Many people have met Song brocade twice without knowing it: as the silk border around an old scroll in a museum, and as the jackets the world’s leaders wore at the 2014 APEC meeting in Beijing. Here is the story behind the patterns on our brocade charms.
A city of looms
Suzhou was weaving fine silk long before the Song dynasty, but it was the Song that gave this brocade its style. When the court fled south in the twelfth century, many of the fine silks needed for court dress and for mounting paintings were lost along the way. Suzhou, long called “the house of silk”, took on the task: under the Southern Song an official workshop was set up in the city, and Shu-brocade weavers and looms were brought from Chengdu, so that the centre of Chinese silk weaving gradually shifted south. The new brocade went into court dress and into the mounting of calligraphy and paintings. By the Ming and Qing, Suzhou’s north-east quarter was said to hum with “the sound of ten thousand looms”, and even in the late Qing some three hundred Song-brocade looms were still at work in the city.
How it got its name
The name, according to a story Suzhou still tells, arrived in the Kangxi reign. Someone bought ten volumes of a Song edition of the Chunhua Model Calligraphy from the Ji family of Taixing, peeled off the twenty-two kinds of Song-era brocade used to mount them and sold them to Suzhou weavers, who copied the patterns. Brocade woven in this Song style came to be called Song brocade, or Song-style brocade. Under Qianlong the Suzhou Weaving Bureau was weaving special scroll-cover brocade for the palace’s handscrolls. The century and more from Kangxi to Qianlong was its golden age.
Reading the cloth
China names three great brocades. Shu brocade from Sichuan is the oldest, rising in the Warring States and flourishing under the Han and Tang. Cloud brocade from Nanjing was woven above all for emperors’ dragon robes. Song brocade is flat, crisp and antique-looking, its colours “bright without being garish, rich without being busy”, and it has been called China’s “crown of brocades”.
The secret is in the shuttles. A long shuttle, thrown all the way across, lays the ground; short shuttles, thrown only where needed, change colour section by section, a technique the trade calls live colour, so the pattern of one piece can carry more than twenty colours. The classic motifs have vivid names: ball-road roundels, chessboard squares, tortoise-shell hexagons, chain-mail links, coiled-ribbon knots and the bada yun, or “eight-way halo”, a lattice of horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines radiating in eight directions, read as “open roads everywhere”. The grounds are quiet, neutral shades: rice-yellow, blue-grey, mud-gold, lake blue. By use, Song brocade falls into three broad grades. Heavy brocade, the most precious, has its motifs outlined in twisted or flat gold thread and went into great palace hangings and furnishings; fine brocade was used for clothing and for mounting fine paintings; box brocade mounted scrolls and covered cases. Over time more than forty varieties were woven.
Two people to one loom
Song brocade is woven on a tall “flower loom” worked by two people: one sits up on the loom raising and lowering the pattern cords, the other sits below, throwing the shuttles and beating in the weft. From reeling and dyeing to the finished cloth there are more than twenty steps, and a hand loom manages only about ten centimetres a day.
The woman who brought it back
By the twentieth century the craft had nearly died out. Qian Xiaoping, born in Changzhou, Jiangsu, in 1939, joined the Suzhou silk research institute in 1957 and began recovering and studying Song brocade in 1966. Working from a single fragment of “lozenge ruyi” brocade, she studied it under a magnifying glass centimetre by centimetre, where not one thread could go astray, and went on to reproduce more than twenty precious historic silks. Among them is a Western Paradise hanging 3.86 metres long and 1.72 metres wide, woven with 278 figures, each with its own expression. In 2006 Song brocade weaving entered China’s first national list of intangible cultural heritage, with the Suzhou Silk Museum as its guardian; in 2009 it was inscribed by UNESCO as part of China’s sericulture and silk craftsmanship.
Then came the summit. For APEC 2014 a Wujiang mill, Dingsheng Silk, supplied about 1,200 metres of Song brocade figured with a wan (卍) pattern for the leaders’ outfits. For “Forbidden City red” alone it prepared fifty colour samples, and wool went into the weft to suit the early-winter weather. The designer, Chu Yan, said Song brocade matched the look she wanted perfectly: “low-key, restrained, not showy”. It has been given as a state gift many times since.
Song brocade at DONGXI
Our brocade charms and hair clips use woven fabric in Song-brocade patterns, finished with embroidery and zinc-alloy fittings, and most of the charms carry a tassel or beaded drop; the materials for each piece are listed on its product page. The lattices and quiet colours pair naturally with a plain leather bag, a linen tote or a dark coat.
Care
Keep it dry, and avoid soaking, snagging and repeated rubbing; keep perfume and hand cream off the fabric. Wipe the metal fittings gently with a soft, dry cloth. When you put it away, smooth the tassel and keep it apart from keys and other sharp objects.
To choose by size and colour, read Choosing a brocade bag charm; more brocade pieces are in the Brocade Forms collection.