"Why launch a project so vast and time-consuming — the first systematic survey of major Chinese textile collections worldwide?" asks Zhao Feng, former director of the China National Silk Museum.
Launched in 2022, the cross-border initiative aims to publish 100 scholarly volumes documenting Chinese silks preserved in museums and research institutions in China and abroad. The 12 volumes published so far include studies of the Palace Museum in Beijing and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where Zhao served as a visiting research fellow from 1997 to 1998.
"This effort not only reshapes our understanding of ancient Chinese silk civilization, but also provides a foundation for tracing intercultural exchange through textile evidence," he says.
"By advancing global textile archaeology and conservation, the project protects a fragile heritage while also revealing its power to deepen and, in some cases, even rewrite our understanding of history."
One example comes from the Shanpula (Sampula) cemeteries in Hotan, on the southern edge of the Taklimakan Desert in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. Situated along the southern Silk Road oasis corridor, the site was historically linked to the Kingdom of Khotan, a major Buddhist and trading center first recorded in the 2nd century BC, when long-distance commerce along the Silk Road was just beginning. The kingdom endured until its fall in the early 11th century.
Among the most revealing finds is a crimson silk fragment woven in a warp-faced compound weave and decorated with jade discs (bi) and animal masks. Although unearthed in China's western frontier, its imagery clearly reflects the ritual and aesthetic traditions of the Central Plains (zhongyuan, a cultural core that corresponds with modern-day Henan province and its surrounding regions).
In ancient China, jade discs were elite ceremonial objects placed in burials as symbols of a gateway to heaven and the cyclical journey of the soul — a practice especially prominent between the 5th and 1st centuries BC. The Shanpula textile preserves this iconography, offering powerful evidence of cultural connections sustained along the Silk Road.
A parallel story of exchange emerges from the silks discovered at Loulan, an ancient oasis city near Lop Nor. Their cloud-and-animal motifs — swirling celestial clouds paired with tigers, bears, dragons and mythical birds — belong to the symbolic world of Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) Taoist imagery, in which cloud-veiled sacred mountains evoked the realm of immortals. Widely produced in central China, these designs traveled west through trade and cultural contact, reappearing proudly in Loulan textiles.
In 1900, Swedish explorer Sven Hedin first identified the ruins of Loulan, a Silk Road hub that flourished between the 2nd century BC and the 4th century AD. In subsequent years, British archaeologist Marc Aurel Stein conducted multiple expeditions there, uncovering Chinese and Kharosthi (an ancient script) documents on wooden slips, along with Buddhist artifacts and finely woven silk and wool textiles.
"These expeditions marked the beginnings of textile archaeology in China, as foreign explorers moved into the country's northwest, including Xinjiang, Gansu and Inner Mongolia," Zhao says. "Their discoveries helped shape global understanding of Chinese silk, but they also led to its dispersal, with many textiles eventually scattered across museums around the world."
Against this historical backdrop, Zhao's current project — built on decades of collaboration with overseas museums holding major Chinese silk collections — grew out of an earlier initiative he launched in 2006 to document Dunhuang textiles.
"Around 2004, the British Museum invited me to help study and catalog their Chinese silk holdings, many acquired during Stein's expeditions to Dunhuang," Zhao recalls.
"Recognizing the importance of these materials, I immediately contacted the British Library and the Victoria and Albert Museum — both of which also preserve outstanding Dunhuang silks — and proposed a comprehensive project."
The scope later expanded to include the Musee Guimet in Paris, the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the Dunhuang Academy in China, and other institutions. The effort culminated in Textiles from Dunhuang — a six-volume, comprehensive study of Dunhuang silks.
Yet, as Zhao and his collaborators emphasize, the exceptionally well-preserved Dunhuang silks represent only a fraction of China's archaeological textile heritage. "Later Chinese silk textiles in the British Museum collection reflect new developments shaped by the emergence of global trading networks, particularly through links with markets in Europe and the Americas," says Luk Yu-ping of the British Museum, who is collaborating with Zhao on the current project.
A case in point is export silk produced in factories in Guangzhou — known as Canton at the time — between the 18th and 20th centuries. In 1757, the Qing (1644-1911) government restricted all foreign trade to this single port, creating what later became known as the Canton System. This policy made Guangzhou, now the capital city of Guangdong province, a pivotal hub in global commerce, first for European merchants and, from the late 18th century onward, for American traders.
Against this historical backdrop, silk production flourished, becoming China's second-largest export commodity after tea. With foreign customers in mind, Chinese weavers and embroiderers developed designs that fused Western neoclassical tastes with imagined visions of China, creating textiles that catered both to fascination with the East and to evolving artistic trends in the West.
Many finished goods, including shawls and bedcovers, traveled to their destinations by sea, a journey subtly echoed in the textiles themselves. One bedcover, likely commissioned, features embroidered mermaids alongside waves, sailors, fish, shrimp and crabs, weaving maritime imagery together with traditional floral and bird motifs. Today, the piece is a highlight of the Guangdong Museum's extensive collection of export silks, examined in one of the first 12 volumes.
Born in 1961 to silk-factory workers in Zhejiang province, Zhao grew up in another of China's historic silk textile-producing regions, whose silk heritage spans more than two millennia. He later studied silk technology in college.
"My first trip abroad was to Sweden in 1993, at the invitation of a textile scholar. The first English-language study of Chinese silk I read was by Vivi Sylwan at Stockholm's Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities," he recalls. Appropriately, Chinese silks from the Swedish Army Museum appear in the project's first 12 volumes.
From then on, Zhao's work became increasingly international. Between September 2024 and February 2025, the British Museum staged the major exhibition titled Silk Roads — "one of the largest of its kind", as Zhao noted — for which his team re-created two silk artifacts for display.
His next collaboration with the museum will focus on silk banners brought back by Stein from Dunhuang — votive offerings hung in temples and cave shrines as acts of devotion. "In this case, Chinese silks first traveled westward, only to return eastward with the spread of Buddhism," says Zhao.
"A single banner may even contain silks from different regions — a mosaic of stories waiting to be rediscovered."
Among the internationally revered scholars Zhao works with is Helen Wang, former curator of East Asian Money at the British Museum and co-editor of the scholarly volume Textiles as Money on the Silk Road.
"All of us who have seen the splendor of ancient Chinese silks and worked to decode their messages agree on one thing: these silent witnesses of history should not remain hidden in museum storerooms," Zhao says.
