Instead of working in Chang'an, capital of ancient China, which is today's Xi'an in Northwest China's Shaanxi province, the officer stayed in Chengdu, says Huang Nengfu, a professor of arts and design at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
"Due to its complex production technique, high cost labor and time, the price of brocade used to be as much as gold back in the day," says Xie Huiru, a 90-year-old former weaver, who started learning brocade-making as a 9-year-old because of poverty.
In 2006, the weaving techniques of Shu brocade were included on the list of intangible cultural heritage by the State Council, China's cabinet.
At the Chengdu Shu Brocade and Embroidery Museum, visitors can see brocade featuring the giant panda, flowers, birds, famous works of calligraphy and paintings, as well as China's folk customs.
One of the most eye-catching sights is dahualou, which literally translates to "big jacquard platform". It is a wood loom built in the late 18th century. Made entirely of wood, dahualou doesn't have a single nail to connect its different parts. It can be detached and reassembled easily.
There are only three original dahualou looms still in existence in the country. They are in the National Museum of China, the Sichuan Provincial Museum and this Chengdu museum.
To enable visitors to see how workers weave brocade, the Shu Brocade Academy which runs the Chengdu museum has made five replicas of the dahualou looms.
Visitors to the museum can see He Bin, a 52-year-old master weaver, and his apprentices weave brocade with dahualou looms just as the ancient masters had done. Holding the highest professional title in the country's brocade industry, He has worked as a weaver for 34 years.
One of the most impressive displays in the museum is a red silk dragon robe modeled on a garment on the bronze statue of a barefooted man with anklets and clenched fists at the Sanxingdui Museum in Guanghan, also in Sichuan.
The 2.62-meter-high, 180-kilogram statue is thought to represent a king of the Shu kingdom.
Dating back 3,100 years ago, the king's statue is crowned with a sun motif and coated with three layers of tight, short-sleeved bronze long shirt decorated with a dragon pattern and overlaid with a checked ribbon.
Huang, the Tsinghua University researcher in Chinese dynastic clothing, considers the garment to be the country's oldest existing dragon robe.
Thinking the pattern is the work of Shu embroidery, he has had the red silk dragon robe made on the basis of the king's garment and has donated it to the museum.
The robe has changed the traditional view that Shu embroidery began in the mid-Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Instead, it shows samples of the embroidery appearing in the Shang Dynasty (16th century-11th century BC), according to Wang Yuqing, a Taiwan-based Chinese clothing historian.
