Weaving a world of beauty like ancients
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E-mail Shanghai Daily, March 3, 2015
It took five weavers at least three years to complete an imperial robe in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). The robe has 5-clawed dragons surrounded by blue clouds interspersed with bats and 12 symbols showing imperial authority, including sun, moon, rock, flames and more.
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A single robe required thousands of golden lines and peacock feathers for its lavish appearance. Kesi (缂丝) — Chinese silk tapestry — was the most common material for the robes. The intricate patterns were not embroidered onto the cloth but instead woven with colored silk. For each centimeter of material, the Kesi weavers needed to sew 100 horizontal threads.
"You see the exquisite texture of silk tapestry, which is the instrument of countless ways of using threads, imagination and painstaking effort. Even today, not one step of Kesi can be replaced by mass machinery," Wang Jianjiang tells Shanghai Daily.
Wang, 51, is a Kesi master whose ancestors made clothes for the Qing Dynasty royal family, including a birthday gown for Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908).
Now he runs a workshop with eight looms in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province. With the looms inherited from his father, Wang and four of his descendents duplicate clothing worn by China's ancient royal families, fixing antique Kesi for major museums in China and also creating new works.
With a career in silk tapestry of over 35 years, Wang has answered the same question over and over again — what is this handicraft that he is so dedicated to?
Kesi is a form of textile that dates all the way back to the Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220). It, along with Hangzhou's silk weaving painting, Fujian's Yongchun paper weaving painting and Sichuan's bamboo screen painting, are called China's "four big textiles."
Unlike other weaving methods, in which the vertical (warp) and horizontal (weft) threads extend back and forth completely across the loom, the secret of Kesi is that it's done on a simple loom using a technique in which warp threads fully extend but the weft ones do not. This skill is known as "whole warp and broken weft."
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