Of all the countries in this series, Uzbekistan is the one we cannot really call foreign. Samarkand and Bukhara are not somewhere else. They are upstream.
✨ Fun fact: Uzbek weavers call ikat abrbandi — “cloud-tying.” The pattern is dyed into the threads before weaving, so its edges blur, exactly like cloud reflected on water.
The court at Samarkand
When Timur (1336–1405) conquered a city, he did something colder and cleverer than looting it. He took its craftsmen. Weavers, tilemakers, gold-workers and glass-blowers were marched back to Samarkand from Damascus, Shiraz, Baghdad and Delhi, and set to work. Samarkand became a workshop assembled out of other people’s cities.
We know what it looked like because a Castilian ambassador, Ruy González de Clavijo, arrived in 1404 and wrote it all down: the vast silk tents, the hangings, the embroideries, the gold. His report is one of the great eyewitness accounts of a court that ran on cloth. Timur’s grandson Ulugh Beg would later turn the same city into a place of astronomy, building an observatory and mapping a thousand stars.
Now the part that matters to us. A Timurid prince named Babur was born in the Fergana Valley, lost Samarkand, and kept losing it — until he gave up, went south, and founded the Mughal empire instead. The Mughals carried the Timurid-Persian design language with them into Hindustan, and it settled, eventually, into the looms of Banaras.
Which means the buti on your saree has a passport, and one of the stamps in it says Samarkand. You can trace the family resemblance in our guide to Banarasi motifs.
Bukhara gold — zarduzi
In Bukhara, the emirs kept workshops of gold embroiderers, and the robes they made — heavy velvet and silk, couched all over with gold wire — were the emirate’s highest currency of honour. A robe was laid across your shoulders and everyone understood what had just happened.
The craft is called zarduzi. Ours is called zardozi. It is the same Persian root — zar, gold; dozi, sewing — and very nearly the same craft: gold thread laid on the surface and couched down, because it is far too precious to waste on the underside of the cloth.
Even the division of labour repeats. In Bukhara, silk embroidery is women’s work and gold embroidery is men’s work — which is exactly what you will find if you walk into a zardozi workshop in Banaras today. Two cities, a couple of thousand kilometres apart, arrived at the same custom. Read more in What Is Zardozi?
The suzani — a cloth made for a bride
The suzani takes its name from the Persian suzan: needle. It is a large embroidered hanging, and it is a dowry.
A girl might begin hers as a child. The cloth is worked in narrow strips — often by several women of the household at once, a mother here, an aunt there, a grandmother’s hand in the corner — and only at the end are the strips sewn together. The colours never quite line up. The pattern jumps a little at the seams. And that is not a flaw; that is the record of how many people loved this girl.
The motifs are a garden with a job to do: sun and moon discs, pomegranates for fertility, tulips, irises, carnations, and here and there a water jug. The needlewomen of Nurata favoured a composition called chor shokh u yak moh — “four branches and one moon.” Around Shakhrisabz you find a border called chor-chirog, the four-wicked lamp, a Zoroastrian fire-charm still burning quietly on a nineteenth-century bedspread.
And before a single stitch is made, someone draws. The chizmachi sets the design out on the blank cloth, and only then do the needles follow. If you have read our piece on the naqshband, you already know this person. Every serious textile culture has one, and almost nobody outside it knows their name.
Margilan silk, and the tying of clouds
East, in the Fergana Valley, is the silk. Margilan has been a weaving town for centuries — there are said to be thirty-seven separate steps between a cocoon and a finished bolt, and most of them are still done by hand.
Its glory is abrbandi. The warp threads are bundled, bound tight where the dye must not reach, dyed, unbound, re-bound, dyed again — and only then stretched onto the loom, where the pattern reappears as if through mist. Uzbek ikat binds the warp only, which is why the design shivers vertically and never quite holds a hard edge.
The names are worth knowing: adras (a silk warp on a cotton weft), atlas or khan-atlas — the “king’s satin,” all silk and blazing — and bakhmal, ikat velvet, which is as extravagant as it sounds. The loom is a dukon, built of mulberry or walnut wood.
We have written about India’s own version of this obsession in Patola: The Double-Ikat Sari of Patan. Same idea, different discipline — and Patan, madly, ties both warp and weft.
The road, and what travelled on it
None of this happened in isolation, because Samarkand and Bukhara sat on the Silk Road and everything passed through. Chinese silk went west. Persian design came east. And the indigo that gives an old suzani its deep blue was very often bought in from Iran — or from India.
So a Bukhara bride’s wedding cloth may well be blue with Indian indigo, drawn with Persian flowers, stitched in Chinese silk. There is no such thing as a pure tradition. There is only a very long conversation.
The painters, and a living master
Central Asia’s great art of the brush was the miniature. Kamal ud-Din Behzad (c. 1455–1535), working in Timurid Herat, is the towering name — called the Raphael of the East, and the painter who taught the world how a court’s robes and carpets should look on a page. In sixteenth-century Bukhara, Abd Allah Musawwir carried that school on.
And the tradition is emphatically alive. Madina Kasimbaeva, working in Tashkent, has spent her career reviving the city’s embroidery school; her suzanis now hang in the British Museum. In Bukhara there are families who will tell you, quite matter-of-factly, that their great-grandparents embroidered for the last emir.
Ikat on the runway
One more thing, because it is a question we get asked about our own cloth: does any of this survive contact with the modern world?
Uzbekistan’s answer is yes, loudly. Oscar de la Renta was so taken with abr silk that he travelled to Uzbekistan and had the fabric woven there for a collection. Ikat and suzani patterns have since turned up at Balenciaga, Gucci and Roberto Cavalli — and then, inevitably, on the high street. Meanwhile Uzbek designers are cutting adras into jackets, coats and dresses at home.
The lesson is one we hold to at Khinkhwab: a handwoven cloth does not need to stay in a museum to stay itself. It needs to be worn.
Where to see it
- State Museum of Applied Art, Tashkent — suzanis, ikats, skullcaps, the lot.
- Yodgorlik Silk Factory, Margilan — you can watch the warp being bound and dyed by hand.
- Sitorai Mokhi-Khosa (the emir’s summer palace) and the Ark, Bukhara — for the gold-embroidered robes.
- The Registan, Samarkand — Ulugh Beg’s madrasa, and the tilework that the suzanis are quietly arguing with.
- Savitsky Collection, Nukus — the “Louvre of the Steppe,” out in the desert, and worth every hour of the drive.
Closer to home: the Victoria & Albert Museum, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Textile Museum at George Washington University all hold major Central Asian textile collections.
The thread we love
Gold couched onto velvet. A designer who draws before the needle. A cloth made by the women of a house for a girl about to leave it. Uzbekistan is not a distant cousin of Banaras — it is very close family, and the resemblance is in the hands. Explore our Brocade Fabric collection.
Frequently asked questions
What is a suzani?
A large embroidered Central Asian textile, from the Persian suzan, “needle.” Traditionally made as part of a bride’s dowry, worked in strips by several women of the household and then joined together.
What is Uzbek ikat?
Abrbandi, “cloud-tying” — the warp threads are bound and dyed before weaving, so the pattern emerges softly blurred. Uzbek ikat binds only the warp, unlike the double ikat of Patan or Bali.
What is the difference between adras and atlas?
Adras has a silk warp and a cotton weft; atlas (or khan-atlas, the “king’s satin”) is all silk. Bakhmal is ikat velvet.
Is Uzbek zarduzi the same as Indian zardozi?
They are the same craft and the same word — from the Persian zar (gold) and dozi (sewing). Gold thread is couched onto the surface of velvet or silk. In both Bukhara and Banaras, gold embroidery has traditionally been men’s work.
How is Uzbekistan connected to the Banarasi saree?
Babur, founder of the Mughal empire, was a Timurid prince from the Fergana Valley. The Mughals carried the Timurid-Persian vocabulary of flowers, vines and boteh into India, where it entered the looms of Banaras.
Where can I see Uzbek textiles?
The State Museum of Applied Art in Tashkent, the Yodgorlik silk factory in Margilan, the emir’s palaces in Bukhara and the Savitsky Collection in Nukus — and, abroad, the V&A, the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Sources & further reading
On Timur’s court, see Ruy González de Clavijo’s Embassy to Tamerlane (1403–1406). On suzani, abr silk and Bukhara gold embroidery, see the open-access collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Textile Museum at George Washington University, together with the State Museum of Applied Art, Tashkent.
More from Khinkhwab Diaries: what is zardozi? · the naqshband · patola.
