there are several kinds of hemp. some grow two or three meters high, the kind from which rope, nets, and sacks are still made. they become coarse and hard. Perhaps that is why the character for hemp also means coarse, raw, uneven.
The low-growing kind is well known in the West under its Latin name, Cannabis. It has been used in China as a sedative for various illnesses since long before the beginning of history, through not, as far as we can tell, as a general intoxicant. I don't know why.
This plant thrives in the dry, sunny high steppes, but also like rich soil, so has long followed people. The nomadic tribes in the North -most of all, their shamans - used it as a drug when they went into a trance, and they probably once brought it west to central Asia and India, where it as long been used as a narcotic.
The character for hemp is included in words such as anesthetic, numb, and apathetic and in the names of several important medicinal plants such as Gastrodia elata the "heavenly hemp", a well-known remedy for rheumatism, and Ephedra sinica ephedrine, which is used all over the world for bronchitis and asthma. None of these plants belongs to the same family as hemp, but as hemp became generally used very early on as a medicinal plant, other plants with similar effects were gathered under that name.
The character is also included in several composite words for disease entailing severe skin changes, such as measles, leprosy, or smallpox.
Perhaps the character is being used in a transferred sense here - a person who looks as if someone had thrown a handful of hemp seeds at his face? Or a cruel but clear picture of the lacerated skin of a smallpox victim?
The low, bushy hemp produces a great deal of seed. Porridge was previously made from these, and hemp was actually classified as "grain" in ancient China. But the seeds were used primarily to make oil. This might be the explanation for the character being included in the names of other important plants such as sesame, castor, and flax brought into China during later periods. Botanically, they have nothing in common with hemp.
Excellent cloth can be woven from hemp, strong and light, cool in summer, and quickly absorbing body sweat.
I did not understand how this quality could be found in hemp cloth until I learned that hemp is one of the nettle plants, and nettles used to be woven into lovely, light materials in Europe. Nettles have seen woven into cloth since very early times in China and still are today. A nettle variety called "China grass" (Boehmeria nivea), or ramie, is still grown widely in the southern parts of the country and is truly practical plant When the long stems are cut, new ones grow quickly , and three or four crops a year are usual if the weather and the soil are both good. The cloth woven with ramie fibers is almost as beautiful and pleasing as silk. The character for hemp is included in both nettle and ramie.
Cotton, now regarded as typical of China, was not grown there until during the Yuan dynasty and did not replace hemp as the main fiber for the manufacture of cloth in everyday use until the seventeenth century. For funerals, people still dress in cloth made from natural, undyed hemp.
***
There is nothing so dead as a discarded nylon shirt. But old rope, nets, and old clothes made of hemp can be made into paper. It is all cut up, boiled and pounded into pulp in a huge mortar, then the pulp is spread very thinly over a reed mat or a finemeshed net and dried into a sheet of paper. This invention may be China's most important contribution to mankind. Thrift, inventiveness, and concentration on what is useful are typical of the Chinese people. nothing is to be wasted. Everything can be used, to emerge again in a new form.
All paper is still made on basic principle, even in the advanced paper industry of today. The oldest paper still preserved comes from the first century B. C. It has yellowed, but after over two thousand years, it is not even brittle, despite the fact that it is only 0,01 millimeters thick. This paper mainly from wrapping valuable objects. But two hundred years later, in 105, an official called Cai Lun and skilled paper workers at the Imperial Palace succeeded in making paper that was fine-grained and strong that it could also be written on with brush and ink.
Hemp continued to be the main raw material for paper. Even during the Tang dynasty, 80 percent of all paper was made from hemp. Then bamboo, rice straw, and other material took over.
For six hundred years, the Chinese were the only people who known how to make paper. But in the summer of 751, the Arabs defeated Chinese army at Talas in central Asia at one of the most important battles in the history of the world. From then on the Tang dynasty began to decline, the centuries-old contact with the West was broken, and China became isolated behind her natural barriers of deserts and mountains.
Among the Chinese prisoners of war taken by the Arabs were some paper workers. Under their direction, Samarkand developed into a center for paper making in the Arab empire.After a thousand-year journey through Asia and North Africa, the technique of papermaking finally arrived in Spain in 1150, then spread all over Europe during the following centuries. At the end of the seventeenth-century, paper arrived in North America. Now every child knows what paper is. What would our modern civilization be like without it?
Paper made from hemp is used in China today only as wrapping paper, just as it was in the beginning, for all other purposes there are special papers. The famous Xuan paper from Anhui is found in ninety variations and is used for many purposes, not only by artists and bookbinders. The Chinese are connoisseurs when it comes to paper. They choose paper for different purposes with the same care as the French choose their wine. What shall we have? "Tiger Skin paper" or "cold gold"?
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Making paper is a fairly simple procedure - although some special papers take as a year and almost a hundred different processes to complete. Weaving silk, on the other hand, is one of the most complicated processes to complete. Weaving silk, on the other hand, is one of the most complicated processes of all. Yet the Chinese mastered this art as early Neolithic days. The Oldest known silk cloth found is considered to be 4 700 years old. But silk ribbon has been found that carbon 14 analysis shows as five hundred years older.
Silkworms come from China, as do the mulberry tree and the leaves the silkworm lives off. The silkworm has a short but intense life. From the moment the larva hatches out of the egg, to a month later when it spins itself into a cocoon of silk, it has increased thirty times in length and ten thousand times in weight. But then its time is running out. After a week to ten days inside the cocoon, its metamorphosis into a butterfly is complete, and it breaks out into freedom. It is gray and insignificant and has no mouth, so cannot eat. It has one more task in life -to reproduce itself- and that must happen quickly, for within a few days it is dead.
The breeding of these creatures is nothing to be done in one's leisure time. Just to pick the leaves the worms need is hard work, requiring a great many hands. A ton of leaves -leaves from thirty full-grown trees- are needed to produce five or six kilos of silk, and of that probably only half can be used to make thread. Silkworms are very sensitive. The slightest change in the weather may mean disaster, and when they have pupated, they have to be watched carefully so that they do not break out of the cocoon, for then the valuable silk thread that is the purpose of the breeding is destroyed.
The thread is about a kilometer long. To get hold of it and wind it up, the cocoon is put into hot water, the butterfly killed, and the cocoon softened sufficiently to enable the extreme end of the thread to be found and reeled up. The threads from several cocoons are always reeled at the time, as the individual thread is too thin to handle alone.
These are some oracle bone and bronze characters for silk. According to one explanation, they show a skein of spun silk; according to another, the cocoons and the thin silk threads.
The cocoon explanation is supported by the form of the character for to tie together, bind together, which shows cocoons and threads rather than a skein, as well as the actual process of reeling the thin threads out of the cocoons as they bob up down in the hot water. In the modern character, the hand holding the cocoon has been reduced to a single stroke.
The character for silk was often doubled on the oracle bones and still appears that the way in the character for raw silk or silk cloth in general, while in compound characters, only one character for silk is used.
In Grammata Serica Recensa, Bernhard Kalgreen's dictionary of the Chinese language a spoken and written in Seres -Silk country- in about 600 B. C., there are nearly two hundred characters containing silk.
About fifty of them are words for tie, bind, braid, and cord, rope. There are special words for ropes used for tethering domestic animals, ropes used at the well, the coarse ropes that hold fishing netd, and rope for horse's reins, crupper, and stirrup straps. The strings of bows and musical instruments are also included. And two characters that means to strangle - the silken cords. When the emperor lost confidence in one of his officials, he discreetly sent him a little parcel containing a silken cord, enough to hang himself with, and there was the end of that career.
The other characters are more directly concerned with silk, silk cloth, or elements in textile production in general: the quality of cloth and clothes, and ornaments.
The character for silk is included in one hundred or more characters that reflect all the time-consuming aspects of silk production. Knots and tangles develop easily when the thin threads of the cocoons are to be reeled up, for they are only a fraction of a millimeter thick. When they have been spun together, the warp can be set up. For a half-meter-wide cloth of good quality, three thousand warp thread are required, and for the first class cloth, seven or eight thousand. Naturally, there are many opportunities for confusion and putting in order before everything is in place and the actual weaving can begin.
The quality of the silk determines what cloth will become. During the Zhou period, there were already fifteen different kinds of cloth, all with names of their own. simple, undyed, rather coarse cloths were mostly woven, but pattern cloths in variegated colors were also produced. Textile scholars say it is remarkable that there are characters for pattern and multicolor, evidence that the early Chinese used looms of a kind Europe did not have until toward the middle Ages, two thousand years later.
When the cloth was ready, all that had to be done, was to cut down the material and roll-up the cloth, the result of so much labor. Then it could be bleached or dyed in one of the thirteen different colors in which the character for silk is included, for instance, in red and green.
Ribbons, belts, and handkerchiefs were also woven, and sandals and bags were sewn. Embroidered borders on hems or cap edges were made, and tassels of every kind. Some were put on the front of shoes, others hung on hats or as decoration on horses. For all this and quite a lot more, there are special characters, and the character for silk is included in every one of them.
When anyone died, white mourning clothes were worn, for in China mourning is white, not black.
Many years ago, I saw a funeral procession in Taiwan. The whole family behind the coffin wore white mourning clothes and walked with heads bowed. All of them were holding on to a thick white rope -children, the middle-aged, and the old-. Then for the first time I understand the character for closely attached, succession, continuation and the little word grandson, the construction of which had been inexplicable to me until then.
Natural materials were not dyed until after weaving. Silk thread contains a natural glue that makes the threads strong and weaving easier. But color does not take easily to unwashed silk thread. If a multicolored, patterned cloth is required, the thread must be washed and dyed first, but then the weaving becomes even more difficult.
Most colors were previously based on plants of various kinds. A few, such as yellow, probably came from minérals. A much-appreciated shade of red came from the sap of a tree. The blue color regarded as typical of China came from China's own indigo plant, Polygonum tinctorium, a plant native to northern China. With the exception of indigo, only artificial dyes are used today.
The silk left over -the cocoons from which the silkworms managed to escape, or in which the thread has become irretrievably tangled - was made into wadding and used to line winter clothes. Fo us, the word wadding has associations with damp, moist compresses and heavy, lumpy quilts of cotton wadding. But silk wadding, "silk floss" as it is also called, is light, thin, and supple, supérior to goose down and all other lining materials. My most beloved winter coat is lined with silk wadding and is as warm as a fur coat. It weighs scarcely more than a kilo.
The technique for making silk wadding is simple. The cocoons are boiled and pounded together into a pulp, then washed and dried on thin bamboo matting. When the wadding is lifted off the matting, a paper-thin layer of silk is left behind. This was once used as protection around expensive objects, as we use tissue paper, and people also tried to write on it. Then gradually, cheaper plant fibers came to be used, and that led to the arrival of what we now call paper.
But silk was also used for writing over a long period, so the character for silk is also included in the character for paper, for the material people used to write on.
Next to grain, silk and silk cloth were for many dynasties the most important raw matérials delivered as taxes to the state. Skeins of silk and lengths of material at certain times were used as a means of payment. A bronze inscription from the early 600 B.C., says that a horse and a skein of silk were worth as much as five slaves.
On the lid of a bronze vessel from the Han dynasty, some women are sitting weaving. Each has one end of the warp fastened with a belt around her waist and the warp held stretched by putting her foot on the end bar. Backstrap looms of this kind have been found since Neolithic times and are still in use among ethnic minorities in China and the Indians of South America.
The first Chinese looms are thought to have been similar to these. They may seem primitive, but astonishingly beautiful and complicated cloth can be woven on them. Some of Japan's most exclusive kimono cloth has been woven on what is called the jibata loom, based on the same principle.
Perhaps a backstrap loom or some other early form of loom can be seen in the character for warp. The characters consisted of two parts: on the left, silk; on the right, something the shuowen dictionary maintains means vein of water, but no reference is given to any text or inscription in which it is used in that sense.
Bernhard Kalgren thinks that the right-hand part is the primary form of the character and says it may depict some kind of loom.
Anyone who has sat at loom can understand, the picture, because is what it feels like, You see the warp stretching out in front of you like a keyboard as your hand search for the yarn or cloth rags that are to constitute the weft.
But there is a difference between the Chinese way of perceiving a loom and ours. In the West, the weft is the most important. When a rag rug is being woven, the warp is coarse and sparse - on the whole, uninteresting -. But then all the bright variegated rags are woven in. As in the making of tapestries, the waft gives the cloth its character and makes it come alive.
Not so with the Chinese. For them the warp is fundamental. Silk is tough and can be stretched a quarter of its length without breaking, and it is thin. So a very long cloth can be set up with a pattern that runs the length of the many meters being woven - and with a wealth of detail inconceivable in wool or flax- . A warp is to the Chinese, not just a plain underlayer needed by weaver to show off his or her skill -it is the actual background of the design. It regulate the appearance of the long cloth - the geometrical figures, the clouds, flowers, and birds.
The only Western equivalent of this cloth is our linen damask - a historically recent attempt to recreate some of the beauty of the Chinese silks -.
Bearing in mind the importance of the warp in the art of Chinese weaving, it is natural that the character for warp also stands for concepts such as to pass through, go through, experience, regulate, continue. Also like the warp in a cloth, arteries run through the body, veins of water run through the ground, and the vast network of meridians run around the hearth.
Just a woman had the warp tied around their waist as they wove, the whole life of human beings as social creatures is also dependent on rules, laws, and customs built over the course of time. These can be seen as the moral "warp" running through generations and periods of time and guiding our way of living and thinking. For this reason, certain most important classic books were also referred to with the character of warp. These thirteen leading books constituted the canon or set of rules on which people sought to model their lives fo over two thousand years. In many respects, those books are still the "warp" of Chinese life.
At the beginning of the Han period, when the women weavers of Yunnan were portrayed on that bronze lid the simple loom they used had been abandoned for a thousand years in the most advanced parts of the country. As early as the Shang period, damask with intricate geometric patterns was woven in towns around the Yellow River, and in the early Zhou period, the weaving of brocade - the most complicated cloth of all - began.
Only a few pieces of cloth from the Shang period have been preserved, among them some plain damask from a grave in Anyang. Many objects were wrapped in silk when they were put into the graves. The cloth itself has now disappeared, but the dampness in the graves made the bronze axes and bronze vessels wrapped in it corrode, leaving behind imprints of the vanished cloth, imprints so clear that textile scholars can see the way the cloth was woven.
During the expansion of the Han period in central Asia, in the last couple of centuries B.C., silk played an important political role. To increase their influence among the nomadic peoples of the deserts and steppes, to establish diplomatic relations and draw them into their sphere of power, the Chinese showered these people with expensive gifts, especially silk. In 1 B.C. alone, thirty thousand rolls of silk were given away the Xiongnu, the people then dominating the steppes in the northwest.
Chinese silk had already reached Europe in various ways a hundred years earlier, but a regular trade was no established until roman empire expanded so far east that it almost touched on the extreme outposts of the Han empire in the desert north of Pamir. No direct contact was ever made between the two realms -trade was handled by central Asiatic and Arab merchants - but from the days of Emperor Augustine, silk was in general use and an important status symbol among the upper class of Rome, Roman imports consists largely of silk thread, which, during the first centuries of the empire, was dyed and woven in towns along the eastern Mediterranean, where the caravans ended their nearly five thousand miles journey. An extensive silk-weaving industry also arose in other parts of the Roman Empire, among other places in Constantinople, from 395 A.D. the capital of Byzantium, the Eastern Roman Empire.
The uneven supply of silk, however, remained a problem. Conflicts flaring between Rome and different central Asian peoples as well as between China and the nomadic peoples, occasionally caused trade to cease. But in 552, the situation changed quite unexpectedly when silkworm eggs were brought to Constantinople. how this happened has never been clarified. The explanation that most fires the imagination is that some monks (or merchants) smuggled the eggs out of China in a hollow bamboo stave -although it is hard to fathom, how the production of silk could have begun from those few eggs. Who in Byzantium was sufficiently familiar with the life cycle of silkworms and the techniques of handling that thin thread? No one knows. But the experiment succeeded. At the beginning of the first century A.D., Italy, and Spain had also learned to produce silk, but up to the fifteenth century, Europe was still dependent on imports from China to supplement their own silk production.
In China, the cloth was woven during the Han period on a loom with treadles and a firm, slanting frame, as can be seen in the weaving scene on page 217. Although the loom does not look particularly unusual today, in its time it was the most advanced in the world.
When brocade was being woven, a considerably more complicated loom was used, called a draw loom. Brocades preserved from the Zhou period indicate that it was already in use at that time, although little is known about how it looked. The most imposing portrayal f a draw loom in its classic form is this 1637 drawing which shows a loom that is worked on two levels by two people, one who slides in the weft and a "draw boy" who regulate the warp by lifting groups of threads in a preordained pattern.
The draw loom came toEurope sometime during the Middle Ages, bringing with it a sharp rise in silk production. In 1801 the Frenchman Joseph Marie Jacquard demonstrated that, instead of the draw boy, punched cards regulating the warp could be used, on the same principle as a program fed into a computer. The weavers, afraid of becoming unemployed, attacked the loom and Jacquard himself, but both he and the loom survived, and it is on Jacquard looms that the Chinese weave their magnificent brocades today.
A great many old looms are still used outside the large textile factories. In Yunnan and Tibet, backstrap looms are still used, and crude looms made by local carpenters can be found all over the country. In winter when the fields are empty and farm implements hang unused on the wall, many people spend their time weaving, although they no longer weave material for family clothing. They can't compete with the great variety found in the village stores, but instead weave coarse cotton cloth for sacks, bags quilts, and so on.
In 1971 a new hospital was to be built in Changsha, and a grave mound from the Han dynasties lay in the way; so it was decided to excavate it in order to get at the site. When the finds from the excavation were made known, they caused a sensation all over the world. Embedded in charcoal and white clay, the body of the Marquise of Tai, as well as the objected buried with her in the grave, had lain as if in a vacuum sealed space.
The marquise herself, after 2 100 years, was so well preserved that it was possible to perform an autopsy. She belonged to blood group A, and at her death in 165 B.C., she suffered slightly from atherosclerosis, gallbladder trouble, schistosomiasis, and the after effect of tuberculosis. Her skin and tissues were still elastic. When technicians injected preserving liquid, swelling arose and later subsided -just as they do after immunization injections into living flesh, such as those given before foreign travel - .
Among all the art objects, necessities, and foodstuffs she had taken with her, the textiles are the most remarkable. It is extremely unusual for archaeologists to find such old and well-preserved objects, and of such fine quality. There were not only fifteen silk robes - eleven lined with silk wadding- but also hand-sewn stockings, shoes, and silk gloves, and forty-six rolls of silk cloth, woven in the most dexterous pattern and decorated with exquisite chain stitch embroidery. They were no more spoiled than if they had lain in a chest in the attic for a few years. Some of the cloth had lost its color, but most of it still glowed in reds, greens, yellows, blues, or black.
The robes are straight and have long sleeves and a broadband around the neck and front. They fasten to the right and are held together by the wearer's arm or with a soft belt. They most resemble an ordinary dressing grown but are cut with much more sophistication.
There are two styles, one in which the two sides of the front part are straight, the other in which the right side is drawn out in a point at the hip.
These finds were considered unique until 1981 when some brick workers were digging for clay and found a grave that was about two hundred years older and filled with robes of all kinds - padded winter costumes in three colored brocade and summer gowns in silk voile, a material as thin as a dragonfly wing. One of them weighs only forty-nine grams (about an ounce and a half).
These are made in the same style as those described above, and in fact, this is what the Chinese costume has looked like since the beginning of historical time. It can be seen on small sculptures from the Shang and Zhou periods.
Robes of this kind are reproduced in the character for clothing.
The Chinese went on using this basis pattern for their cloths for three thousand years. peasant coats reached halfway down the thigh and from the Han period on were worn with a pair of wide trousers tied firmly in a knot around the waist with a soft cloth belt. Many older Chinese peasants still dress this way. Officials and others who did not have work in the fields wore theirs almost down to the ankles. As the years went by, their sleeves became longer and wider. During the Tang and Song dynasties, they almost reached the floor.
When the Manchurians set up the Qing dynasty in 1644, they brought their national costume into the country. This was also a long, straight coat, but the sleeves were narrow and fastened with a number of small cloth buttons. The particularly lovely style worn by Chinese women is based on this model: a fitted tunic buttoned high up at the neck and slit high up the thigh.
Buddhist monks, however, were not to be influenced. They kept the ancient costume and still wear it today, as do the Japanese. The kimono is not a Japanese invention, but a close successor of upper-class Chinese clothing of the Tang period. It was introduced into Japan in the eighth century. A thousand years later, the kimono of Japanese ladies was complemented with a broad belt called an obi, but the gentlemen's kimono looks just as it always has.
CHINA Empire of living symbols, by Cecilia Lindqvist, translated by Joan Tate, foreword by Michael Loewe, edition of Da Capo Press, réédition 2008 (1st édition 1989)
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