The Year He Had No Choice

Craft · Brocade

In 1973 Zhou Shuangxi finished school as a coal-industry student and was assigned to the Nanjing Yunjin research institute. He wanted to run. Fifty years later he is a national inheritor of the craft.

He was eighteen, trained in coal, with nothing to do with weaving. Then the assignment came through: the Nanjing Yunjin Research Institute. A grown young man, he said later, told to do work that fine — “I wanted to run.”

The harder problem was that nobody was left to teach him. The old masters had stopped years before; when the institute brought them back they were in their seventies. Two generations had been lost in between.

IThe weaver's complaint

Nanjing has an old local ballad, The Weaving Room's Bitter Song: I curse my father, I curse my mother, you should never have sent your boy to the weaving room. No fire in winter, no cool in summer.

No fire, because a spark on the silk is a hole. No draught either, because a draught snaps the warp. So the room is freezing in winter and stifling in summer.

In his apprentice years few people in Nanjing knew what yunjin was any more. The institute rented an old factory; passers-by heard the clatter, saw the room hung with ropes, and said: oh, they make tofu here.

“We had no choice in those days. Given no choice, yunjin was the best choice there was.”

Zhou Shuangxi

IIHalf a dragon robe

In 1980 the national heritage bureau decided to reproduce the silks excavated from the Dingling tomb, and named the institute as its base for copying historic textiles. Dingling is the tomb of the Wanli Emperor. The robes began changing colour the moment they met the air, so the copy had to be rebuilt from the colours and patterns recorded during excavation — paper laid over the fragments, the design traced off, layer after layer put back.

The youngest of the masters was given one of the robes. He wove half of it and then fell ill: liver cancer, advanced. The institute’s director took Zhou to visit him. The old man saw him and wept. The robe is half finished, he said. What do I do?

Zhou promised to finish it. The master brought out his tools and handed them over. The shuttle, Zhou said, was heavy in the hand.

When the master died, that whole generation of teachers was gone. Only then, Zhou says, did he feel the weight: if I don’t do it, nobody will. That was also the moment he began to care about the craft — not love at first sight, but something taken up and impossible to put down.

He finished the half robe, and then wove another. From the assignment arriving to the first copy being completed took three years.

IIIAn inch of brocade, an inch of gold

The loom is called a grand drawloom: four metres high, five and a half long, built from 1,924 parts. Two people work it. Above, the thread-lifter raises the warp and sets the pattern. Below, the weaver throws the shuttle and sets the colour. Together, eight hours a day, they produce five or six centimetres.

Hence the saying: an inch of brocade, an inch of gold. The hardest variety, zhuanghua, uses what the trade calls “warp through, weft broken” — the warp runs the full length, while the weft is laid in short stretches, one colour at a time. A single panel can carry a dozen colours, sometimes thirty. No machine has managed to replace it.

Gold is the foundation, and that goes back to the Yuan. The Mongols of the steppe did not build houses; they carried their wealth on their backs, and the gold-woven cloth they favoured — nasij — is where yunjin’s heavy use of gold begins. By the Ming and Qing it was court cloth.

The patterns were not chosen at random either. He puts it in six characters: every picture carries a meaning, and every meaning is auspicious. Long life, full halls of gold and jade — woven in, and worn.

Yunjin is woven. The same silk, taken to Suzhou, goes another way: there it is stitched, one needle at a time. That story is about the difference between the two.

Living Heritage · Su Embroidery

Suzhou Double-Sided Silk Embroidery Tabletop Display

Where Nanjing grand looms weave gold into court robes, Suzhou artisans split fine silk into gossamer filaments to create mirrored imagery on both faces with no visible knots.

$218.00 View Details →

IVCarrying it out

The bid for international recognition began around 2000 and ended in September 2009, when Nanjing yunjin weaving was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity at a meeting in Abu Dhabi.

The hard part, he says, was not the paperwork. It was that when people asked why it deserved to be on the list, he could not answer. So he took the cloth abroad — France, the United States, Belgium — and ended up at UNESCO’s Paris headquarters, weaving in an office, every day, for whoever came to look.

VMore than masters and pupils

The young man interviewing him said he had never learned to weave — he only brought a camera. Zhou waved that away. Inheritance, he said, does not have to run from master to pupil: filming the craft is a way of taking part in it, and a real contribution too.

His own turn was handed to him at a sickbed. Who takes the next one, he does not pretend to know. He says only what is plainly true: this kind of craft needs thousands of people in it, or it will not last.

There is another way of passing it on: one family, one kang bed, one pair of scissors — the mother cuts, the daughter cuts. The Gao family in northern Shaanxi did it for three generations.

To explore how other Chinese masters keep ancient crafts alive through relentless hands, read our stories on Jingdezhen porcelain master Feng Guohua's hand-carved vases and the living lineage of three generations of Fuzhou lacquer masters.

Craft

Nanjing Yunjin wooden-loom zhuanghua weaving

Listing

China’s first national list of intangible cultural heritage, 2006 (No. Ⅷ-13); UNESCO Representative List, 2009

Place

Nanjing, Jiangsu

Maker

Zhou Shuangxi (b. 1955) · national-level inheritor, third batch · senior arts-and-crafts artist

Lineage

Entered the Nanjing Yunjin Research Institute in 1973; apprenticed to Gu Huiyuan

Loom

Grand drawloom, 4 m high, 5.6 m long, 1,924 parts; one thread-lifter and one weaver

Output

Five to six centimetres a day for two people — “an inch of brocade, an inch of gold”

Key work

Dingling Wanli dragon-robe reproduction · gold-and-peacock-feather gauze robe · Long Live China\n