Textile with Stripes and Confronted Birds
Eastern Zhou dynasty, Warring States period (475–221 BCE)
Not on view
The oldest Chinese textiles in The Met's collection, these two fragments feature a complicated weave structure with different colored warps in the same dent of the loom’s reed. The introduction of an inner weft allowed the weaver to choose three colored warps for the design, and the binding weft determined the structure. This technique was so labor-intensive that it was discontinued by the eighth or ninth century. The stripes in the design were woven vertically, and the motifs were woven sideways.
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