Weaving Li Minority "Brocade": travel notes

Weaving Li Minority "Brocade": travel notes - Chris Buckley

click on image to go to enlargement - all text & images © Chris Buckley

In June 2010 Chris Buckley made a visit to Hainan Island in search of Li weavers and weaving. On his return he sent in the travel notes below of weaving Li Minority "Brocade" (supplementary weft textile) using a backstrap loom, in Shui Mian Qiao village near WuZhiShan on Hainan Island. On his brief visit to Hainan he also managed to find some weavers speaking the Meifu Li dialect in the ChangJiang area of southwestern Hainan who were making and weaving ikat. His description and photos of that encounter and how he reached them can be found on the forum.

Chris says: "These photographs are of weaver Huang Ji Xiang (01), who is a member of the Qi subgroup of the Li people, making the cloth that is called "Li brocade" locally. This particular cloth is for the tourist market, rather gaudy and with large, widely spaced designs (02) (for ease and speed of production I expect), but I think that the basic technique is the same used to make most Li minority supplementary weft weavings. I have an old-ish Ba-Sa-Dung Li (Run Li) skirt to hand that a friend lent me, and as far as I can see it was made using the same technique. The most obvious difference between this method and Tai supplementary weft weavings is that the design is not visible from the back of the fabric, as a result of using two separate sheds for the supplementary weft (design) and the ground weft.

Jpg 117K - Weaver Huang Ji Xiang, who is a member of the Qi subgroup of the Li people, making the cloth that is called "Li brocade" locally. Huang Ji Xiang seems to be in her 60s (Chris was too polite to ask her age), and she is quite well known in the surrounding villages.

Jpg 111K - Weaver Huang Ji Xiang, who is a member of the Qi subgroup of the Li people, making the cloth that is called "Li brocade" locally. This particular cloth is for the tourist market, rather gaudy and with large, widely spaced designs (probably for ease and speed of production), but Chris thinks that the basic technique is the same used to make most Li minority supplementary weft weavings.

121K Jpg - Huang Ji Xiang, a member of the Qi subgroup of the Li people, wearing her festival outfit, including a skirt decorated with the technique shown in the other photos and described by Chris who thinks that it was made by her in the 1980s-90s.

Huang Ji Xiang seems to be in her 60s (I was too polite to ask her age), and she is quite well known in the surrounding villages. There is also a government-run workshop in Bao Ting nearby that makes the same style of weaving on a metal-framed loom with 4 heddles.

The loom (03)consists of a foot rod and a breast beam, and the warp is wound continuously around these. In between are heddles and various tools for opening sheds and keeping the warp threads aligned. The warp threads are mostly black with a few colored warps to provide some stripes.

As mentioned, weaving proceeds via two separate sheds. A lower shed is opened with the large, dark colored weaving sword (04), which is twisted to open the shed wider. Black weft is passed through on a spindle (05) and then beaten down with the sword.

After adding a row of ground weft the weaver switches attention to the upper shed where the pattern is formed. She first selects the region of interest with the light colored wooden pick at the bottom of the photo (06), then uses a second pick to select the warps for the supplementary weft, which is then added by passing the thread from hand to hand (07) because the distance is too short to need a spindle or shuttle. She then beats this down using the pick/sword and switches back to the lower shed ... and so the weaving goes. top

Huang Ji Xing is making her designs from memory, though at the government run workshop they have a printed graph to follow.

As mentioned, the main difference here versus Tai supplementary weft is the use of two sheds, which creates a ground weave and makes the weft design invisible from the back (versus Tai weaving where the back usually shows a "reverse" view of the design. There are a couple of advantages to this method that I can think of:

1) the pattern weft is pushed to the top and shows very clearly, without the use of long "floats" which tend to catch and get broken
2) a rather thick and strong fabric is produced (compared with typical Tai weavings), presumably good for making a durable skirt
3) the pattern weft can just as well run selvedge to selvedge or be added to a small area. In the latter case the results can easily be mistaken for embroidery.

In areas which are left without design the weft underneath tends to show through (see green threads in enlargement of the pattern in 02), which is somewhat inelegant, and may explain why good, old Li weavings tend to have very dense designs without much "ground" visible. Though this weaving looks rather different to Run Li skirts I think the basic technique is the same, though the designs on Run Li skirts are produced on an almost microscopic scale. As far as I can tell a similar method is used to make the Li blankets discussed on the forum, though in the case of the blankets the pattern wefts all run selvedge-to-selvedge. top

I would be very interested to know more about how this compares with Tai weaving methods. (Post your responses on Chris' forum thread on his visit to Hainan or start a new thread.)

The last photo is of Huang Ji Xiang (08) wearing her festival outfit, including a skirt decorated with this kind of technique. I think it was made by her in the 1980s-90s.

Regarding the future of this kind of weaving on a backstrap loom in Hainan, I am not very optimistic. In the villages in this area (near mount WuZhiShan in central Hainan) I could only find this one lady who is weaving on a backstrap loom. All the weaving I saw of this type that was going on here and in BaoTing on frame looms was for tourist pieces like the one in the photos. The problem with this is that few tourists can tell the difference between a cloth produced by this traditional method and a piece of commercial machine-made cloth, and when fluorescent colors and commercial thread are used like this the difference becomes moot anyway. Whether the Li people in this area are still using this method to make skirts I am not sure, but no-one could show me recently made skirts that they were using.

I hope these notes will also be of some help with understanding the techniques used to make older Li weavings." top

Jpg 161K - A design on a cloth is for the tourist market, rather gaudy and with large, widely spaced designs (for ease and speed of production I expect), but Chris thinks that the basic technique is the same used to make most Li minority supplementary weft weavings. Note in areas which are left without design the weft underneath tends to show through (see green threads in this design), which is somewhat inelegant, and may explain why good, old Li weavings tend to have very dense designs without much "ground" visible.

Jpg 11K - Weaver Huang Ji Xiang (01), who is a member of the Qi subgroup of the Li people, making the cloth that is called "Li brocade" locally. Weaving proceeds via two separate sheds. A lower shed is opened with the large, dark colored weaving sword.

Jpg 107K - Weaver Huang Ji Xiang, who is a member of the Qi subgroup of the Li people, making the cloth that is called "Li brocade" locally. Weaving proceeds via two separate sheds. A lower shed is opened with the large, dark colored weaving sword, which is twisted to open the shed wider. Black weft is passed through on a spindle and then beaten down with the sword.

Jpg 118K - Weaver Huang Ji Xiang, who is a member of the Qi subgroup of the Li people, making the cloth that is called "Li brocade" locally. Weaving proceeds via two separate sheds. After adding a row of ground weft the weaver switches attention to the upper shed where the pattern is formed. She first selects the region of interest with the light colored wooden pick at the bottom of the photo, then uses a second pick to select the warps for the supplementary weft.

Jpg 103K - Weaver Huang Ji Xiang, who is a member of the Qi subgroup of the Li people, making the cloth that is called "Li brocade" locally. Weaving proceeds via two separate sheds. After adding a row of ground weft the weaver switches attention to the upper shed where the pattern is formed. She first selects the region of interest with the light colored wooden pick at the bottom of the photo, then uses a second pick to select the warps for the supplementary weft, which is then added by passing the thread from hand to hand because the distance is too short to need a spindle or shuttle. She then beats this down using the pick/sword and switches back to the lower shed ... and so the weaving goes.

Also see Chris' forum post on weavers speaking the Meifu Li dialect in the ChangJiang area of southwestern Hainan making and weaving ikat.

see other articles on Li textiles

Chris Buckley is a collector of ethnic textiles - see his Torana tribal website selling ethnic minority textiles and Asian art - but he is better known to Beijing residents as the "Tibetan carpet guy". Chris is originally from England and came to China in 1995, having previously lived in Japan, where he acquired a taste for things handmade and an appreciation for texture. He used to work for a multinational company but that is a long time in the past now: these days he spends most of his time on his Tibetan carpet business. He has a workshop near Lhasa making Tibetan carpets the traditional way, with designs that are mostly by him, and that are sold in his stores in Beijing and Shanghai as well as to individual clients and interior designers overseas. More about his Tibetan carpet business can be found on his Toranahouse website. He is also interested in Tibetan crafts generally and in painted furniture in particular, a subject he wrote a book about.

Aside from running the carpet business he has also been a collector for many years, and he has been lucky enough to travel widely in China and Asia (and still does). One of his earliest and most memorable trips in China was a cycling trip in Guizhou province through Dong and Miao minority areas. Apart from the rain and the mud the villages were entrancing, and he has been hooked on minority arts ever since. Chris can be contacted via his websites.

top

Copyright © 2012 Pamela A Cross. The contents of this site, including all images and text, are for personal, educational, non-commercial use only and may not be reproduced in any form without the express permission of Pamela A Cross.

If you have any comments on the tribaltextiles.info website please send them to us. If you have any general tribal textile comments or questions go to the tribaltextiles.info/community forum to share your thoughts and questions with an international community of enthusiasts.

this page last updated 19 October, 2010