Silk is the stuff of commerce and clothing, a material for brilliantly decorating and finely protecting things, a medium for artists and some times a work of art itself. In China it also functioned as currency. It was an agricultural staple and a method of payment for taxes; it was used to purchase large items and even, at some points, government office. Silk was spun by peasants and often woven by noblewomen and eventually it was worn by both, as well as by men and women of every social class in between. Those who never wore it or had their houses furnished with it would have seen silk banners, decorations and costumes at local festivals and performances. Its presence in so many aspects of life gave rise to a high regard for silk as a raw product and also as an item of beauty. A goddess of sericulture existed as early as the Shang dynasty (c. 1500-c. 1050 Bc), and she was still worshipped, though in a different form, by the silk factory workers of nineteenth-century Shanghai. Within China, there were relatively few who encountered neither its production nor its consumption.

Outside China, silk became synonymous with the land that produced it, a land whose very name in ancient Rome - Serica - was born of the Latin for silk, sericum. From the third to the ninth century the trading of silk along the Silk Road not only delivered fine textiles through western Asia to the Mediterranean, but opened China to goods and particularly ideas from Central Asia and India. The most important of these was Buddhism, which became one of the three major religions in China. In the seventh and eighth centuries movement along the Silk Road consisted mainly of pilgrimage and commerce, and the trades in silk going westwards and Buddhist relics eastwards became inter twined. Between the tenth and fourteenth centuries silk was transported less far but was an important medium of exchange between the Chinese Song (960- dynasty and the states on her northern border, as well as a symbol of the power balances between them. By the sixteenth century the sale of silk, along with spices and porcelain, in exchange for silver from the New World drew China for the first time into the world economy. By the eighteenth century silk was a fabric desired over most of the Western world.

Silk thus represents China's external relations, yet it also articulates inter- regional contacts within the country, either by comparability of finds in different areas or through records of commercial transactions. For many of the periods covered in the following chapters, China was not a single state politically or ethnically, so that much of the discussion deals with silk in China rather than with silk that is necessarily Chinese. The elucidation of some of these regional distinctions through looking at one, albeit versatile and pervasive, commodity is indeed one of the aims of this book. Another is to consider the making and uses of a largely luxury item that had a role in art, religion and the economy, in order better to understand the social uses of goods in historical China. Both these aims are limited by the perishability of the material itself. Silk does not survive to the same extent as ceramics, metalwork or stone, and the result has been that historians and art historians of China have tended to over look it. However, silk is very much present in literature, and recent excavations both controlled and random have vastly increased the amount of real examples. It is hoped that this survey of the records and the remains will make it easier for everyone to include silk in their understanding and impressions of China.

MYTHS AND RITUALS

For centuries China was the only place where silkworms were domesticated and silk fabric was made. In most parts of the world it remained a mysterious, wonderful luxury, while in other regions, where the significance of mulberry plants to its production may have been understood, their cultivation proved difficult. In these circumstances silk gained a mythic element outside China, and the methods of silk production were considered a closely guarded secret. In fact there was an embargo on the export of the means to produce silk, and one of the legends surrounding it was recorded by the seventh-century monk Xuanzang: a Chinese princess who was to travel to Khotan to be married was warned by envoys that there were no mulberries or silkworms there; she therefore hid silk moth eggs and mulberry seeds in her headdress and went unchallenged across the border, to the delight of the king of Khotan who had long been seeking to make silk. Khotan is far west along the southern silk route, and a painted wooden plaque discovered at Dandan-oilik in that region depicts the legend.

Some of the mystery that prompted stories such as this was also felt within China, both at the level of rural religious belief and, in a different way, at the highest level of government. This is expressed in a wealth of fairytales and legends on the one hand, and on the other in imperial rituals recorded in the official histories. Oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang dynasty include characters that arguably relate to a silk spirit and it is generally thought that silk at that period was associated with royalty and ceremony. Later texts describing the rituals of the Zhou dynasty (c. 1050-221 Bc) mention official sericulture ceremonies, and many early texts ascribe the invention of silk to Lady Xiling, wife of the legendary Yellow Emperor who is supposed to have ruled from 2698 to 2598 BC. Her principal early rivals for the position of First Sericulturalist, LadyYuanyu and PrincessYu, seem finally to have been eclipsed by a reference in chapter seven of the history of the Sui dynasty (AD 589-618) to the 'empress offering a sacrifice to the First Sericulturalist, the goddess Lady Xiling From that period onwards Lady Xiling was the principal silk deity.

The institution and revival of silk ceremonies met with varied success in the Song, Ming and Qing dynasties, though throughout the latter two, Lady Xiling was remembered in a dedicated building within Beihai park to the north of the Forbidden City imperial compound in Beijing. There, the Hall of the Imperial Silkworm and the Altar of Silkworms were used for examining mulberry leaves that were then fed to the imperial silkworms, which were kept in stone houses along the outer wall of the silkworm hall. Images of sericulture were sometimes used to reinforce imperial patronage, most notably in the twelfth century when the academician Lou Shou's scroll of weaving processes, which was accompanied by pictures of ploughing, was annotated by the first empress of the Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279). Series of paintings known as illustrations of tilling and weaving' in fact became quite regularly produced as reminders of the agricultural base of China's prosperity. In 1696 the Kangxi emperor (r. 1662-1722) personally inscribed lines of poetry on a series of forty-six tilling and weaving pictures and issued the preface to the mulberry poem throughout the country. The title always used for these series of paintings is associated with the ancient phrase nan geng nu zhi (men plough, women weave) that summarizes the traditional division of labour. With the advent of industrialization in early modern China, weaving and embroidery were in fact also undertaken by men as well as women, although textile production was traditionally a female occupation; numerous poems lament the fatigue of guarding the silkworms round the clock at crucial periods in their development, the pain of fingers embroidering endlessly in cold weather, or the chagrin of seeing the glittering results of months of labour trailed through the mud in a single energetic outdoor opera performance.

It was probably in recognition of the domination of textile production by women that the First Sericulturalist was a female goddess, and that the ceremonies conducted in her honour were the only state rituals presided over by the empress rather than the emperor. The large number of popular silk deities were probably female for the same reason. These were particularly prolific in the big silk-producing areas at either end of the Yangzi River, in the western province of Sichuan and the coastal provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang in the east. In Sichuan a silkworm temple was established in AD 460, and it was also in that region that one of the principal popular goddesses emerged. Known as the silk worm horse maiden, she is first recorded in the Tang dynasty (618-906) and derives from a transformation myth of silkworm, horse and a woman who turns into a silkworm. The depiction of the goddess is conventionally a woman accompanied by a horse. The legend and the goddess became widespread and particularly popular in the Jiangnan region, which comprises the provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang. In the Ming and Qing dynasties her festival, regarded as her birthday, was fixed on 12 December and was celebrated with papercuts and clay figures of the horse and maiden image. In addition to legends celebrating the invention of silk and the metamorphosis of the silkworm, another major group of deities was identified with the successful rearing of silkworms. This included a male deity, the black-robed god.

Two focal points of popular worship of silk deities were, unsurprisingly, located in the central Jiangnan region, at Hangzhou, which was the site of one of the imperial workshops of the Ming and Qing dynasties, and at Huzhou, which was renowned in the same period for producing some of the finest silks available. At the Lingyin temple in Hangzhou, offerings and thanks were made for successful silk harvests. At Hanshan near Huzhou, a pagoda was erected in the eleventh century on the site of a ninth-century temple; it was decorated with carved images of the silk goddess and it had the reputation of being visited by her each year during the Qingming festival. Offerings to the silk goddess or goddesses at the imperial altars and at the popular shrines demonstrate the importance attached to silk and sericulture, whether as a foundation for a prosperous country or as a central part of rural life. In each case the worship derives from its agricultural significance.
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SILK IN LITERATURE

Silk is the subject of specialist texts and an embellishment in literary ones, reflecting its dual roles of agricultural product and sumptuous luxury. Both are evident from the very beginnings of Chinese writing, though they are not distinguished in the Shang oracle bone inscriptions, while the late Zhou period Shi jing (Book of Odes), despite being the earliest anthology of songs or poems, mentions the mulberries as much as the fine raiment. The earliest silk-related treatise is a section on mulberry planting in a book by Si Shengzhi of the Western Han (206 BC-AD 9) dynasty. An Eastern Han (AD 23-220) work includes a calendar for the silk production process, but the other two silk texts ascribed to the period are lost. In fact, many of the early writings on sericulture are known only because their titles are preserved in later compilations, while the texts themselves are lost. The fact that they are listed is some measure of the importance in which they were held; the survival of the text would be a greater one, but the circumstances and individual preferences that determined whether a work be passed down or why it perished cannot always be fathomed. One of the most complete of the early works is the Can shu (Book on Sericulture) of 1090 written by Qin Guan (1049-1100) at a time when printing and the compilation of manuals and catalogues were first becoming established. His book deals with silkworm breeding in the north in Shandong province and the spread of sericulture to the western regions, and was much cited by later writers. Four agricultural books of the Jin dynasty (1115-1234) are lost, as are several from the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1279-1368), but those that survive include sections on dyeing and loom construction. Such highly practical titles also dominate the Ming and Qing works on silk, though in the eighteenth century dozens of works appeared on mulberry planting and silkworm breeding.

Many of these are included in larger works on agriculture, and the rural and economic dimension of silk is possibly the reason that it alone of China's fine products is the subject of so much writing. Though the development of the silk industry is in some ways paralleled by that of porcelain for example, and both were highly practical materials with luxury possibilities, the associations of silk with the land and with rural household production make it quite separate from other manufactured goods, the making of which is not documented. These associations also mean that it was primarily a functional commodity of better than necessary quality rather than an artefact that might acquire the status of a work of art, though this did, within a limited group of silks, apply at some points. Its fragility also denied silk the possibilities of status through successive ownership. However, this obsolescence perhaps meant that silk contributed more to a sense of occasion and atmosphere, in the way that food or wine or the weather might.

The colours and textures of silk clearly evoked memories and defined opulence, according to poetry and prose throughout China's literary history. While early references to silk clothing may have been included to denote the grandeur of the wearer, silk bed covers and curtains appear frequently in poems of the Tang and Song dynasties dealing with romantic parting and loss. In the novels of the Ming and Qing dynasties, the fine gauzes and twills of furnishings and the satins and embroideries of the characters' clothes are a constant motif, and nowhere more so than in the eighteenth-century Honglou meng (A Dream of Red Mansions, also known as The Story of the Stone). Architectural materials are not mentioned, articles of daily life only referred to in passing, but amongst all the physical descriptions, allusions to silk are surpassed only by details of things to eat. Food of course is of great significance in China's history as well as being one of the country's cultural contributions to the world. Silk as an agricultural staple and fine consumable may be compared to refined regional cuisines, while as a technological achievement and manufactured product it equals the porcelain and lacquer for which China is equally renowned. What distinguishes it from these other cultural achievements is its pervasion of rural, urban, religious, imperial, artistic and economic life over three millennia; the role of silk in all these contexts is the subject of the chapters that follow.

I. FROM FILAMENTS TO FINERY: THE DEVELOPMENT OF SILK PRODUCTION IN EARLY CHINA

Silk was used in China six thousand years ago. Other textiles existed, such as ramie produced from nettles, hemp from mulberry, and abutilon from mallow, and some may even predate silk. As these other textiles derived directly from plants and did not entail the domestication of animals in order to obtain the raw material, their production processes must have been simpler, in the initial stages at least. The primacy of the silkworm however provides an additional source of evidence for the production of silk. Fragile and fugitive as any textile, silk survives in even smaller quantities than the cloths listed above, which are more prevalent amongst prehistoric textile remains in China. In fact most of our understanding of fabrics in this early period is implied by implements rather than presented by artefacts. The silkworm is furthermore depicted in models of clay and stone, and as ornament on vessels of ivory and ceramic, providing a pictorial record that suggests large quantities and a symbolic significance that the slender physical remains cannot infer.

NEOLITHIC

The tools of textile production include needles for splitting up beaten or de-gummed fibres, brooms for silk reeling, spindles for twisting fibres into yarn, weights for twining warp threads, shuttles for weaving, battening blades for beating cloth down as it is woven, and looms with all their component parts. These represent various stages in the development of textile technology, and have been excavated from sites in both north and east China.

For example, the hand spindle for twisting yarn found at Cishan in Hebei province is dated to approximately 5000 Bc; later spindles have been found at Hemudu in Zhejiang (where there was also a primitive backstrap loom), at Banpo and Jiangzai in Shaanxi, and in the far northwest at Ledu Liuwan. Pottery weights have been found at a number of sites, while bone needles, shut- ties and battening blades are included amongst the finds from almost all the Neolithic sites that have been excavated.
However these early implements are not cloth-specific, and it is not possible to know which were used in the production of silk as opposed to other textiles. Representations of silkworms and cocoons provide more direct evidence, but are scarce. The earliest depiction of what are probably silkworms, carved confronting one another on the side of an ivory basin, come from the Neolithic culture of Hemudu (c. 5000-c. 3000 BC), which occupied the area of present- day northern Zhejiang province on the east coast of China. The site, in Yuyao county, also yielded high-quality black pottery with incised designs of plants and animals, including wild boar, as well as large quantities of animal remains, and spades, blades, spinning whorls and other implements made from wood and from a variety of animal bones. Building remains display a high standard of carpentry and use of the mortise and tenon joint, and Hemudu is recognized as one of the major cultures of Neolithic China. The incised ivory basin is datable to around 4900 BC, placing it amongst the earliest evidence for silk.

From much further north, from Wangxicun in Shanxi province, a pottery model of a silk cocoon shows that silkworms were also reared in the late phase of the Yangshao culture in the third millennium BC while further north still, at Shaguotun in Liaoning province, a marble carving of an insect assumed to be a silkworm is dated to around 2000 BC.

Silk itself is not much more evident than these representations. The very earliest silk fabric has been dated to the middle of the fourth millennium BC, to approximately 3630 BC, and comes from Qingtaicun at Rongyang in Henan province, in central north China. The fragments are so badly deteriorated that, although the fabric is identifiable as silk, little can be determined about its weave or structure; it appears to have served as wrapping for a child's body. From a site on the east coast again, at Wuxing Qianshanyang in present-day Zhejiang and datable to about one millennium later at approximately 2570 BC, comes the fullest evidence of silk in the Neolithic period. The find yielded about two hundred bamboo utensils and within one of these were placed three types of silk, surviving as fragments of a silk belt, silk threads, and a piece of woven silk fabric. The belt was braided in a herringbone weave, and there were several lengths of silk thread. The piece of woven silk, on investigation, has been shown to comprise warp and weft yarns of straight, smooth, untwisted silk fibres reeled from at least twenty cocoons. The fragment is small - 2.4 by 1 centimetre - but with a warp density of fifty-three threads per centimetre and a weft density of fifty-nine, it is close to the specifications of some modern silk fabrics in its compactness.

What was the Neolithic culture that produced a textile of this quality, and how was it achieved? Like the Hemudu culture that preceded it in the same region, the Liangzhu culture (c. 3300-2250 Bc) of which Qianshanyang formed a part was amongst the most technologically and artistically sophisticated of Neolithic China, and as a society appears to have had well-developed agriculture and an established political system. Liangzhu artefacts are characterized by fine jades in the forms of blades and axes, by elaborate objects of unidentified function but probably, like the blades, ceremonial in purpose, as well as by smaller carvings, and also by fine pottery in slender, often openwork forms and with polished surfaces. Some of the ornament on these artefacts, and in particular the face designs seen on jades, may well have provided a source for aspects of the decoration cast on the ritual bronzes that characterized China's first documented dynasty, the Shang.

THE SHANG DINASTY (C. 1500-C. 1050 BC)

The representational and real evidence for silk in the Neolithic period is augmented in the Shang dynasty by a form of written evidence, and by trace impressions on ritual objects placed in burials. Some archaeological evidence overlaps the late Neolithic period and the early dynastic era, which is identified by some as the Xia dynasty, yet the Shang is still widely regarded as the first historical period in China. The Shang political centre was in north China, where Zhengzhou and Anyang in Henan province have yielded ancient cities comprising palaces and residential areas within city walls, and workshops and royal cemeteries beyond them. Shang royal burials, accompanied by slaves and animals, included quantities of elaborate cast bronze ritual vessels, and also items in jade, ivory and bone. Bronze vessels were not confined to the Shang capitals however, and there are substantial contemporary finds from city sites, hoards and burials far to the south and west. In addition to the social, political and economic organization that must have supported the production and use of such bronzes, the Shang is further defined by the use of script, known as oracle bone script, which is the earliest writing system in East Asia.

Oracle bones, usually the scapula of an ox or sheep, or the underbelly or shell of a turtle, were used for divination. Questions were incised on them in a script which is in some instances but by no means exclusively pictorial; a hot needle was then applied to a hollow drilled near the inscription, and the resulting cracks were interpreted to provide an answer. The answer may or may not be inscribed on the bone. Oracle bones do not appear at the early Shang dynasty sites of Erlitou and Erligang at Zhengzhou, but in the early twentieth century were found in large quantities at Anyang. More than two thousand oracle bone characters have been identified, of which about half have been translated. These include several graphs that appear to allude to the mulberry tree, silk, the silkworm and a silk goddess or spirit. The forms of the character are not fixed and the meanings are not always clear and precise. For example, silk may be represented by two lines entwined in an elongated figure of eight, or by small ovals linked vertically by short straight line sections. Characters including the graph for silk may mean silk thread, silk cloth, or gems made of silk. Other characters still, which describe textiles but do not include the silk graph, have been understood as types of silk fabric. Altogether, more than one hundred instances of silk related characters have been identified on the oracle bones of the late Shang dynasty. Some should be regarded, like many other such characters, as referring to names, either of places or of groups of people; indeed the place names imply that silk weaving was practised throughout an area encompassing the whole of Henan and parts of Shandong, Hebei, Shanxi and Anhui. Taken together the inclusion in the script of words for the raw materials and finished products of silk manufacture imply the significance of sericulture in Shang society.

The appearance of these words on divinatory inscriptions suggests that the significance of silk lay in its prestige rather than its prevalence, for Anyang, the only site where they have been found, was certainly the most ordered and prosperous of Shang sites known to date, and has long been regarded as the metropolitan capital' of China from the thirteenth to the eleventh century BC. The inscriptions do frequently mention everyday topics such as health and weather, but also the king's military campaigns, hunting exploits and rituals. It is in the context of rituals that the silkworm and silk spirit are mentioned, marking the start of an association with religious practice; in the Shang dynasty, ritual to the ancestors and spirits was closely allied with political power and practice showing that silk occupied the same sphere as bronzes. Some oracle texts deal with feminine or everyday subjects such as childbirth and illness, but it is likely that even these referred to the wellbeing of individuals within, or associated with, the palace.

A good deal of information recorded on oracle bones was confirmed by one of the richest and most complete, and also most informative, of Shang sites, the tomb at Anyang of the royal consort Fu Hao, which included traces of silk preserved on ritual bronzes. The tomb contained more than 750 jades and almost 500 bronzes, amongst them the largest and most impressive of Shang ritual vessels. Taking the wine vessels as example, we see that of the fifty-three in gu form, that is a tall waisted beaker with flaring mouth, four bear remains suggesting they were wrapped in silk, while a further four show traces of hemp cloth. As for the three-legged pouring vessels (jue), a single one of the forty in Fu Hao's tomb bears silk traces, though altogether ten have remnants of woven material. As textiles are so perishable, and the conditions that create textile impression on metal are so haphazard, it is likely that all the vessels were wrapped before being placed in the tomb, even though only about one tenth of them show evidence of it. Jades were also wrapped and one bears the remains of two different types of silk as well as some hemp cloth, showing that objects were wrapped in several layers. Two types of weave, as well as a vegetable fibre, are also discernible on a bronze yue axe in the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities in Stockholm, which was the first textile wrapped Shang ritual object to be analysed and published.

Since this evidence of silk occurs in association with ceremonial objects in the royal tomb of one of the most powerful people in the S hang kingdom at its zenith - for the reign of Fu Hao's king, Wu Ding (died c. 1189 Bc) was the strongest of the dynasty and he remarkably invested his consorts with civil or, in the case of Fu Hao, military power - it is clear that the context could be no more exclusive or elevated.

Evidence from elsewhere in China in the thirteenth to eleventh centuries BC however shows that silk consumption was not in fact confined to the Shang metropolitan ruling elite. The late Shang capital Anyang lay in the area of present-day Henan province; in neighbouring Hebei province, to the northeast, bronze weapons and vessels from a tomb group at Gaocheng Taixicun also display the use of silk. Traces of fine textile were found on three gu beakers, four jue (another type of wine vessel), three halberds and two tools. The traces on one of the gu beakers have been closely examined: of the five different types, one is too degraded to be identifiable, three are simple tabby weaves of varying densities, and the fifth is a gauze. The excavators suggest, on the strength of the context, that in some cases the silk fabric was placed as a cover on top of the bronzes and that in others it was wrapped around the exterior, as with most examples. Further evidence of silk occurs in a slightly less usual context at this site, for the tombs included accompanying slave or servant burials, bound at the hands or feet, indicating that the principal occupants, if not royal like Fu Hao, were certainly members of a local elite who could command sacrificial burials. The slave burials included narrow rectangular implements that have been identified as battening blades for beating down cloth as it is woven. This implies that although offerings were made by aristocratic women to a silk deity, the role of such women in silk production was probably supervisory and that it was women slaves who carried out the spinning and weaving. The evidence of social stratification that these accompanying burials provide shows that Taixicun, despite being a small site and apparently having no city wall, was of some consequence, and that it shared cultural practices with the metropolitan area.

Comparable silk traces on bronzes unearthed at Xin'gan in Jiangxi province are however at a distance of some 1500 kilometres south of the Shang 'capital', sufficiently removed to belong to an apparently independent bronze-using culture, in which the occurrence of silk provides one more means of assessing the extent of that independence, or the nature of the region's relationship with the metropolitan area.

The Shang dynasty tomb at Xin'gan is, after Fu Hao's tomb, the second richest early Bronze Age site known in China. It contained 232 bronze weapons and fifty-nine bronze vessels, a proportional relationship which links it with the non-royal tombs at Anyang, the royal ones containing a higher proportion of vessels. Sixteen bronzes bore traces of juan or plain weave silk, and several were also enveloped in coarse cloth; both types of textile were wrapped in several layers around the bronze. It is not known whether the silk was locally produced or imported into the region, but it is interesting that the practice of wrapping valuable tomb goods was carried out at Xin'gan as in the Shang metropolitan tombs.

The evidence of bronze, in both its styles and its technology, in fact suggests that both Anyang and Xin'gan developed from a common earlier culture at Erligang in Zhengzhou, Henan province. Contemporary with this early Shang site was a southern city, Panlongcheng in Hubei, which may well have been the link between Erligang in the north and Xin'gan in the south. These early Shang sites however show no evidence of silk, though the later stages of Panlongcheng have yielded one jade, a handle-shaped object, with traces of coarse cloth wrapping.

Analysis of bronze composition links Xin'gan with the most recently discovered of the major Shang period sites, Sanxingdui at Guanghan in Sichuan province, where the casting technology of bronze and the presence of a rammed-earth city wall point however not to Xin'gan practice, but once again to early Shang culture in the north at Erlitou and Erligang. From Sanxingdui, Xin'gan in Jiangxi would have been accessible along the Yangzi River while the mountainous route northeast to Henan, well known in later eras as a trade route from Sichuan and most famously in the Tang dynasty (AD 618-906) as the emperor's escape route in the opposite direction, westwards from the central capital, would have been harsher and more difficult.

Silk however plays no part in documenting these relationships, as none at all has been found at Guanghan Sanxingdui; its use is implied by the costumes depicted on large bronze figures from the site, and their role in assessing Shang dress is discussed below, but the particular nature of the burial of goods at Sanxingdui forms one of its clear distinctions from the central area, and precludes the use of expensive wrappings. The Sanxingdui site consists not of tombs, but of two rectangular pits, filled with large bronzes including extraordinary heads, gilded masks and figures of semi-human form, the latter standing more than two metres high, as well as bronze models of trees, bronze vessels, jades and elephant tusks. The pits appear to be repositories for ritual objects; their forms and contents are so distinct from any other early finds, even in the Guanghan vicinity, that no close interpretation has yet been possible; some archaeologists suggest Sanxingdui as the forerunner or early phase of the Shu kingdom that was eventually in fact to occupy such an extremely prominent role in the production of silk.

Silk use would thus seem to have been fairly widely distributed throughout China in the Shang dynasty, certainly beyond the places named in the oracle bone inscriptions. The types that can be identified from the meagre surviving traces are similarly broad, encompassing plain weaves, known collectively as juan of varying densities, and silks with geometric designs.

The geometric designs are based on straight lines and right angles, ranging from the squares within squares seen on a yue axe from Anyang, to straight lines with a hooked 'thunder pattern' design, a motif commonly seen in the ornament of cast bronzes, usually as a background decoration, and deriving its name from its similarity to the character for thunder. These designs that have survived in small sections on bronzes and jades are preserved in complete form on carved sculptures of the period. These rare sculptures are principally in the form of small jade kneeling figures, carved in varying degrees of detail, with shoes and other items of clothing. All come from royal tombs of around 1200 Bc and are in the same subservient kneeling posture; their significance however is unknown. One jade figure from the tomb of Fu Hao wears a robe decorated with snakes and the taotie monster mask motif which is central to bronze ornament. The similarity to bronze ornament already noted in the fragmentary textile remains places the decorative scheme within the ornamental repertoire common to all Shang artefacts yet one jade figure, from a tomb at Xibeigang in Anyang, shows the hooked chain adapted successfully to a textile border. In most instances the patterned textiles appear on borders, collars, cuffs and hems, possibly because as complicated fabrics, they were expensive and used sparingly, if the sculptures are indeed faithful representations of dress. The garments of most of the small jade and stone figures take the form of a robe overlapping loosely at the front with the left side over the right and held in place by a broad, patterned sash; trousers or a skirt beneath the robe, and gaiters and shoes. Some also sport headdresses which are flat with a rising projection at the front.
These overlapping robes with decorated borders on hardstone carvings less than fifteen centimetres high appear also on the two-metre-high bronze standing figures from Sanxingdui in Sichuan. There are however differences in the representation of dress that must be due to far more than disparities in size and material. The bronze figures show three layers of robes of which the outer, decorated one, appears to represent the first one-sleeved garment in costume history. It overlaps from right to left, in contrast to the central plains examples, and is tucked high under the left arm with a short sleeve on the right. The second garment appears to have a V neck and two slightly longer sleeves while the undergarment has two full-length sleeves. It seems that the outer robe finishes above the knee while the middle one tapers almost to the ankle and the under garment reaches to the shins, showing trousers or leggings, with ornamented borders, beneath. The outer garment is elaborately decorated with designs that once again relate to bronze ornament, including a column of squared spirals ('thunder pattern') running from collar to hem just right of the centre. These compare with the robe borders seen on the jades of central China, but the large fields of design on the main part of the robe, front and back, are unparalleled elsewhere, and raise questions of technique.

They may of course simply be bronze ornament, and bear no relation to the decoration of contemporary textiles. A small stone figure from Anyang wears an open robe with a large scale taotie mask design across the back and sleeves, and a smaller horned mask at the front where it might perhaps represent a trouser band, but is certainly illegible as part of a robe. This lack of coherence on the figure suggests the design ornaments the stone carving, rather than represents actual dress. The complexity of the robes depicted on the Sanxingdui figures, together with the detail and organization of the design, makes it more likely that the outer robe ornament should be considered representational of textiles in use in that area at that time. The techniques available for producing large-scale designs would have been weaving, embroidery and painting. Brocade weaving on such a scale would require techniques - principally the drawloom and weft-patterning - for which there is no evidence at this early date, and weave-patterned silk of the period usually comprises small, repeated designs. The relationship between painting and embroidering of textiles is not clear, yet there is certainly evidence for the latter in the period of the Shang to Zhou transition.

A silk fragment adhering to a bronze mirror, and a silk impression on a large yue axe, were found in a tomb in Xinjiang in the far northwest dating to the late Shang or early Western Zhou, or around 1100 BC according to the Carbon 14 dating of the fragment. This purple fragment has the same squared design seen on the axe from Anyang, while the axe in the same tomb bears impressions of chainstitch embroidery on a gauze ground. This is the earliest evidence of embroidery. It raises the possibility of embroidery having been current in the Shang dynasty, while the discovery in present-day Xinjiang of fabric types and ornament similar to those of the Shang cities must raise the possibility of a very early silk route.

THE WESTERN ZHOU (C. 1050-771 BC)

Western Zhou silk remains are scarcely more numerous than those of the Shang, but the recorded evidence is much richer, and appears in new forms. The Zhou overthrew the Shang in the eleventh century BC, arriving from their pre-dynastic territories in the region of north China almost immediately to the west of the Shang metropolitan area. They too used ritual bronzes, with strong flamboyant forms and often boldly protruding ornament in stark contrast to Shang style. These vessels also served as historical documents. The Zhou ruled by enfeoffing local leaders who fought successfully on their behalf, vanquishing new territories and consolidating the Zhou empire; such conquests and enfeoffments were recorded in long inscriptions on the vessels, and it is from one of these, recording a payment made in silk for horses, that the earliest evidence comes of silk as currency.

An exchange of this nature represents some notion of the exotic in early China. Horses are associated with the northwest plains while silk is over whelmingly associated with urban elites at this period, so that in transactions each party was receiving something rare from a distant area. Silk acquired in exchange for horses probably went northwest, another indication of the silk route operating at a very early stage. In the opposite direction, almost on the southeast coast, the discovery in Fujian province of silk thread and silk fragments shows that silk was used, possibly even made, in that region.

Such finds are scarce, and the documentary evidence for the Western Zhou is much in excess of the excavated examples, for the Shi jing (Book of Odes), compiled in the Eastern Zhou (771-221 Bc) and the earliest of the classical texts, preserves songs and poems current in the Western Zhou. They are considered to be have been edited by Confucius (551-479 BC) and comprise 305 poems selected from approximately three thousand collected for the education of his disciples. The poems themselves are supposed to date from the twelfth to the seventh century BC though the text, which probably dates mostly from the seventh century, was banned in the third century BC and restored in the Han dynasty (206 BC-AD 220), having survived orally. The poems deal with grand public themes such as dynastic legend, sacrificial ritual and war, as well as love and agriculture. The text is divided into four sections of which the oldest is the 'Hymns of Zhou' (Zhou song), which are also the most formal and make no reference to silk either as garments or agricultural activity In the 'Greater elegies' (Da ya) section there is a single reference to fine ceremonial attire (ode 261) while silkworm rearing, and weaving, are mentioned in terms of women's place in society, as appropriate activities for those who promote disorder and are not fit for public service. The 'Lesser elegies' (Xiao ya) contain references to fine clothes, and to the mulberry tree, but it is in the 'State odes' (Guofeng) section, comprising 150 short poems, that silk and sericulture feature more prominently.

The mulberry grounds are mentioned as places where soldiers are man oeuvring, and where lovers tryst; the mulberry trees as perches where birds alight. A longer poem details the activities of the agricultural calendar, referring to pruning the mulberry trees in the silkworm month' (ode 154).The working of silk into garments is remembered in a poem (ode 27) that describes a yellow-lined green jacket as symbol of an absent loved one, while a silk brocade bedcover is used similarly in another of the odes (152). Fine clothes are included in descriptions of fine men, of whom the grandest wears a 'brocade robe and fox fur, a robe adorned with emblems and an embroidered skirt' (ode 130). In a different poem (ode 146) fox fur and lamb's fur are worn for going to court. The only function of silk mentioned apart from clothing is the use of silk strings for an angling line, and it provides a metaphor for strength when a performer is described as having 'strength like a tiger; he holds the [chariot] reins as if they were silk strings' (ode 38). A more interesting simile appears in ode 57 where the daughter of the Prince of Qi, wife of the Prince of Wei, wears a brocade robe and has a 'cicada-like head and eyebrows like silk moths', anticipating by more than a thousand years the frequent 'butterfly eyebrows' of Tang dynasty poetry and fiction. Thus the poems of the Guo feng, which show folk features of fifteen different regions of ancient China, refer to silk and sericulture as part of rural life, as emblematic of emotions and social privilege, and as metaphors for strength and beauty.

The surviving examples of Western Zhou silk are too small and too few even to hint at such roles, but actually imply additional ones, for the most significant in technique are those from tombs at Baoji Rujiazhuang in Shaanxi, where brightly coloured and decorated fragments adhere to clay and wood remains. The pieces in tomb no. 1 are embroidered in yellow thread on a scarlet ground, and enhanced with painted decoration. They were found near the head of the corpse and so probably represent a headdress or a shroud. More than sixty jade ornaments nearby included five silkworms, and impressions of plain weaves and embroidery on the coffin interior show that either it was lined with silk, or that the body was wrapped so that the coffin fitted tightly. It is clear from the quantities of ritual bronze vessels and other burial goods that this was a grand burial, and the use of complex silks would therefore seem appropriate. Another tomb in the same group showed more modest use: the interior of the coffin in tomb no. 3 at Zhuyuangou bore traces of plainly woven silk on all four sides of the remains, anticipating some of the burial practices revealed in Eastern Zhou excavations.

THE EASTERN ZHOU (771-221 BC)

The Eastern Zhou, so called because of the eastwards move of the capital to Luoyang in the eighth century BC, divides into two phases: the Spring and Autumn period (771-475 BC), after the era covered in a historical commentary known as the 'Spring and Autumn Annals', and the Warring States period (475-221 BC), reflecting the three centuries of disunity following the disintegration of ancient China into numerous competing states. Altogether it was an era in which much change took place, in belief, in ritual, in technology and in burial customs; the plurality of cultural practices in the Warring States led to strong regional identities, and one of these is rather better understood than others because the nature of the state's terrain has better preserved its material artefacts. It is the southern state of Chu, which occupied approximately the provinces of present-day Hubei and Hunan, and extended southwards almost to Guangdong. Not only do lacquer, wood, bronzes and textiles survive from the Chu area, but in addition, the principal Eastern Zhou literary texts are associated with southern China; this is not to say that other regions are not understood at this period, but that they are less well represented in the archaeological record.

The north has been characterized as becoming increasingly intellectual during the Eastern Zhou, with Confucius and the philosophical schools of the Logicians and the Legalists rationalizing myths, humanizing gods and trans forming legends, representing a departure from religion and magic as the tenets of daily life. In the south however, imagination and otherworldliness continued to inform style in the arts. In terms of silk, almost all the surviving pieces can be said to come from the ancient state of Chu. The regions mentioned in the Shi jing odes show that silk was also manufactured in the north, particularly along the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River, from the edge of Shaanxi in the northwest through Henan, Hebei and Shandong; it was also produced along the Wei River in central and southern Shanxi, in Sichuan province and most particularly to the south, along the middle reaches of the Yangzi River in the Chu territories.

The earliest artefacts demonstrating silk use in the Eastern Zhou come from Shanxi province. These are in the form of casting moulds from the great bronze foundry at Houma, which in the sixth and fifth centuries BC was the capital of the state of Jin (584-453 BC). The decorated clay foundry-debris shows ornament known on bronzes excavated from many different regions and includes some that have not survived in bronze at all. Nine of these represent human figures, some with quite detailed dress, and one is a model for a design of people picking mulberry leaves, which would have been cast into a larger vessel or other bronze item. The figure moulds are small, all less than twelve centimetres high, and the robes of one standing and one kneeling figure show ornament of strong diagonal lines creating a lozenge design, usually described in the Chinese literature as a mallow, and filled with hooked or squared spirals not entirely dissimilar to those on the small stone sculptures of the Shang dynasty, though in this case more coherent with the cut of the complete garment. Another standing figure has decoration in vertical lines filled with a design of elongated triangles, which is perhaps more in keeping with the ornament on large contemporary bronzes, or even the Sanxingdui figures, as opposed to the lozenges that are seen on small Eastern Zhou bronzes, particularly mirrors.

Evidence in clay, bronze and jade for Eastern Zhou textiles is on the whole rare however and, by this period, outweighed by the remains of many types of silk fabric. Little survives from the Spring and Autumn period, though a silk fragment attached to a bronze tripod vessel was found in a tomb at Shucheng in Anhui, while the Warring States period finds are centred around Changsha in Hunan province.27 Clothing fragments from a mid-Warring States period tomb at Zuojiatang in Changsha included dark brown, red and yellow silks figured with stripes and geometric motifs that matched those on lacquers and bronzes from other tombs in the area, implying that they were made locally.

The two most substantial silk finds of the Warring States period come however not from Changsha but from Hubei province to the north, on the opposite bank of the Yangzi River. Hubei is the location of the great tomb at Suixian Leigudun of the Marquis Yi of Zeng; and also of a tomb at Jiangling Mashan which yielded not only a wide range of fragments, but fine examples of complete garments. The tomb of the Marquis Yi of Zeng is dated to c. 433 BC and is considered to represent the finest of Chu culture; it is certainly the finest of what has been excavated, but it is worth bearing in mind that nonetheless the Marquis was not the most senior of Chu rulers. His tomb measures 21 by 16.5 metres and is partitioned into four compartments, including a ceremonial hall with massive sets of musical instruments and ritual bronze vessels, and he was buried in two coffins: an outer one of bronze and wood weighing more than six tonnes, and an inner one painted with mythical figures and beasts in black and gold on a red lacquer ground. His burial was accompanied by eight sacrificial victims and one dog, while a further thirteen coffins are in a separate chamber: all the sacrificed humans were females between the ages of thirteen and twenty-five.

The marquis himself is thought to have been aged about forty-five, and most of the 234 silk fragments in his burial were recovered from his inner coffin, as clothing, shrouds and quilts, while some were placed on top of the outer coffin, and are probably the remains of a banner. They included gauze, embroidery, plain silk and brocade. The gauze was remarkable for combining a silk and hemp fibre mix, with silk warps and hemp wefts woven into a design with square apertures. The gauze seems to have comprised three bags or covers, of which one was in a reasonably complete condition, for enclosing stringed instruments or bows. The plain silk was the most plentiful type for there were within the coffin interior, on the coffin lid, and on or around various burial objects altogether 169 fragments. The single piece of embroidered silk was decorated with a two-headed, single-bodied dragon in chainstitch on plain silk. The brocades were the most technically accomplished pieces, composed of silk fibres dyed before weaving and figured with mallow or lozenge designs.

The textiles in the grand burial of the Marquis Yi of Zeng are in fact modest in comparison with those of a woman of the lower nobility and of about the same age as the marquis who was buried at Mashan in Jiangling, about eight kilometres south of the ancient Chu capital at Ji'nan, and approximately 200 kilometres south of the Zeng state. This is not surprising, as most excavated evidence of silk comes from the tombs of women, from the time of the Taixicun burials onwards. The Mashan tomb was smaller than that of the Marquis of Zeng, comprising three compartments and containing funerary pottery, bronzes, lacquerware and, most extraordinarily, a parcel of clothing. It was wrapped with a piece of brocade and a silk skirt, tied with nine braid ribbons, and was placed within the coffin covered with an embroidered quilt and a gown. There were thirteen layers of clothing, and the body was also clothed, in two quilted outer garments, a lined garment, an unlined skirt and quilted trousers, as well as thick quilted shoes and a belt. These are the earliest known complete formal clothes, and all were of silk. Rolls of silk were placed in her hands and the compartments around the coffin included a mirror bag, a cap, a jacket and a large number of silk fragments in a bamboo box. In addition, the seven wooden burial figures, measuring between 30 and 60 centimetres high, were clothed in silk of the same shapes and types as the fullsize garments.

The types of silk represented in tomb no. 1 at Mashan include plain silk, gauze, leno, damask, brocade, silk braid, cross-knitted cord and embroideries. Some of the techniques, such as the gauzes, and the warps in three colours crossed with single colour wefts in the braid ribbons and on some of the burial figures, are of unprecedented complexity. The designs are also more intricate than those of earlier known silks. The shroud is decorated with pairs of confronting dragons and birds, probably phoenix, as well as pairs of qilin beasts and dancing figures, set between zigzags or 'elbow' patterns: with angular spirals and more dragons. Other figured silks from the tomb are patterned with elaborate versions of the mallow motif, while the large embroidered designs on the complete garments include dragons, tigers and phoenix amidst well-ordered but free-flowing tendrils extending across the whole piece. The garments include several robes, either opening edge to edge at the front, or, in most cases, overlapping to the right, with hems, cuffs and borders of contrasting fabrics. The colours include reds, purples, yellows, oranges, greens and blues, and in the case of the embroideries these are mostly applied to a white ground. The embroidery is all executed in chainstitch, as it was in the Western Zhou. In the patterning of the shroud, a defect near the selvedge affects the dragon's tail, and its repetition throughout the length of the fabric reveals that mistakes made in the pattern-setting of the loom could not be corrected during weaving, and also that the pattern repeat was quite short. It is in fact cm high across a width of 49 cm, involving more than 7660 thread ends and more than 280 weft threads, and while it is not known with certainty what type of loom was used for weaving such fabrics, it must be a possibility that the drawloom of the Han dynasty, with lifting pattern-rods and movable shafts, and operated by several people, was already in use.

Little is known about the workshops in which such looms may have operated, but some hints appear in Warring States tombs from Changsha in Hunan. A tomb at Zuojiatang in Changsha, judged to belong to the middle Warring States period, contained a bundle of clothing within the coffin; the garments were in poor condition but were shown after conservation to consist of items which compare with those discovered subsequently at Mashan tomb no. 1. They include silk woven in three colours - brown, red and yellow - with designs including the 'elbow' pattern, stripes, paired dragons, paired phoenix and other birds. One yellow and brown brocade had written on the yellow edging the three characters nu wu shi, reckoned to be the signature of a woman from the Wu clan whose precise role in its production can only be surmised. The same silk also bore seal impressions in red; these are illegible but judging from later practice are likely to give the name of a workshop and, given the early association of seals with authority rather than simply names, the workshop is likely to have been an official rather than a private one. An actual seal from another Warring States tomb in Changsha bears the characters zhong zhi bao thu yin (seal of the precious needle central weaving [workshop] which gives a strong implication of officially supervised textile production.

This evidence of seals associated with silk production anticipates an aspect of silk usage that confirms its elevated status in early China, namely, as a medium for written documents and, eventually, for paintings. The earliest surviving Chinese manuscripts appear in two forms: those written on bamboo slips, which were usually bound together top and bottom with threads and then rolled, forming the origins of the Chinese scroll; and those written on silk, hence the frequent occurrence in ancient texts of the phrase 'written on bam boo and silk'. Silk had the advantage of being light and folding into small parcels, whereas bamboo took more space, and the slips could get out of sequence. Bamboo texts on the other hand could be easily corrected or written over by being cut away, whereas silk, once marked, could not be changed. Bamboo slip texts are also more durable and have been recovered from a number of Warring States tombs, while a single pre-Qin silk manuscript survives. It was found within a bamboo box in a tomb at Zidanku in Changsha, Hunan. It is 38.7 cm long and 47 cm wide, with altogether twenty- one columns of writing in two blocks, and images painted in green, red, white and black around the edge. Further manuscript fragments from the tomb show lines in red and black separating the columns of characters. The text is written in the style of the archaic script of the state of Chu and deals with descriptions of the twelve illustrated deities, with natural disasters and with mythology.

The formal historical texts pertaining to the Zhou dynasty, known collectively as the San li (Zhou li, Yi li, Li ji), have all been shown not to be conclusively of the Zhou period, and have survived through transmission rather than in manuscript form, though all were certainly extant in the Han dynasty. They therefore cannot be taken as evidence of Zhou practice, yet they must reflect Han understanding of Zhou times and some of this may possibly derive quite directly from Zhou. It is therefore worth considering comments contained in them that deal with silk and costume. The Zhou li (Rites of Zhou) in particular tells of the restrictions on silk use that are supposed to have prevailed in the Western Zhou, relating chiefly to garment colours and types, to ceremonial and to social rank. The restrictions are supported by regulation of manufacturing methods, in particular the introduction of standard widths and lengths for pieces of cloth, which amount in current terms to just over half a metre and approximately 9.25 metres respectively, as well as guidance on weave densities. They also record the titles of various official positions relating to the manufacture of silk, implying organization as well as regulation of production. The tianguan (heaven's official) oversaw the diansi (silk), the diantai (equip ment) and the dian fu gong (women's work), the last thought to have woven silk and hemp specifically for the court.

In terms of consumption, the fine silks were restricted to various members of the official classes, while the merchant classes were formally excluded from wearing them. In the area where silk manufacture was concentrated however, that is in the ancient states of Qi and Lu in the area of modern Shandong province, developments in the production of yarns and dyes, together with development in the craft of weaving, meant that there were some merchants who were successful and rich. These men had wealth and even in some cases influence that was comparable to that of the 'thousand household' feudal lords of the Eastern Zhou period. They are considered to have lived in similar style and it is unlikely that they refrained from wearing silk, eschewing the use of the very material on which their prosperity was founded, and which was in regular use by men they may have considered their social equals.

The range of garments was extensive, with different types recorded for different activities including ritual attire, court dress, hunting clothes, funeral clothes and so forth. Men wore jackets, trousers and robes while women had six set outfits. The silk fabrics of which they might be made included brocade and various types of gauzes and figured silks known as qi, luo, ti, wan, gao, hu, xiao and sha, and the type of weave used for belts indicated the social rank of the wearer. The woven fabric patterns were on the whole geometric or comprised small floral motifs, but more complex designs could be painted or embroidered, which seems to have been particularly the case for men's formal attire. This was subject to regulations regarding colour, of which there were ten principal shades: the primaries of blue, vermilion, yellow, white and black used by higher-ranking men for upper clothing and headgear, and the secondaries of green, turquoise, orange, purple and ochre used by men of lower rank, and for clothing the lower body. The colours for upper garments only were interchangeable with trousers, skirts and so on, and the five colours represented the five directions (north, south, east, west and centre) and the five elements of wood, fire, metal, water and earth.

The pigments for creating these colour dyes derived from both mineral and vegetable sources. Red dyes came from cinnabar, green from malachite, yellow from arthraxon hispidus, which was also used to produce a bright green when mixed with cupric salt, blue from the indigo plant, and black from acorn cups, which are rich in titanium. White dye was derived from two sources: lead, and clam shell powder. Lead was used in various other ways, including ladies' powder make-up and the casting of bronze vessels, while clam shell powder was used, according to the Zhou li, for painting sacrificial vessels. In textiles it was not just a dye but was also applied as a ground for paintings and as a means of delineating the contours of images. Dyeing took place in summer and autumn, principally because these were the times for gathering the plants. Different dyeing techniques were required for mineral pigments, which adhere to fibres, and vegetable dyes, which are united with them; mineral pigments were applied with the aid of millet-based adhesives, while colouring with vegetable dyes involved the techniques of dipping, soaking and the use of mordants.

Much of the information about garments and colour contained in the Zhou li is supported by references in the Shi jing odes and by the excavated pieces discussed in this chapter. The rituals themselves are much less identifiable, and the practice of restrictions on silk use almost impossible to gauge even in a period, the late Zhou, when the scale of its consumption and production had clearly expanded greatly even since the foundation of the dynasty to which the written records refer. At the beginning of the imperial era, silk was still, it can be surmised, something of a luxury.

II. EARLY EMPIRE AND FOREIGN TRADE: THE EXPANSION OF SILK CONSUMPTION

The Warring States period ended with the supremacy of a single state, and the foundation of the empire; the two most powerful of the seven strong states of that period had been Chu, where so many fine textiles were produced and preserved, and Qin. The Qin territories were to the north and west of Chu, and a series of conquests beginning in 232 BC led to the establishment of the Qin dynasty throughout ancient China eleven years later in 221 BC, two years after the defeat of Chu. The Qin dynasty was shortlived, being replaced in 206 BC by the Han, but achieved much to establish the empire in the form that was to endure more than two thousand years, and also gave China the name by which the country became known in the West.

The First Emperor, Qin Shihuang, is most familiar to the world now through the life-size terracotta army with which he was buried; however he also built sections of wall across north China linking existing structures to create the Great Wall, and under his rule weights, measures, axle widths, coins and script were standardized throughout the empire. He set up new forms of administration, and espoused the philosophy of the Legalist School, in whose name he exacted harsh punishments for crime and sedition, and burnt texts. The dynasty was too brief for distinctive artistic styles to develop, yet the burial of the First Emperor displays a grandeur of vision, a technical achievement and above all an organization of labour on scales which do not exist in the archaeological record of earlier periods. We know from historical documents that this degree of organization extended beyond the imperial burial project. Six departments existed for gathering taxes from the regions for presentation to the emperor; one of these was supplied by twelve offices which included two workshops, the east and the west, for weaving, and there were also workshops producing silk for palace use. All these suggest a larger, more precisely controlled official production than previously, and indeed some details of workshop practice recorded in documents written on bamboo slips from a tomb at Hubei Yunmeng Shuihudi reveal that workshops operated precise apprentice training periods, and that strict standardization was applied to finished products.

In the Han dynasty this workshop system became more elaborate, as did the administration of the empire in general. Government, with the emperor at the pinnacle, comprised a central administration in the capital and provincial units throughout the rest of the country which could be augmented or reduced according to the expansion or contraction of the empire's territories. There were two types of provincial unit - the commanderies and the kingdoms - both of which became smaller in size, and more numerous, over the course of the dynasty. The central administration to which all these answered consisted of nine major ministries, for religious ceremony, superintendence of the imperial court, palace security, the imperial stables, punishments, receipt of tribute from foreign leaders, imperial family records, revenues and projects, and the imperial purse. This last, in the form of the shaofu or Lesser Treasury, was responsible for supervision of craftsmen including the zhishi, or weaving studio, which amalgamated the east and west workshops of the Qin dynasty. Silks for the court were woven at Linzi in the kingdom of Qi, present-day Shandong province, and at Xiangyi in modern Henan, also some distance northeast of the capital. The Linzi and Xiangyi workshops were called the sanfuguan (literally three garments offices), meaning that they produced silk clothing for the three seasons of spring, summer and winter. The Han official history records that the Qi sanfuguan had in olden times - meaning the Qin dynasty and the Han up until about 140 BC - produced no more than ten trunks of articles each year, while by the time of the Han emperor Wudi (r. 140-87 BC) each of the workshops employed several thousand people and produced tens of thousands of pieces. The sanfuguan at Xiangyi produced ritual attire embroidered with dragons, and other high-quality robes, employing several thousand people and making goods to a high value. The care of such robes once in the palace was the duty of the director of the imperial wardrobe, who was supported by female government slaves, and the director of the valets, while the storage of silk and precious materials was the responsibility of the director of the palace storehouses. Within the palace, silk dyeing and weaving were carried out within a precinct known as the pushi, which comprised a prison and a hospital for ladies of the harem, including divorced empresses. The reigning empress meanwhile presided over a 'silkworm department' to the west of the capital at Chang'an in the Shanglin royal park. This had been established by Qin Shihuang and greatly enlarged by Han Wudi to include hunting grounds, lodges, and gardens with a collection of strange animals, as well as a collection of treasures, particularly bronzes, within the palace. There the empress conducted the silkworm rites each year in the company of other ladies of the palace.

Silk production was not however a state monopoly, as salt and iron became in the reign of Wudi. Silk was produced in private workshops throughout the country while workshops for other articles such as bronze and lacquer did not strictly become government workshops but their output was effectively commandeered by the privy treasury. In Sichuan province, in the commanderies of Guanghan and Shu, free craftsmen and state slaves worked side by side under government administrators, and some at least of their products bore elaborate inscriptions detailing the specifications of the piece and the names of the people under whose supervision they had been made, in an extension of the type of workshop mark woven into the edge of the Warring States silk mentioned in the previous chapter. We know however that in addition to the two sanfuguan and the palace activity, domestic slaves in well-to-do households were employed in spinning, and the quantity of bolts of silk cloth that were collected under Wudi's 'equal supply system' implies that silk was manufactured privately on a considerable scale.' Silk from the state of Qi on the other hand, where the sanfuguan imperial workshop was situated, is known to have been used throughout the empire for garments and accessories. This is not to say necessarily that silk woven for the palace was being overproduced and sold off, as happened much later with porcelain for example, but that the establishment of imperial workshops outside the capital may have stimulated privately owned production in the same localities, in the way that it certainly did in the Qing dynasty (1644-1911).
In fact, silk production and silk consumption were quite widespread, with silk weaving becoming an important part of the household economy of agricultural families, who worked on the principle of 'men plough, women weave'; this led in turn to the cultivation of plants for dyes. Most silk was produced in the northeast around Shandong province, but there were also centres in Chengdu in Sichuan, and along the Yangzi River. Silk ceased to be the preserve of the nobility and official classes, for there are references to servants wearing colourfully embroidered silk gauzes; it had become a commodity, produced in increasing quantities and exchanged increasingly widely. Silk was in demand: a bolt of plain silk was priced at the equivalent of six piculs (approximately 60 kilos) of rice; higher-grade silk at eight piculs of rice, while a bolt of high- quality patterned silk was worth more than one hundred. In these circum stances silk merchants proliferated, and rural households produced more. In the reign of Wang Mang (AD 9-23) silk was established as a form of currency and this system, which encouraged peasant households to produce even more, persisted throughout the Eastern Han period (AD 23-220).

The surviving silks of the Han dynasty however are not remotely representative of rural life but come from the tombs of the nobility. The most spectacular assemblage is the group of textiles and garments from a relative, probably the wife, of the Marquis of Dai who was buried on the eastern outskirts of Changsha in Hunan province, probably in 145 BC or slightly before. In addition to the silk fabrics, the tomb contained a painting on silk which is one of the most important two-dimensional works of art from ancient China. The painting depicts, in several separate scenes, a vision of life in the afterworld including the sun, moon, animals, figures, mythical beasts and ritual vessels, and the guiding of the soul of the deceased to the realm of the immortals. It is more than two metres long, with upper and lower sections of different widths, and was painted in bright colours. The banner was placed over the top of the innermost of four coffins, which was itself covered on the top and sides with embroidered silk and applied feather decoration. Its positioning suggests strongly that the silk fragments found on Chu state coffins of the Eastern Zhou period were similar objects serving a similar function, and in fact there is much about the mid-second century BC burial of Lady Dai that suggests continuity of Chu beliefs and practices.

The coffins are lacquered and painted with designs comparable to those at Jiangling Mashan, while the body was shrouded in multiple layers of garments and quilts, and tied round horizontally with the same number of bands - nine- of silk ribbon. The other burial goods are also comparable, including lacquer objects and 162 wooden figures, eighteen of which were clothed in silk garments, and forty-eight bamboo cases of which six contained silk textiles and clothing. The garments themselves included eleven padded robes, three unlined robes, two unlined skirts, and two pairs of socks, along with forty-six rolls of silk. There were also silk shoes, pillow covers, mirror covers and covers for musical instruments, and on the wall of the northern compartment were silk curtains.

The robes were of several designs, all overlapping to the right, in some cases with the overlap tapering upwards from the hem so that it narrows and wraps around the back almost as a belt, in others squaring off to give the appearance of a broad sash. They varied from 130 to 160 cm in length, and the total width from cuff to cuff averages about two and a half metres. They were mostly sewn with plain silk linings, with cuffs, hems and edgings of slightly higher quality, and some garments were made from gauze, figured silks, embroidered silks or brocades. The finest is a type of pile brocade, the first evidence of the technique in China, and attests to advanced loom design. Modern reconstructions of the weave have led to the conclusion that the Han examples must have been produced on a drawloom, which is a huge construction. It has shafts operated by a treadle, and a tower with a pattern-operating device, which was worked by a weaver sitting at the top raising the warp threads as the weave pattern required. Such a device is in fact described in a poem of the second century AD, in the fu form of rhapsody or ballad, the lengthy narrative poem developed in the Han dynasty for formal subjects. Fu frequently contain elaborate descriptions of animals, plants, food and pastimes, employing an extraordinarily rich vocabulary and some vivid depictions of life in the upper echelons of Han society. Wang Yi (AD c. 89-158), who composed the Jifu fu (Rhapsody on women weavers), was an official from Hubei province who had written commentaries on the Chuci (Songs of the South) and came from a town, Yicheng, renowned for its silk. His description of the loom is at once practical and poetic, with the framework, beams and tower likened to the sun, moon, streams and ponds. The poem may have been written as long as two centuries after the Mawangdui silks were produced, but even if the weaving technique of the brocades and figured silks found in tomb no. 1 was not quite as grand and complex as that described by WangYi, then other techniques that make their first appearance there were quite innovative.

These other techniques include the pile brocades mentioned above, and a new type of embroidery stitch. Satinstitch is straight and flat, and can be used to produce finer designs than the usual, bulkier, chainstitch; vermilion, black and brown satinstitch is used on the silk exterior of the innermost of the four coffins in Mawangdui tomb no. 1.

However the most influential of the new techniques at this site must be the appearance of printed designs, the earliest known use of printed decoration on silk. Pattern repeats are seen on Eastern Zhou bronze vessels, and casting moulds discovered at Houma foundry in Shaanxi show the use of repeat designs impressed on the clay for transfer to the bronze vessels, but the scale of the Mawangdui printed pattern repeats is quite different. The designs corn prise cloud, hill- and flame-shaped patterns no more than six centimetres high, printed in gold, silver and yellow on purplish-brown gauze. There are approximately 430 units of the design to each metre of silk, each applied by hand. The printing technique was confirmed with the discovery in 1989 of relics of printed silk gauze from the second-century BC tomb of the King of Nanyue in Guangzhou. These provide the only other evidence of this type of fabric. The designs on the Nanyue silks are similar to, though slightly larger than, those of Mawangdui, yet of far greater significance than the fabrics themselves was the discovery alongside them of two bronze blocks used for printing the designs (fig. Seals, as mentioned in the previous chapter, were used in the Eastern Zhou period and had been used to apply a workshop name to the selvedge of a piece of silk from Zuojiatang. The technique for block printing a design was not dissimilar to that of affixing a seal, and the patterns on the silks from Mawangdui and the Nanyue royal tomb were probably the precursors of printed designs, or even writing, on paper, which was invented during the Han dynasty.

The designs themselves, of clouds, flames and hills, are part of the extensive religion-based system of ornament that the Han maintained, and which was itself a continuation of the prevalent tradition in the pre-Qin state of Chu. The beliefs of Chu, involving flights of the spirit and quantities of real and mythical beasts, are both represented in Chu literature such as Qu Yuan's Song of the South and the Nine Songs, and depicted in lacquer paintings on coffin exteriors, on bronze vessels and on the textiles from Jiangling Mashan discussed in the previous chapter. The designs on the Mawangdui textiles, from the ancient lozenge designs on monochrome figured weaves to the elaborate pictorial embroideries, encompass the same range. Indeed though the Han retained Qin practices in politics and the law, albeit under the rubric of Confucianism, in literature and art they continued the practices of southern Chu, which was in fact the ancestral homeland of the Han dynasty founder Liu Bang, and most of his inner circle. Under the Han however this artistic style was not confined to the south, not least because many of the kingdoms and commanderies that comprised Han China were ruled by members of the imperial family. One of these was the area which is the northern part of modern Jiangsu province on the eastern seaboard, where a tomb of the mid- to late Western Han period contained a silk quilt embroidered in the lacquer colours of red, brown and black with images of clouds, beasts, feathered men and three-legged birds very much in the Chu design tradition. The tomb was one of a group which also contained a number of disintegrated textiles along with bronzes, jades, some simple lacquer utensils, a few wooden burial figures and a writing brush.

Silks of the Eastern Han period have not been found in central China; indeed no major tomb sites survive intact for this period, making it difficult to assess the styles, uses and development of a range of artefacts during the latter half of the dynasty. Sites in the northwest however contain considerable quantities of silk of the first and second centuries AD, when the Silk Road became established, and are discussed below. The organization of the silk industry appears not to have changed significantly in the later Han, though production continued to increase. Bolts of silk carried on flowing in and out of the imperial court as tribute and gifts, while considerable quantities were conferred on the border peoples, in particular the Xiongnu to the northwest. Such transactions were a form of trade and anticipated the much heavier activity along the silk route. After the Wang Mang interregnum (AD 9-23) however silk became an explicit form of currency along with cotton, gold and grain according to the Hou Hanshu (History of the Later Han) which elsewhere defines brocade as gold, with equivalent value being provided by the intensity of the labour put into the textile. This use of silk as currency in a barter economy was to characterize periods of political plurality or unrest in China's subsequent history, and certainly it took hold in the period following the Han dynasty.

THE NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN DYNASTIES

The period between the fall of the 1-Tan dynasty in AD 220 and the reunification of China under the Sui in 589 is generally referred to as the Six Dynasties period, or the era of Wei, Jin and the Northern and Southern dynasties. Altogether in fact these three and a half centuries saw thirty different kingdoms, roughly divided culturally between northern and southern, and it is therefore perhaps unsurprising that the period as a whole has been seen as internecine, unproductive and marked in cultural terms only by the spread of Buddhism. Recent scholarship exploring the polarities of north and south, civil and military, and developments in literature, commerce and religion, emphasize however an awareness of earlier ideologies and systems, and the carrying forward of the arts of writing, painting and crafts within and alongside the development of ethnic and regional cultures from their own roots and not merely in response to, or in imitation of, a central Han cultural and political norm."

The Han dynasty was followed immediately by three dynasties simultaneously occupying different regions: Wei (220-65) in the north, Shu (221-64) in the southwest and Wu (222-So) in the southeast. These corresponded to the areas that were the principal silk-producing centres for several centuries along with two more in the far north, around Liaoyang in the northeast and Gansu in the northwest. In the central plains of north China, silk was quite widespread across Shanxi and Henan, with the most prominent centre being Yizhou near the Wei capital, which was well populated and well developed agriculturally, with lots of mulberry planting. Three places - Zhaojun, Zhongshan and Changshan - were specialist producers of a type of very fine plain silk known as juan. The region of Shu had more producers still, while the Wu kingdom in the southeast did not establish a silk-weaving industry until slightly later.

It was in this period immediately after the end of the Han that the enduring practice of paying household taxes in silk was instituted. Even before the end of the dynasty, Gao Gao, a powerful warlord in north China, had allowed farmers to pay their taxes in grain. The payment by ordinary people of taxes in silk had been a practice throughout much of the Eastern Han period, but it was only in AD 204 that he issued a regulation requiring set quantities of juan in exchange for land. Further amounts were specified by the Western Jin in AD 280, with quantities defined per household, and the system was maintained throughout the Eastern Jin and Sixteen Kingdoms periods, until 485 when an important change was introduced by Xiao Wendi. This was to stipulate a portion of household land to be given over to mulberry planting, and was refined the following year with regulations that were to prevail across most of north China for a further century. In the Wei and Jin dynasties, prices for wood, bricks, grain and other commodities began to be quoted in silk bolts and it is even recorded that in the Northern Wei, official positions could be bought in at two thousand bolts for the governorship of a large prefecture and one thousand for a small one, with minor prefectures available for five hundred bolts, which in the case of plain silk meant five hundred lengths of about 60 centimetres.

These stimuli to the production of silk undoubtedly accounted for an expansion in the industry throughout the country; however official production still maintained at workshops in each of the kingdoms of Wei, Shu and Wu during the third century. In Wei they were staffed by palace ladies, in Shu the jin guan (brocade office) supervised production from its workshops in the western suburbs of Chengdu, and in Wu details are recorded of some of the lavish garments ordered by the ruler Sun Quan (182-252). During the decades of rule by his nephew Sun Hao, the official workshops are thought to have inreased in size tenfold; the Wu region encompassed present-day Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces in the east - the region where some of the few examples of Neolithic age silk have been found. It has long been associated with the silk industry, and its establishment as a lasting centre of silk manufacture can be traced to this expansion during the third century. In the late fourth century AD in the north, the Xianbei (Sarbi) people established the Northern Wei dynasty, drafting more than 100,000 craftsmen to their capital at present-day Datong in Shanxi province and establishing 'craft households' rather along the lines of the military families which had become a third type of household, alongside official and agricultural, after the fall of the Han. In these circumstances silk production was controlled effectively, and was prolific. Private production limited by the insistence that silk be made in official workshops, and it was forbidden for individuals to have their own looms.

No such control is recorded for the south, where the quantities apparently traded suggest that craftsmen enjoyed some freedom. This is confirmed by written records stating that in Shu privately made brocade was produced along similar lines to the jin guan brocades. It was during the period following the Han dynasty that Shu jin or brocade from Shu established an output and reputation that was to last for several centuries. It is reputed to have been encouraged by the great third-century general Zhugeliang who conquered the Yizhou region in AD 214 and came across large quantities of the valuable brocade; he saw it as the answer to the region's economic problems and set up the jin guan (brocade office) alongside offices for agriculture and water management. Silk soon became a successful industry and the mainstay of a thriving Shu economy, attracting merchants from great distances. By the fourth century it had eclipsed other types of silk including the highly regarded weaves of Xiangyi in Henan province in the central plains. It is recorded that the brocades used in Wei and Wu were all woven in Shu, though eventually Wu produced its own imitation. In fact it has been suggested that Shu was the sole producer of fine brocades from the third to the seventh century, from the end of the Han to the early part of the Tang dynasty, and that all the traded silks of the period must have been made in the vicinity of Chengdu, the provincial capital of modern Sichuan and the centre of the early silk industry in Shu.

Though the state of Wu did not apparently rival Shu in the weaving of brocade, it nonetheless had a serious silk industry producing many types of silks including a speciality known as luo gu, a thin, bright, transparent silk used for summer clothing. The wife of the Wu ruler Sun Quan, mentioned above, wove this type of silk; each length is reputed to have taken several months to complete. The region also made silks known as qi and ling figured with oblique linear patterns. Standard plain silk juan was produced in large quantities and was widely available even to ordinary people, while the governor of Jiangnan received several thousand bolts of it each year. Throughout the fourth and fifth centuries the silk industry expanded across the Jiangnan area of southeast China, and seems to have been a favoured means of reviving local economies: Yuandi in 318, XiaoWendi in 485 and ChenWendi in 60 all issued edicts on increasing mulberry planting. In the fifth and sixth centuries the southern silk industry was boosted by an influx of craftsmen from the north, which was in disarray; the southern drift of skilled and educated northerners from the third century AD onwards has often been used to explain the rise of the Jiangnan area as the centre of traditional scholarly culture and the development of fine living that accompanied it, and therefore also as the centre of numerous craft industries such as lacquer and the carving of jade, bamboo and so forth. Certainly it was in this area and during this period that calligraphy became firmly established as an artistic pursuit in addition to its purposes of documentation and communication. Wang Xizhi (307-65) wrote his Lanting xu (Orchid Pavilion preface) to the poems composed by a group of scholars and officials whiling away a summer afternoon in 353 at the Orchid Pavilion in Shaoxing, now in Zhejiang and at that time in the kingdom of Wu. Written in ink on silk, the piece, which Wang himself was unable to replicate, so finely had it captured the rhythms of the occasion, became a canonical work in the history of Chinese calligraphy; it was not until the eleventh century that calligraphers and scholar painters used paper.

Whatever the effects of the arrival of skilled weavers or the demands of new residents on Jiangnan silk production of the third to sixth centuries, it is highly likely that their contribution embellished rather than established a successful regional industry The silks of Jiangnan, and possibly their weavers too, arrived in Japan between the fourth and the sixth century; they are also recorded as having been traded in Southeast Asia for rhinoceros horn, ivory, pearls and so on, and may have been traded on further westwards.' The brocade of Shu meanwhile seems to have been transported in some quantities overland, to the northwest through Central Asia and beyond.