China gave the world its most precious cloth — and then guarded it for three thousand years. The story of silk, and of the brocade we weave in Banaras, begins here.
✨ Fun fact: For centuries China guarded the secret of silk so closely that revealing how it was made could be punished by death — which is why the route that finally carried it west became known as the Silk Road.
Silk — the mother craft
The Chinese learned to unwind the cocoon of the silkworm into a single unbroken thread more than four thousand years ago, and for a very long time they were the only people on earth who could do it. Legend gives the discovery to the Empress Leizu, who is said to have been sitting in her garden when a cocoon dropped into her cup of hot tea and began, impossibly, to unravel.
Legend or not, it tells you something true: in China, silk was women’s work, and it was imperial business. Every spring the emperor ploughed the first furrow of the year — and the empress, in her own ceremony, fed the first silkworms. Farming and sericulture were the two halves of the realm, and the empress held one of them.
The court of the dragon robe
Nowhere on earth has cloth been read more precisely than at the Chinese court. A Qing official’s robe was not decoration; it was a document, and anyone could read it across a courtyard.
The emperor’s longpao — the dragon robe — carried nine dragons: eight you could see, and a ninth hidden inside the front flap, over the heart. Only the five-clawed dragon was his. At the hem ran the lishui stripes of the deep ocean; above them rose mountains; above those, clouds. The emperor did not wear a pattern. He wore the universe, and his authority over it. And bright yellow — minghuang — was his alone, with paler shades of yellow issued down the family like a gradient of permission.
Below the emperor came the officials, and here the system becomes exquisite. From 1391, every official wore a buzi — a square embroidered badge, about a hand’s span across, on the chest and back of his surcoat. Birds for the civil service, beasts for the military, nine ranks each: a crane for the first civil rank, a golden pheasant for the second, a peacock for the third, down to the paradise flycatcher at the ninth. A single glance at a man’s chest told you exactly where he stood in the empire.
And the detail we love most: an official’s wife wore a badge matching her husband’s — but mirrored, so that when the two of them sat down together at a banquet, their birds turned to face one another.
Some of those badges were worked in gold-wrapped thread couched down onto the silk, and some in thread wrapped with fine strips of peacock feather, so the bird shimmered green as you moved. If you have ever watched a Banaras weaver lay in real zari, you already know exactly what is going on here.
Cloud brocade and carved silk
China’s brocades are among the most magnificent ever woven, and they are the close cousins of our kamkhwab.
Yunjin — the “cloud brocade” of Nanjing, named for its resemblance to sunset clouds — was woven with silk, gold leaf-wrapped thread and peacock filament for the imperial court. It is made on a hualou, a great drawloom that needs two weavers at once: one below working the treadles and throwing the shuttles, and one sitting up inside the loom’s tower, lifting the pattern cords by hand. Between them they manage about five centimetres a day.
Read that again and you will see Banaras. Two people, one loom, a pattern held in cords above the weaver’s head — it is the same machine and the same partnership as our naqsha and jala. Two civilisations solved the same problem the same way.
Kesi, or “carved silk,” is a fine slit-tapestry so precise it can copy a painting brushstroke for brushstroke. The Qing court kept three imperial silkworks — at Nanjing, Suzhou and Hangzhou — weaving for the palace and for no one else.
Cloth as money, cloth as secret
Here is the part that always startles people: for long stretches of Chinese history, silk was money. Under the Tang, taxes were assessed in it and soldiers were paid in it. A bolt of plain silk was a unit of currency you could wear. Cloth was not a luxury good sitting at the end of an economy — cloth was the economy.
Which is why the technology was a state secret. Carrying silkworm eggs or mulberry seed out of the country was forbidden, and the two great stories of how it escaped are both stories of smuggling. In one, a Chinese princess marrying into the kingdom of Khotan hid silkworm eggs in her elaborate headdress, where no border guard would dare to search. In the other, in the year 552, two monks walked into the court of the Byzantine emperor Justinian carrying hollow bamboo canes — and inside the canes were silkworm eggs. The monopoly of three thousand years ended in a walking stick.
Then the cloth went everywhere. West along the Silk Road; east and south by sea. Chinese silk crossed the Pacific on the Manila galleons to Acapulco and on to Seville, where it was embroidered into the fringed shawl that Spain now considers utterly its own — the mantón de Manila, a story we tell in The Crafts of Spain.
Porcelain — the cloth’s equal in clay
China’s other gift to the world is porcelain. The blue-and-white wares of Jingdezhen, painted in cobalt under a clear glaze, were traded across the globe and imitated everywhere from Delft to Japan — so completely that in English the ware simply took the country’s name. We still call it china.
And a lovely irony sits inside it: the finest early blue was made with cobalt imported from Persia. The most Chinese object in the world was painted with a Persian mineral, carried east along the same road the silk went west. Nothing is pure. Everything travels.
The painters, and the woman with the needle
Emperor Huizong (reigned 1100–1126) lost his empire and is remembered anyway, because he was one of the finest painters and calligraphers China ever produced. The great scroll at the top of this page — women pounding and stretching a length of new silk — comes from his studio, a copy after the Tang master Zhang Xuan. An emperor’s painters, recording the work of cloth.
Earlier still, Gu Kaizhi’s Admonitions Scroll (now in the British Museum) gives us the earliest great look at Chinese court dress — sleeves, sashes and trailing silk, painted in the fourth century.
But the artist we most want you to know is Han Ximeng. In seventeenth-century Shanghai, the women of the Gu family perfected Guxiu — “Gu embroidery” — splitting a single silk filament into dozens of strands finer than a hair and stitching copies of famous Song paintings so exact that scholars argued about where the brush ended and the needle began. Han Ximeng was the greatest of them. She did not illustrate paintings. She was a painter, whose brush happened to be a needle. We think of her often.
Where to see it
If you ever go, these are the places we would send you:
- China National Silk Museum, Hangzhou — the largest museum in the world devoted entirely to silk.
- Nanjing Yunjin Museum, Nanjing — where you can watch two weavers work a cloud-brocade drawloom together, one of them sitting up inside it.
- The Palace Museum (the Forbidden City), Beijing — for the dragon robes themselves.
- National Palace Museum, Taipei — for the imperial painting and kesi collections.
- Suzhou Silk Museum, Suzhou — the old silk capital, and still an embroidery city.
Closer to most of us: the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Victoria & Albert in London, and the Cleveland Museum of Art all hold superb Chinese textile collections — much of it viewable online for free.
The thread we love
A loom worked by two people. Gold thread couched down by hand. Cloth read as rank, given as honour, spent as money. Every gold-woven Banarasi owes a quiet debt to China, where silk began — and where they understood, long before anyone else, that cloth is never only cloth. Explore our Brocade Fabric collection.
Frequently asked questions
Why is China so important to the history of silk?
Silk was first made in China over four thousand years ago, and for millennia China was the only source of it. The trade that carried it westward gave the Silk Road its name.
What is Chinese cloud brocade?
Yunjin, the cloud brocade of Nanjing, woven with silk, gold and even peacock-feather thread for the imperial court, and named for its resemblance to coloured clouds. It is made on a great hualou drawloom worked by two weavers at once, and produces only a few centimetres a day.
What is kesi?
“Carved silk” — a fine slit-tapestry weave so precise it can reproduce a painting. Kesi court robes could take years to complete.
What is a dragon robe?
The longpao of the Chinese emperor: nine dragons (the ninth hidden inside the front flap), five claws each, above a hem of ocean, mountain and cloud — the emperor wearing his authority over the universe. Bright yellow was reserved for him alone.
What are Chinese rank badges?
Buzi, or “mandarin squares” — embroidered panels worn from 1391 on the chest and back of an official’s coat. Birds marked the nine civil ranks, beasts the nine military ranks, so a man’s exact standing could be read at a glance.
Where can I see Chinese silk and imperial robes?
The China National Silk Museum in Hangzhou, the Nanjing Yunjin Museum, the Palace Museum in Beijing, the National Palace Museum in Taipei and the Suzhou Silk Museum — and, outside China, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Sources & further reading
On Chinese silk, cloud brocade and kesi, on Qing court dress and rank badges, and on Jingdezhen porcelain, see the open-access collections and scholarship of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum, together with the China National Silk Museum, Hangzhou. On the mandarin square in particular, see Schuyler Cammann, “The Development of the Mandarin Square” (Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 1944).
More from Khinkhwab Diaries: what is silk? · the meaning of Kinkhab · the looms of Banaras.
