| Twining method appeared early in China's history, by which fabric is made through one group of threads twining the other parallel arranged group. The earliest example is a purple gauze fragment found at Yangshao site in Qingtai Village, Xingyang, Henan, dating from 5000 years ago.The archeological evidences show twining method is a traditional Chinese technique and has been widely used during a long period in ancient China. Relics made by twining method were found in many places, such as Astana, Yingpan, little River and Shanpula in Xinjiang; Cave 17 and beacon site in Gansu; the tomb of Eastern Zhou in Langjiazhuang, Linzi, Shandong; the tomb of Chu state in Mashan, Jiangling, Hubei; the Yunyan Temple in Huqiu, Suzhou, Jiangsu etc. and relics made by twining method combined with braiding were found at the tombs of Han Dynasty in Dabaotai and Mancheng, Beijing.These archeological evidences cover a wide range, including shoes, sutra wrappers, woolen fabric, rush baskets and ribbons of different types, and through these archeological evidences we believe twining method appeared 5000 years ago then continued to be used during a long period and reached its heyday in the Han and Tang dynasties. The most famous example is a pair of shoes with Chinese inscription fu qie chang yi hou wang tian yan ming chang and sutra wrappers from Cave 17 in Dunhuang are large in number.According to their feature, relics made by twining method can be divided into two categories: the one dating to pre-Tang dynasty and the other dating to the Tang and Song dynasties. Before the Tang dynasty, relics made by twining method are numerous and varied and mostly are used in ancestors'daily life. But after that time, in the Tang and Song dynasties, twining method is mostly adopted by bamboo sutra wrappers which belong to temples.Sutra wrapper is used for rolling and covering sutra. According to the material, it consists of bamboo sutra wrapper, cloth sutra wrapper and grass sutra wrapper. Bamboo sutra wrapper is made of bamboo splints fastened together with silk threads using the warp twining method. Bamboo sutra wrappers dating to the Tang and Song dynasties are mainly found in Cave 17, however, at the beginning of the 20th century many of them were taken abroad by foreign archaeologists and have been collected in several museums or libraries overseas such as the British Museum, the Musee Guimet and the Bibliotheque nationale de France etc. Bamboo sutra wrappers are usually in a rectangular shape with the geometrical, dotted or floral pattern which are quite favored in the Tang dynasty. In order to get a further understand of the twining method, I reconstructed a representative example:bamboo sutra wrapper EO.1209/1 in the Musee Guimet collection. Affected by Buddhism, sutra wrappers of this kind have also been found in other Asian countries such as Japan and Korea, with a similarity in structure, dimension and twining method.Besides ancient China, ancestors in other areas also used twining method, such as Egyptian, and Indian in North America. Till today, in our country this method is still used by minorities but the technique has developed. |
