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11. Robe with silk braiding decoration Yuan dynasty (1279-1368) |
In Yuan dynasty documents, one of the most common types of ceremonial robe was the bian xian ao or bian xian pao. Ao and pao are alternative words for ‘robe’, but bian means ‘braid’ while xian means ‘threads’, thus ‘braided thread robe’. The present robe is one of the best extant examples of such a garment, the silk braiding being implemented in the cummerbund-like waist decoration, which in the robe in Plate IX is composed of ribbons. Curiously enough, the couched pairs of silk threads filling the band at the waist give the effect of braided cords, without actually being braided. In each pair, one thread has been plied with two S twisted silk yarns into Z direction, and the other with two Z twisted yarns plied into S direction, and thus the effect is achieved. There are in total 97 pairs of silk ‘braids’ in the waist area, giving it a width of 24.5 centimetres. This same technique for a braided effect can be widely found on robes from other Yuan excavations. One good example is a nasji robe from Mingshui (Inner Mongolia) in the collection of the Museum of Mongol Art, Hohhot. The robe is 123 centimetres in length, 202 centimetres in width across the sleeves, and 46 centimetres in width at the waist. Its front panel opens to the right with five ribbons of purple complex gauze, each 2.8 centimetres wide and 24 centimetres long, which, when tied to five other purple gauze ribbons on the right waist, secured the robe. On the inside panel, a silk tabby ribbon, 2.5 centimetres by 9 centimetres, would have been tied to a now-lost ribbon on the underside of the left arm. Like the robe in Plate IX, the top of the robe and the skirt are separate pieces of fabric, the skirt being composed of two panels. Since the textile used for the front panel of the robe is somewhat wider than other comparable examples for this type of robe, the tailoring method is therefore slightly different. The panels of the skirt are also much wider than in comparable robes, and with many more pleats stitched into the border at the waist – in total 224 pleats, each three centimetres in length. The flat, overlapping collar is 7 centimetres wide, and the border around the hem of the skirt originally had a layer composed of feathers, but that has now almost completely disappeared leaving a silk tabby base between four and six centimetres in width. The same silk tabby composes the fabric for the robe’s lining, but the exterior layer of the robe is the so-called nasji, in which lampas is used as the basic weave structure and gold threads for the patterning wefts. So on this textile, two sets of warps – a foundation warp and a binding warp – were woven with two sets of wefts – a foundation weft made of silk and supplementary wefts made of gold-wrapped threads – to form a foundation weave in ribbed tabby and a binding weave in 1/3Z twill. The woven pattern employs small hexagons as a ground and tear-shaped lobed roundels enclosing running deer as the main motif, one row of deer running leftwards and the other row running rightwards. Based on analysis of the fabric, the loom width would have been about 88 centimetres, including eight repeats of the tear-shaped roundels. This shape of roundel was popular during the Yuan dynasty, as was the use of deer as decorative motifs. On the shoulder is a band some 14.5 centimetres long bearing a pattern with a strong Islamic flavour, and is possibly a design in pseudo Kufic script. Similar patterns have been found on other Mongol robes and textiles, such as a Mingshui nasji robe and other textile fragments from this region. This kind of band decoration, in fact, dates back at least to the Jin dynasty (1115-1234) as attested by an excavated robe with bands in gold brocade on the shoulder, sleeves and lower section of the skirt. The cuffs of the sleeves are also of gilt fabric, being adorned with a diamond-shaped grid, each of the diamonds containing a rosette at its centre. This is also a very common pattern in Yuan dynasty textiles and can be found on such pieces such as the patchwork from the Dove Cave at Longhua (Hebei). However, the weave structure is very unusual – there are no binding warps. One reason for this might be that the minuteness of the pattern and shortness of the gold threads on the face meant that a special binding warp was not necessary, but instead utilised the pairs of foundation warps to bind the gold threads. |