Textile with Phoenixes and Dragons
Lampas; silk and gold thread
China, Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368)
The Cleveland Museum of Art, Edward L. Whittemore Fund 1995.73
(Cat. no. 42)
This is one of the very few northern Chinese silk and gold textiles to have
survived from the Yuan dynasty. The curled dragons chasing pearls, the
phoenixes, and the background of tiny hexagons are Chinese motifs, but the
lobed roundels enclosing the dragons and phoenixes indicate the influence
of eastern Iranian craftsmen who had been relocated to northern China.
A red and gold silk woven with the same pattern is preserved in Beijing.
The extraordinary survival of the two silks demonstrates that patterns were
The person who associated a work with this deed has dedicated the work to the public domain by waiving all of their rights to the work worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law. You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.
http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.enCC0Creative Commons Zero, Public Domain Dedicationfalsefalse