The "Fashionable Piece" Beloved By Madam Xinzhui In The Western Han Dynasty Was Successfully Copied!

Reporters recently learned from Hunan Museum that Hunan Museum, together with Nanjing Yunjin Research Institute, successfully completed the imitation of silk padded gown with printed and colored yarn, which was a "fashionable item" in the wardrobe of Madam Xin Zhui in the Western Han Dynasty more than 2000 years ago.

The straight train silk padded gown with printed colored yarn was unearthed in the No.1 Han Tomb at Mawangdui. It was one of Xin Zhui's favorite costumes before his life. Its fabric is printed colored yarn, with silk lining, sleeve, collar and rim, and silk floss inside. It is the earliest silk fabric found in the world that combines printing and color painting. A total of three silk cotton gowns with printed and colored yarn were unearthed in Tomb 1, and their styles are basically the same.

Yang Jiyuan (second from the right), director of the Cultural Relics Restoration Department of Nanjing Yunjin Research Institute, delivered the replica at Hunan Museum. (Courtesy of respondents)

This is a silk padded gown with printed and colored gauze (original) collected by the Hunan Museum. (Courtesy of respondents)

One of the reasons why this dress is popular is that the upper body can show "charming posture". "This kind of dress with straight train style is very popular with women in the Han Dynasty." Dong Minghua, deputy director of the Collection Protection Center of Hunan Museum, said that although the silk cotton dress with printed and colored yarn is a cotton dress, the main body of the dress is yarn, and the upper body is light. The hem of the straight train gown is cut at an angle to make the bottom of the hem look like a trumpet, making people's posture more beautiful.

In addition to the fashionable style, the patterns on this garment are also very beautiful. It is understood that the decoration method of printing and applying color yarn is extremely complicated, and the patterns on the yarn materials need to be made by printing and color painting. The patterns are mainly the deformed patterns of vine plants, including branches, buds, flower spikes, leaf buds, etc., and the colors are vermilion, pink, blue black, blue gray, etc.

This is a part of the silk padded gown with printed and colored gauze collected by the Hunan Museum (original). (Courtesy of respondents)

Experts speculate that the printing pattern of the branches and tendrils is fine, evenly distributed, and there are obvious broken lines at the intersection, which indicates that it is printed with a hollow plate. The patterns of flowers, leaves and buds are different, with different colors. They should be painted by hand one stroke at a time.

"Such a large fabric is printed, dyed and depicted in turn, and its difficulty and working hours can be imagined." Yu Yanjiao, director of the Research and Exhibition Center for Han Tombs and Collections at Mawangdui, said that the printed and colored yarn should be a fashionable fashion fabric popular among the Han Dynasty nobles. This combination of printing and color painting technology was first found on silk fabric in China. Its appearance confirmed the reliability of "painted clothes" and "painted articles" recorded in the literature, reflected the superb printing and painting processing technology of the Han Dynasty, and was also a masterpiece of ancient Chinese paint printing and dyeing.

However, after more than 2000 years of preservation under the tomb, a large area of halo dyeing appeared in the printing and color yarn pattern pigments, and the copying work is imminent.

Yang Jiyuan and the team put the imitated clothes on the top of the original to compare the size. (Courtesy of respondents)

Yang Jiyuan, director of the Cultural Relics Restoration Department of Nanjing Yunjin Research Institute, is the person in charge of the cultural relics imitation work. "The overall color of the imitated printed silk padded gown with colored yarn is crimson, with seven layers of patterns and eight layers of halo dyeing, all of which are made by printing and hand painting." She said that because the production process in the Western Han Dynasty can not be verified now, it can only be inferred through microscopic observation of cultural relics and historical data.

In Yang Jiyuan's view, the biggest technical difficulty of this imitation is that, while painting and dyeing on such thin plain yarn, in order to restore the original state more truly, the clothes also need to show the old color of history.

This is an imitation printed silk padded gown with colored yarn (partial). (Courtesy of respondents)

As early as 2019, she led her team to successfully imitate a 49g plain yarn single garment by visiting the "thin silkworm", reforming the loom, weaving by experts, developing dyes, and researching shapes.

"It is more difficult to imitate the printed silk padded gown with colored yarn than the plain yarn single garment, because to use the printing process on the plain yarn, a total of 7 layers of color patterns need to be painted, each layer of patterns is very small, which requires great patience." Yang Jiyuan said that they had tried to directly print and hand paint on the plain yarn, and found that the effect was not good after comparing with the original. Later, they bought all the mineral pigments available in the market, and finally prepared pigments of appropriate concentration by constantly trying the ratio of kraft gum and mineral powder. The superposition of different colors was basically the same as the original, which successfully solved the problem.

In order to make the overall pattern of the imitation more similar to the original, Yang Jiyuan and his team also specially re colored the imitation and painted a special color halo on it. "The appearance of color halo makes the visual similarity between the imitation and the original reach 95%," she said.

At present, Yang Jiyuan and his team have completed the imitation of silk fabrics unearthed from the Han Tomb at Mawangdui, such as straight train plain yarn single clothes, vermilion rhombic rib silk cotton gowns, yellow and brown silk "longevity embroidery" pillows, feather applique silk, and Qucheng plain yarn single clothes. The imitation of silk "longevity embroidery" silk cotton gowns unearthed from the Han Tomb at Mawangdui is under way and is expected to be completed by the end of this year.

(Source: Xinhua News Agency)