of China continued to receive large quantities of Chinese silk, at least some of which must have been traded to the West. In fact, it seems that most of the centers of product in the Due west did not supply enough to see demand there. Moreover, at that place were always issues of quality, price and fashion which might support demand for the imported product. The Mongol Empire created what historically were the all-time weather e'er for the overland trade, as accounts such as that of Marco Polo certificate. Italian merchants were involved in the China merchandise, and the development of a flourishing silk industry in Italy in part was thanks to the availability of inexpensive Chinese raw silk. Under the Mongols, silk production in the Caspian provinces of northern Iran also expanded. Imports from that region to the Mediterranean earth increasingly were preferred to those from China which often were damaged in the long transit by camel caravan.
The Mongol courts developed a particular gustation for a aureate-embroidered silk known as nasij, the techniques of whose production originated in the Middle East. The fame of this "Tartar" cloth spread both east and westward. Chingis Khan'south invasion of Central Asia in 1219 seems to have been occasioned by a dispute involving trade. 1 important product the Muslim merchants brought to the Mongol court was the textile produced presumably in Key Asia and Persia. Among the meaning activities of the Mongol rulers was to conscript craftsmen from areas they conquered and otherwise to encourage or require technical experts to serve them in regions far from their homes. Every bit sources such as Marco Polo relate, colonies of weavers from the Middle East were established in northern Red china. There presumably their techniques of embroidery combined with Chinese traditions of silk industry to produce the most sought-subsequently textiles. A like blueprint of conscription has been documented for the reign of Tamerlane,the Mongols' successor in Central Asia in the belatedly fourteenth century, who populated his capital Samarkand with merchants and craftsmen, including weavers from Damascus.
By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the traditional overland trade began to be undercut by political disorders in Central Asia, the focus of European demand for silk shifted to suppliers other than People's republic of china. A noteworthy example of state support for the silk industry was that of Safavid Persia, especially in the time of its most famous ruler, Shah Abbas I (1587-1629). He promoted the silk manufacture, the management of which was largely in the hands of Armenians whose commercial center had been moved by the Shah to a suburb of his capital Isfahan. The Dutch and English competed at the shah's court in the early seventeenth century for command of the Iranian silk exports. While hostilities between Safavid Islamic republic of iran and the Ottoman Empire often interrupted the silk trade and forced the Europeans to seek roundabout routes (even to the n, up the Volga River and through Muscovite Russian federation), eventually establishment of peaceful relations between the two empires ensured that the trade could continue along the historically important overland route to Aleppo and the Mediterranean as well equally across Anatolia to the important port of Izmir (Smyrna). The Ottomans themselves developed a silk manufacture in western Anatolia effectually Bursa, which to this twenty-four hours is nonetheless a middle of silk product.
The refinement of mechanized weaving in the industries of the Westward ultimately would have an affect on product techniques in the East, since mechanized looms required that raw silk come across sure standards of uniformity and quality. Once the requirements of European importers could again be met past Chinese producers, Chinese exports to Europe revived. This process of adaptation by the producers to importers' demands is coordinating to that which nosotros meet in the Chinese porcelain industry, when it began to produce the shapes and designs which were most sought in the markets of the W.
Given such a complex history of silk production and trade, information technology is non surprising that determining directions of "influence" on artistic gustation in silk fabrics can be quite difficult. One example is the widespread depiction of animals in medallions or roundels, a characteristic that probably traces its origins to ancient Persia. Fabrics with such designs were produced in Key Asia and the Middle East in the early centuries of the get-go millennium CE. They became popular in Cathay especially in the T'ang menses, when in that location was a substantial interest in exotica imported from the Westward. Some of the most striking examples of textiles with such "centre eastern" designs are preserved in the famous royal treasure house in Nihon, the Shosoin. Both in Red china and on the far western end of the Silk Route, such designs and then were incorporated into locally woven fabrics and continued to be produced for several centuries. Often the cloths preserved in the cathedral treasuries of the West comprise such hitting imagery of lions, peacocks, and hunting scenes. Churchmen seem to accept cared little virtually the fact that imported silk might as well deport Standard arabic inscriptions with Islamic invocations. Silk then was a medium for cultural and artistic exchange which transcended political and religious barriers. Where the weavers themselves moved freely across cultural borders, indeed we may never be able to decide for certain the origins of the pieces of silk which embody the romance and history of the Silk Road.
-- Daniel C. Waugh
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Source: https://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/exhibit/trade/silkae.html
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