Dragons Chasing Flaming Pearls (1200s or earlier): Art, History and Details

Dragons Chasing Flaming Pearls (1200s or earlier) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This rectangular, reversible tapestry (kesi) fragment, woven with silk and metal thread on a deep purple ground, is a section from yardage likely intended for a garment, but no contemporary paintings exist to confirm this. A selvage edge remains on the left; having an extant selvage edge provides us with information about the loom on which this textile was woven. The design motif of this kesi—dragons chasing flaming pearls—is Chinese. But the form of the dragons and the way they are crowded together is not Chinese. Rather than animals and birds among flowers, a frequently occurring pattern in the decorative art of eastern Central Asia that long predated the Mongol conquest, here the dragons are chasing flaming pearls. This deviation is indicative of the powerful influence of the Mongols.

Object facts

• Title: Dragons Chasing Flaming Pearls
• Date: 1200s or earlier
• Culture: Central China
• Type: Textile
• Technique: silk and gold thread: tapestry
• Dimensions: Overall: 60 x 32 cm (23 5/8 x 12 5/8 in.)
• Collection: Textiles
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1988.33

A detail from the museum

The metal thread used in this weaving is fabricated from very thin strips of parchment with applied gold and silver leaf that are then wound around a core of yellow silk.

Collection credit

Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Simcox, Jacqueline. "Silks from the Middle Kingdom." Hali: The International Magazine of Fine Carpets and Textiles, Issue 43, (February 1989), pp. 16–33.
• “The Year in Review for 1988.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 76, no. 2 (February 1989): 30–75.
• Wilson, J. Keith. "Powerful Form and Potent Symbol: The Dragon in Asia." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 77, no. 8 (August 1990): 286–323.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.