Learn
Where to Start
从头读起
If you are new to Chinese embroidery, read in the order below. The four parts stand on their own, but taken together they change what you see when you next look at an object.
01
A History of Chinese Embroidery
Five periods, from Neolithic silk to the four regional traditions of the Ming and Qing. What it records is not a succession of dynasties but the repeated reinvention of stitch, material and purpose.
Five periods
Start here so that the techniques and regulations that follow have somewhere to sit.
02
Embroidery Techniques
Chain stitch, satin stitch, seed knots, counted work on gauze, couched gold — each differs in lustre, in thickness, in the edge it makes, and in what it is for.
16 entries
Reading the stitch is the first step in reading an object. The same motif in different stitches is not the same thing.
03
Court Dress and Its Regulation
Colour, motif, the number of dragons — all of it set down in the illustrated statutes. The rules were written on paper; carried out in silk they never quite match, and it is in that gap that the questions begin.
Argued from 27 objects
The Qing wrote down who could wear what. Once the rules are legible, every element on a robe means something.
04
Glossary
Characters, pinyin, the rendering used here, and the other renderings in circulation — so that a term met elsewhere can be recognised as the same thing. Where a common English rendering misleads, the entry says so.
32 terms
The practical obstacle in the English literature: one Chinese term is rendered three or four different ways from book to book.
After Reading
That is as far as an account can take you. The next step is the objects themselves: 27 catalogued here and 10 motif entries, against which everything above can be checked.