Silk links faraway worlds

Nowhere is this fusion more striking than in Tomb No 15, where the man — swathed in splendor — was laid to rest. His garments combine Chinese weaving traditions, Central Asian tailoring techniques, and decorative motifs rooted in Sasanian and Greco-Roman cultures. The double-woven woolen robe bearing the Eros figures clothed his body, while his pillow — adorned with confronting birds and beasts in geometric grids — echoed textile designs found as far away as Palmyra in Syria and as near as Mawangdui in Changsha, Hunan province.

"Chinese silk textiles provide key evidence of contact and exchange in human history," says Luk Yu-ping, curator of Chinese paintings, prints and the Central Asian collection at the British Museum in London, and one of Zhao's principal collaborators.

"The remarkably well-preserved textiles from Xinjiang reveal materials, techniques, motifs and functions that capture life along the Silk Road, as well as the transmission and adaptation of Chinese, Central Asian and broader Eurasian cultural elements."

In 2004, while serving as deputy director of the China National Silk Museum, Zhao personally removed the entire set of clothing from the Yingpan mummy and later oversaw its conservation.

"Analysis suggests that the fabric used for the embroidered pants may have been rewoven from a dismantled silk textile originally produced in central China," he says.

"The original piece was unraveled into filaments, spun locally into silk thread, and then woven anew."

For Zhao, this process offers a metaphor: silk becomes a material expression of how cultures encounter, reinterpret, and ultimately bind themselves together.

"We are now collaborating with more than 80 museums globally to tell the story of these well-traveled threads," Zhao says.

"From the early Silk Road caravans of the 2nd century BC to the maritime networks of the Age of Exploration, Chinese silk has always moved through multiple worlds — prized as symbols of power, yet also serving as ambassadors of cultural exchange."

He notes that this circulation intensified during the Mongol era, "when Mongol rule drew Eurasia into an unprecedented commercial web".