China, after 1220. Lampas weave; silk and gold thread, 124.5 (warp) x 47.5 (weft) cm.

During the early Islamic period, silk and gold textiles had an extraordinary importance and value. Owned by persons of wealth and power, they ranked high among the requisite gifts exchanged by all diplomatic missions, were given as gifts of honor to and by persons of distinction, and were extensively traded from one end of Asia to the other. This is one of the most beautiful textiles to have survived from the thirteenth century, and-for technical and stylistic reasons-also virtually unique.

The design of aligned roundels, the paired winged lions contained within them, and the griffins in the interspaces belong to the decorative repertory of twelfth- to thirteenth-century Persia. At the same time, however, details within the design were derived from Chinese models: the cloudlike treatment of the lions' wings, the dragon's head at the end of each lion's tail, and the cloud terminals of the scrolling vines in the rounders. Moreover, the type of gold thread in the textile--gilded strips wrapped around a silk core--is Chinese and unknown among medieval textiles woven west of Chinese Turkestan. The textile was certainly woven after Genghis Khan's conquest of Transoxiana and Khurasan (beginning in 1220), perhaps by artists from those areas forced by the Mongols to migrate east. Persian and Chinese chronicles as well as eyewitness accounts of travelers reveal that artisans from Samarkand, Bukhara, Urgandj, Herat, and Nishapur were sent to state-run factories in China's present-day Xinjiang Province and Mongolia, and along the great bend of the Yellow River. That Chinese artisans were sent to those same areas may explain the juxtaposition of Persian and Chinese elements in the textile.

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund. 1989.50