With her short hair and bubbly personality, Yang Jiyuan is a bit of a pleasant mystery. She admittedly loves cats and toys packed in blind boxes in her daily life. But once she steps into the laboratory, a seeming alter ego emerges at work. She is a calm and meticulous protector of ancient silk textiles, having successfully replicated an ancient China's lightest silk garment, weighing only 49 grams, with days and nights of patience.

Including the piece that is called "plain unlined gauze gown," Yang's dedication to work has enabled her to recreate multiple long-lost garments. Yet these feats alone cannot fully capture her career passion. Yang told the Global Times that what she truly seeks is to uncover "the ancient wisdom and humanistic stories behind Chinese silk."

'Prefer to stay grounded'

Yang is an inheritor of China's Intangible Culture Heritage (ICH) yunjinbrocade, a traditional silk fabric rooted in Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368) culture from Nanjing, East China's Jiangsu Province. Her expertise in silk textiles, however, extends far beyond just this brocade alone. Before entering the field of ancient silk textile conservation, Yang had already been a rising talent in the contemporary sector of the industry.

At that time, she was in her early 30s, but had already had opportunities working with widely known haute couture designers like Laurence Xu, crafting "red-carpet" statement garment for celebrities for global shows such as the Cannes Film Festival and Milano Fashion Week in Europe.

Seeing fabrics she crafted gracing stages overseas once thrilled Yang, but years of experiencing the vanity fair-like glitz and glamour in overseas fashion circles gradually left her weary, prompting her to ask "What am I truly pursuing?"

"Under neon lights and constant jet leg, I grew increasingly aware of how so-called 'prestige' can feel superfluous," Yang noted, adding that she "preferred to stay grounded."

Driven by such a thought, Yang returned to China and chose to enroll in a training program launched by the National Cultural Heritage Administration (NCHA) in 2013.

From the glare of camera flashes to the glow of lab lamps, Yang's training journey transition was not always easy. She told the Global Times that, while dusk settled and fellow trainees departed one by one, only she and her closest colleague would still be hunched over the work table.

"We often worked until midnight. If we got hungry, we'd use a little stove typically used for fabric dyeing to cook instant noodles," she said, adding that such experiences somehow intensified her passion for ancient silk textiles.

Though the training experience was intense, it opened a new door to her career, allowing her to see and touch real garments unearthed from ancient sites such as the Western Han Dynasty (206BC-AD25) Mawangdui tomb and the Dingling Mausoleum dating back to the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644).

In 2017, she was commissioned by the Hunan Museum to restore the one-and-only plain unlined gauze gown that is a national first-class relic. The piece has more than 2,000 years of history. Weighing a mere 49 grams, it could easily fit inside a matchbox when folded. The reproduction of such a delicate artifact inevitably brought pressure.

"When we were collecting data on the relic," Yang recalled, "even speaking slightly louder could make it flutter from our breath."

The greatest technical challenge in replicating this garment lay not in its cut or style, but in recreating its antique appearance and astonishing lightness. To match the original's weight, Yang and her team creatively put silkworms on a controlled "diet" to produce finer threads. After numerous tries, an accidental black tea spill on her table inspired her to use tea and color-fixing agents as the dyes for the garment's subtle earthy yellow color.

"I still remember, my eyes were teary when delivered this replica successfully to the museum," said Yang.

Wisdoms behind the silk

With her proven expertise in replicating the national first-class gauze treasure, Yang was entrusted with an even more challenging task, to recreate a Western Han Dynasty (206BC-AD25) printed and painted floss silk-padded gauze robe, a piece that is even more challenging than the former.

The robe consisted of seven gauze layers, each merely one-third the thickness of a tissue paper. Yet what astonished Yang most wasn't this intricate textile structure, but its densely intricate patterns revealed under a microscope. She told the Global Times that they were like an awe-inspiring testament to ancient artisans' precision.

While restoring another piece of zhijin brocade (gold-woven silk fabric), she noticed variations in the sheen of its gold threads. Under a microscope, she uncovered ancient craftsmen's secret that they had mixed genuine gold threads with imitation ones to cut corners and lower fabric production costs.

"I felt I could communicate with those ancient craftsmen through touching the piece," Yang noted.

The more she handled ancient textiles, the better she understood the stories of ancient makers. She said that despite lacking advanced technology, ancient Chinese craftsmanship possessed astonishing wisdom, especially integrating diverse techniques.

And this has also inspired Yang. She told the Global Times that she experimented on mixing silk and ceramics to make brooches. "The boundary-defying genius of old masters," she muses, "lives on in our hands."

Song Jiabao also contributed to the story.

This story first appeared in Global Times:

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202507/1337474.shtml

Company: Global Times
Contact Person: Anna Li
Email: editor@globaltimes.com.cn
Website: https://globaltimes.cn
City: Beijing
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