The Spread of Gold Thread Production in the Mongol Period: A Study of Gold Textiles in the China National Silk Museum, Hangzhou

A series of luminous, gold-woven fragments from the Mongol period in the collection of the China National Silk Museum 中國博物館 (CNSM) in Hangzhou gives a glimpse into elite textile production in China during the second half of the thirteenth century and first half of the fourteenth century (See Figures 1–13, pp. 366–78). These fragments were originally part of larger textiles that were used in different ways: as clothing or hats, as hanging panels for tents, and as sutra covers, hinting at the variety of gold-woven silk fabrics that enrobed the Mongol court. The Mongol period in China, from the mid-thirteenth to the mid-fourteenth centuries, saw innovations in many areas of artistic production, notably blue and white ceramics and literati painting. The manufacture of silks woven with gold was exceptional, however, from the point of view of courtly visual culture. Gold was symbolically important to the Mongols in a way it was not for previous "Han" Chinese dynasties such as the Tang and the Song, as it represented, among other things, the lineage of Chinggis Khan.¹ In addition to the symbolic importance of gold to the Mongols, the spectacle of thousands of bodies enrobed in gold during Mongol courtly ceremonies was visually stunning and a statement of conspicuous consumption: both of a valuable metal and of incredibly complex high-cost fabrics. The visual impact of these literally flashy ceremonies thus conveyed clear messages to visitors to the Mongol court about the power and reach of the Mongol Empire.

The vast quantities of gold thread required by the Mongol court to make textiles that gave the impression of being made entirely of gold marked a departure from previous dynasties, when gold thread had been used sparingly.² Indeed, the Mongol period was a turning point in gold thread production. Prior to the Mongol period in China, gold thread was usually made in two ways: filé (winding gold foil around a silk core), called nianjin 撚金 ("twisted gold"), or by gilding flat strips of animal substrate, called pijin 皮金 ("leather gold").³ During the Mongol period, a new type of gold thread made by twisting gilded animal-substrate-based threads around a silk core emerged, effectively combining these two techniques. In this article, I will investigate the shift in gold thread production techniques by focusing on a group of fragments now in the CNSM. By putting these textiles in dialogue with better-known examples, I hope to shed some light on the context of this new gold thread production technique, using wrapped animal substrates, in the Mongol period.

In the past forty years, pre-modern metallic threads have become a field of interest for art and textile historians as well as scientists, who have used them to explore the connections between visual culture and textile technology in medieval Eurasia.⁴ Probably for reasons of access, the focus of these studies has been mostly on European and Eastern Mediterranean production, but there is an increasingly available body of evidence for historical metallic thread production in East Asia, specifically in China.⁵ The Mongol period was a particularly fruitful episode in the production of metallic threads in the pre-modern world, and I hope to clarify the technological contribution of artisans working for the Mongol court, who I believe spread the technique of wrapped animal substrate gold threads across Eurasia, and further, to stimulate additional analyses by scientists on Mongol period gold threads.

In this article, I focus on a group of thirteen textiles from the CNSM and have chosen this corpus for two reasons. First, they are unpublished and thus not as well-known as some other gold-thread textiles from the Mongol period in other museum collections and archaeological findings. Publishing them will contribute to the ongoing dialogue about metallic threads in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Second, I was able to study most pieces in this group using a digital microscope, which allows me to make some basic observations about thread structure and composition.

I...