Two silk cultures, one of them saved by a queen and the other very nearly erased — and both of them tying their patterns into the thread before a single row is woven.
✨ Fun fact: The American who rebuilt the Thai silk industry after the Second World War, Jim Thompson, walked into the jungle of the Cameron Highlands in 1967 and was never seen again. His house in Bangkok is now a museum, and one of the most beautiful buildings in the city.
Ikat — tying the pattern into the thread
To understand either of these silks, you have to understand ikat, and it is one of the most counter-intuitive ideas in all of weaving.
In an ordinary patterned cloth, the design is put in as you weave — or printed, or embroidered, afterwards. In ikat, the pattern is dyed into the loose thread before weaving begins. The weaver binds tiny sections of the yarn tightly so the dye cannot reach them, dips the bundle, unties, re-ties, dips again — building the whole image in the thread, one colour at a time. Only then is it wound onto the loom and woven, and the picture appears row by row as the cloth grows, always with a faint, characteristic blur at every edge where the dyed threads shift a hair out of line.
It is a first cousin of our own bandhani — the same idea of defending part of the material from the dye — except that bandhani resists the finished cloth, and ikat resists the naked thread. When both the lengthwise and the crosswise threads are tied and dyed so that the two must line up perfectly on the loom, you have double ikat, which is one of the hardest things a weaver can attempt anywhere on earth.
The Indian thread in the Southeast Asian loom
And this is where Thailand and Cambodia belong, quietly, to our story.
India was the workshop of the pre-modern textile world, and for centuries Indian cloth poured east into Southeast Asia — above all the double-ikat patola of Gujarat and the painted kalamkari cottons of the Coromandel coast. These were not ordinary imports. Across the region they became sacred and dynastic cloth — kept as heirlooms, hung at rituals, buried with the powerful, and copied with reverence by local weavers. The geometric grids and flowering layouts of Indian trade textiles worked their way permanently into the vocabulary of the Southeast Asian loom.
So when you look at a Thai or Khmer silk, you are looking at a tradition with a genuine Indian accent in it — the same way an Indian block-print turned up buried in medieval Egypt. Cloth has always been the first traveller.
Thailand — mat mi, and a queen’s intervention
Thai mat mi (mudmee) is weft ikat: the crosswise threads are tied and dyed before weaving, so the finished pattern arrives softly out of focus, glowing against the natural warm gold of Thai silk. Its heartland is Isaan, the north-east, where the raising of silkworms and the tying of thread were village work, done between the rice harvests.
By the mid-twentieth century the craft was fading, and two people are largely responsible for the fact that it did not disappear. Jim Thompson built an export house that turned Thai silk into a global luxury almost single-handedly. And Queen Sirikit founded the SUPPORT Foundation, which put royal patronage and royal money behind the village weavers of Isaan — and then did something no subsidy could match: she wore their cloth herself, at state banquets and on royal tours, in front of every camera in the world.
That second move is the one we keep thinking about. A queen who wears a village weave to meet other heads of state does more for a craft than any grant. It is exactly the lesson of Thai silk’s survival — and, in a smaller way, exactly why it matters when a handwoven cloth is treated as something to be proud of rather than something old.
Cambodia — hol, pidan, and a craft that nearly died
Khmer hol is also weft ikat, worked in an unusual uneven twill that gives the cloth a slightly different tone on each face, and specialists rank the finest of it among the very best ikat made anywhere in the world. It is woven from the deep gold of Cambodia’s own indigenous silkworm, in the five traditional colours — red, yellow, green, blue and black — drawn from lac and morinda root, from indigo and from the prohut tree. The everyday glory of it is the sampot hol, the patterned silk skirt-cloth.
And then there is pidan — or hol pidan — the pictorial hanging. These are the summit of Khmer weaving: silk tapestries with entire scenes tied into the thread, made to hang in temples above the Buddha. They show the Jataka tales and the life of the Buddha, temples and apsaras and the tree of life, nagas, elephants, and sometimes great ships crowded with figures. A single pidan could take from three months to a year, and it was woven not to sell but to be given — donated to a monastery as an act of merit. A woven prayer.
That a pattern can carry a story, and that a cloth can be an offering, is something we understand completely: it is the logic of the narrative pallu of a baluchari, and of the silk kept for sacred days.
Then came the Khmer Rouge. Between 1975 and 1979 silk-weaving was banned outright; mulberry was cut, looms were destroyed, and weavers were scattered or killed. More than three hundred of the four hundred-odd textiles in the National Museum’s collection vanished in those years. The craft came within a single generation of ending altogether — and its revival, led by the Institute for Khmer Traditional Textiles and by small foundations that went looking for the few old women who still remembered, has been a matter of rescuing knowledge from living memory before it died with the people who held it.
We include this deliberately, and it is the hardest lesson in the whole of this series. Craft is not automatically immortal. It continues only because specific people refuse to let it stop — in Cambodia, in Kashmir, in Korea, and in Banaras.
Why it speaks to us, at a Banaras loom
Three things bind these silks to ours.
Resist, in the thread. Ikat and bandhani are two answers to one question — how to make a pattern by keeping the dye out — and the family resemblance is unmistakable once you see it.
The Indian lineage. The patola and painted cottons of India helped shape the very look of Southeast Asian cloth. We are not strangers to this loom; we are somewhere in its ancestry.
The story in the cloth, and the will to save it. A pidan tells a tale as a baluchari does, and both Thai and Khmer silk survive because particular people — a queen, a handful of foundations, a few old weavers — decided they must. That is the truest thing we know about handmade cloth anywhere.
Where to see it
- Jim Thompson House, Bangkok — go; it is worth the trip on its own.
- Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles, Bangkok — within the Grand Palace grounds.
- National Museum of Cambodia, Phnom Penh; and the Institute for Khmer Traditional Textiles, Siem Reap — where the revival lives.
- Abroad: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cooper Hewitt and LACMA hold fine Thai and Cambodian silks.
The thread we love
A pattern tied into the naked thread and coaxed into focus on the loom; an Indian trade-cloth ancestry hidden inside a Thai sarong; a Khmer prayer woven into a temple hanging; and two silk cultures that live today only because someone refused to let them die. Strip away the distance, and every one of these is a conviction we hold at our own looms. Explore our handwoven Brocade Fabric collection, or read how India tied its own double ikat in the story of patola.
Frequently asked questions
What is mat mi (mudmee)?
Thai weft ikat — the crosswise (weft) silk is tied and dyed before weaving, producing a characteristically soft-edged pattern. Its heartland is the Isaan region of north-east Thailand.
What is Khmer hol?
Cambodian weft-ikat silk, woven in an uneven twill and counted among the finest ikat in the world. The patterned skirt-cloth is the sampot hol; the craft was nearly destroyed under the Khmer Rouge and has been painstakingly revived.
What is a pidan?
A Cambodian pictorial silk hanging, woven in the hol ikat technique with Buddhist scenes — Jataka tales, temples, apsaras, ships — and traditionally donated to a temple as an act of merit. One can take from three months to a year to weave.
How is ikat different from bandhani?
Both are resist-dye techniques, but ikat resists the loose thread before weaving, so the pattern is built into the yarn, while bandhani resists the finished woven cloth by tying tiny points before dyeing.
Did Indian textiles influence Southeast Asian silk?
Yes, profoundly. For centuries Indian trade cloths — especially Gujarati double-ikat patola and painted Coromandel cottons — were treasured across Southeast Asia as sacred and heirloom textiles, and their patterns shaped local weaving traditions.
Sources & further reading
On Thai mat mi, Khmer hol and pidan, and the influence of Indian trade textiles in Southeast Asia, see the Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles (Bangkok), the Jim Thompson House (Bangkok), the National Museum of Cambodia, Cooper Hewitt, and Gillian Green, Traditional Textiles of Cambodia.
More from Khinkhwab Diaries: songket, ikat and the weaves of South-East Asia · patola · bandhani · the Silk Road.
