Zhangjiajie · Two hours, booked on its own
Two hours at a wooden back-strap loom: eight hundred warp threads, a bamboo pick, a pattern held entirely in the weaver's head — and then she gets up and lets you try.
In Tujia it is xilankapu — literally, the flowered bedspread woven with all kinds of beautiful patterns.
People here call it the flower of the Tujia, and describe it as their culture compressed into a single object. It was on China's very first national heritage list.
And it is made on a wooden back-strap loom, by a person leaning away from it to keep the tension. Nothing else holds it.
10:15Opened 2014
Exhibition hall · working floor · the first of its kind
This is the largest Tujia brocade production base in the country and the first dedicated exhibition hall and teaching workshop for the craft. The building runs as a sequence — an entrance piece, a gallery, a working floor you walk through, and a shop — and the entrance piece is a flower eight metres wide and thirteen high, woven from a hundred and fifty thousand metres of red thread.
10:45Counted, never drawn
通经过纬 · 反面挖花 · a bamboo pick, one pass at a time
The weaver works with the pattern facing away from her, picking the coloured weft through with a bamboo tool — and the number of warp threads she crosses is different on every single pass. There is nothing to copy from. A metre-long panel of a standard motif takes over a month.
11:15The piece upstairs
6.4 m × 2 m · 190 weavers · one year
In the gallery upstairs hangs a panel six point four metres long. A hundred and ninety weavers worked on it for a year and picked 7,955,280 individual colour blocks. It is now permanently held by the National Museum of Ethnology. Standing in front of it after you have tried four rows yourself is a specific and slightly humbling experience.
11:35After the demonstration
A fifth-generation weaver takes you through it
A fifth-generation inheritor of the craft teaches the loom hand to hand — how to hold it, how to open the shed, what order things happen in. The strap goes round your back and you find out how much of this is in the body. The first pass is clumsy and the third is noticeably less so.
Watching is not the same
You can watch weaving for twenty minutes and leave with a video. The moment you take the seat, the loom stops being a display.
You feel the warp resist. You feel it go slack when you pull wrong. You discover that the even, unremarkable cloth on the wall behind you represents a physical discipline you could not sustain for an hour.
Most of the weavers here are women who stayed in the villages when others left for work in the cities. The centre trains them, films them, and streams them working — a strange sentence to write about a technique with no written pattern, and also why it is still here.
