Brocade Factory

Sichuan province is known for its fancy brocade fabric. We visited a brocade factory and learned how silk is made and weaved into the intricate patterns of the brocade fabric. They have a wooden loom set up in the entry foyer that two people operated to show how brocade was manufactured in ancient times. The machine is very complex.

Brocade loom.

After the education part of the tour we were ushered into...wait for it…the showroom. Just like at the silk factory in Beijing we were given the silk quilt sales pitch. We opted to take a look at the other silk products. One thing that this facility had that the Beijing place didn’t is embroidered tapestries. Hunan province is also known for its silk embroidery, and we visited a “museum” in Changsha in 2002. The Changsha facility struck me as much more authentic than what we saw today. We were able to watch workers as they created delicate embroidered designs in 2002, but not here. The other (very important) difference is price. We picked up a number of embroidered items on our trip to Changsha, so we had a pretty good idea what prices to expect. I saw a set of tapestries of the “Four Gentlemen” similar to what’s hanging in our dining room. The set I saw today was of comparable quality, but much smaller than what we already have. Each panel was 50% more than what we paid for the entire set back in 2002. We ended up buying  few small items, but everything was so overpriced we didn’t get much.

On the way back to the hotel Jenna, Amanda, and Ally played games to keep busy. I am really looking forward to tomorrow’s panda breeding center visit, and I can only imagine how close the girls would get if we were to spend much more time together.

Here are a couple of pictures of silk embroidery very similar to what we saw in Beijing. this particular one looked like a peacock from one side and a tiger from the other.