In this week’s blog, Costume Society News Editor Dr Babette Radclyffe-Thomas reviews the textiles on show at A Silk Road Oasis: Life in Ancient Dunhuang at the British Library and Silk Roads at the British Museum.
London is currently hosting two Silk Road themed exhibitions. Both exhibitions question the received wisdom of a single path linking ‘East’ and ‘West’, and instead focus on the web of networks, linking communities across Asia, Africa and Europe, from East Asia to Britain, and from Scandinavia to Madagascar.
Silk Roads at the British Museum focuses on the period AD 500 to 1000, bringing together over 300 artefacts from various regions, cultures and stories including loans by 29 national and international institutions, many of which are on display in the UK for the very first time. The exhibition covers five geographic zones, and it is the first exhibition in the Museum’s history to have a multi-curatorial approach, featuring objects from across the institution.
Silk Roads’s focus is not on clothing, but the exhibition does include various ancient clothing, jewellery and textiles highlights. One of the outfit highlights is an AD450-550 riding coat with AD400-700 gaiters (leggings) from Sheikh Ibada in Egypt. Byzantine clothing typically comprised tunics shaped to the body with belts and cloaks fastened with brooches. By contrast, riding costumes originating on the Steppe and worn in the Sasanian empire were tailored like the cross-over coat on show worn with linen and silk leggings (gaiters). Woven from the finest blend of sheep's wool and cashmere and trimmed with silk the coat may be an import or local imitation of eastern fashions in Antinoopolis in Byzantine Egypt.
A silk sleeve panel from AD 600-800 and fragment of a silk tunic, AD 775-900 also address the Byzantine appetite for silk. Silk was highly prized and was imported into Byzantium as both raw material and finished fabric. Sericulture itself reached Byzantium in AD 500s.
A massive embroidery from about AD700s depicting the Buddha emerging from a rocky mountain was sewn with silk threads on a silk ground backed with hemp hangs on display. Traces of embroidered text suggests the textile was commissioned by a senior monk at a monastery at the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang, a major Buddhist complex and remains one of the world’s most significant sites of Buddhist art.
Two silk fragments patterned with geese and flowers within roundels are on show. These clamp resist-dyed silk textiles are also from the Mogao caves and the pattern is created using wooden clamps to cover areas of the fabric which is then dipped into a dye bath. Scientific analysis of the dyes also informed a reconstruction of these textiles by experts in China to show how vibrant these textiles originally would have been.
There is also a fragment of ancient silk excavated from northwestern China as well as a modest shoe found at a guard station from AD 700 to 800. Other artefacts depict the legend of the Silk Princess, a Chinese princess who shared the secrets of silk farming with her new kingdom and ancient Central Asian textiles.
“Our aim in this exhibition is to tell a richer, more complex story of the Silk Roads beyond trade between East and West, highlighting the interconnectedness of Asia, Africa and Europe during the period from AD 500 to 1000. We are very excited about the incredible, first-time loans that will be featured alongside key British Museum objects. This has been a truly collaborative effort, very much in the spirit of the Silk Roads,” Luk Yu-Ping, Basil Gray Curator of Chinese Paintings, Prints and Central Asian Collections said.
A Silk Road Oasis: Life in Ancient Dunhuang at the British Library is the smaller of the two exhibitions and focuses on life in the town of Dunhuang in northwest China during the first millennium of the Common Era (CE). Dunhuang was established in 111BCE as a military outpost, and it became an important resting point for travellers due to its strategic position on the overland trade routes known as the Silk Roads. The exhibition showcases over 50 manuscripts, printed documents and pictorial works, many from the 'Library Cave' in the cave complex of Mogao and on public display for the first time. The ‘Library Cave’ specifically had been sealed for nearly 900 years at the time of its discovery by the Daoist Priest Wang Yuanlu in 1900. It contained tens of thousands of manuscripts, paintings, printed documents and objects spanning literature, theology, medicine, politics and art.
Mélodie Doumy, Lead Curator, Chinese Collections (Stein and Hoernle) and International Dunhuang Programme manager at the British Library, said: 'We are incredibly excited to provide a glimpse into the lives of the ordinary people who were the heart and soul of the Dunhuang oasis, making it such a fascinating melting-pot of languages, cultures and religions. We hope to show how these stories from the first millennium still resonate in our contemporary world, particularly in a cosmopolitan hub like London, which a number of diverse communities call home.'
Highlights of the exhibition include The Diamond Sutra (868 AD), the world’s earliest complete printed book with a date, and one of the most influential Mahayana sutras in East Asia. Garments include a hemp shoe from the 1st-2nd century possibly worn by an early settler who resided along the Dunhuang Limes. These were defensive walls and watchtowers constructed north of the town, and soldiers based there also doubled as farmers. Another textile themed artefact is an earthenware figure from 7th – 10th century of a central Asian merchant, possibly of Sogdian origins, as suggested by his large beard and conical hat. He carries a bundle of fabric or a rug under his left arm and Sogdians were renowned for the textiles they produced and sold.
Silk Roads, The British Museum, 26 September 2024 – 23 February 2025
A Silk Road Oasis: Life in Ancient Dunhuang, The British Library, 27 September 2024 – 23 February 2025
In our last blog post, Babette reviewed Vogue: Inventing the Runway; you can catch up on her review of the exhibition at Lightroom on our blog.
