Pieces of Shu embroidery works are showcased at the Chengdu Shu Brocade and Embroidery Museum. (Photo by Huang Zhiling/China Daily)
Zivit Sari, a resident of Haifa, Israel, was happy to receive a brocade purse from a friend in Chengdu, Southwest China's Sichuan province, during his visit to the city in January.
Sari, a silk lover, says the gift that was made at the Chengdu Shu Brocade and Embroidery Museum, was so exquisite that she might travel to the Chinese city in the future. Haifa was designated a "sister city" of Chengdu in 2013 as part of an understanding between the two countries.
Caroline Portsmouth, an English teacher from Britain, enjoys visiting the same museum that has become a must-see list of sights in Chengdu because she likes silk, too.
"The museum narrates the history of the Chinese silk industry and displays exquisite works of Shu embroidery and brocade, two important symbols of the 3,000-year-old city," she says.
China is the source of the silk industry and people began using silk in ancient cultures. Silk fabrics are said to have been produced in the Yellow River and Yangtze River valleys centuries ago. Sichuan's history of sericulture can also be traced back to more than 4,000 years ago when the region was called Shu.
More than 2,000 years ago, Sichuan's brocade was exported across Asia through the Silk Road during the Warring States Period (403-221 BC). The trade route is thought to have started in Chengdu, passed through neighboring Yunnan province and then to Myanmar, India and Central Asia, ending in Europe.
"It started 200 years before the North Silk Road, " says professor Tu Hengxian of the College of Textiles of the Shanghai-based Donghua University (formerly China Textile University).
Together with the Song and Yun brocades of East China's Jiangsu province and Zhuang brocade in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region in the country's south, Shu brocade is one of China's four most famous schools of embroidery. It is the oldest from which the other three evolved.
So important was the brocade trade in Sichuan that during the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 24), an office of the "brocade officer" was created by an emperor, similar to the role of a textiles minister in modern governments.
Brocade refers to the colorful silk woven textiles. It is a gorgeous past treasure.
