Tea silk – luxury and ritual from the Ming Dynasty
I first discovered tea silk one day walking in Beijing’s hutongs (衚衕), the narrow streets and alleys that Beijing is known for. A woman next to me at a tea shop was wearing a double sided kimono that looked like layers of vintage lacquered paper. It was black and brown at the same time. Leather and paper. Shiny and opaque. She explained to me that this super smooth imperial royal silk is called ”xiangyun sha“ (fragrant cloud organdy) and comes from the Guangdong Province dating from the Ming Dynasty.
German Designer Katharine Rechenberg focuses exclusively on this material in her atelier in Beijing. She says, “Tea silk is made naturally with no artifice, by hand, the traditional way in the Pearl River Delta by dying the fabric 30-40 times with plants and river sand only from that area. The best quality fabric is stored for up to 5 years. Properly aged tea silk is as rare as fine wine, a sibarite’s texture, clothing for connoisseurs.”
To this day it is produced manually in southern China, using traditional techniques that have not changed in 500 years and that still use a plant called Gambiered Canton Gauze, associated with traditional Chinese medicine for its medicinal and wound-healing properties. Tea silk offers the wearer cooling properties despite its typically dark shades. Centuries ago fishermen first noted that their nets, treated with yam juice from a fibrous native tuber (Dioscorea cirrhosa) to prevent them from rotting, turned black from being in contact with river mud.
A similar labour-intensive process today transforms the neutral silk fabric to give it its rich, coppery and caramel tones. Between the months of April and November, the bolts of natural silk are soaked up to 40 times in barrels of dye produced from the same yam. At the end of this process, the color is fixed with the river mud. Afterwards, dyed bolts are laid out to dry in long, long ribbons on the river banks. ♥
