Prince's trousers and lining (700s): Art, History and Details

Prince's trousers and lining (700s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

This coat and pants are part of a set of garments that originally included an outer pair of pants and silk boots made from the same material as the coat. Such rich garments would have been worn by a member of the imperial family or nobility. The fabrics comprising this outfit were woven in widely distant parts of Asia. The silk of the coat, with ducks in pearl roundels, was woven in Sogdiana. The white silk of the pants, ornamented with flowers and birds, is Chinese. Both garments are lined with a Chinese silk woven with a radial floral pattern that was common during the 700s. The coat and pants were made at a time when Tibetan power extended to parts of China, eastern Central Asia, and the trade routes to Sogdiana.

Object facts

• Title: Prince's trousers and lining
• Date: 700s
• Culture: China, Tang dynasty
• Type: Garment
• Technique: twill damask: silk
• Dimensions: Overall: 52 x 28 cm (20 1/2 x 11 in.)
• Collection: Textiles
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1996.2.2

A detail from the museum

The pants are made of three parts: two rectangles folded down their length and joined by an inseam, a center front seam, and a back seam; a third piece is a square folded to form a triangle and inserted into the inseam at the crotch

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Watt, James C. Y., Anne E. Wardwell, and Morris Rossabi. When silk was gold: Central Asian and Chinese textiles. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art in cooperation with the Cleveland Museum of Art: Distributed by H.N. Abrams, 1997.
• Mackie, Louise W. Symbols of Power: Luxury Textiles from Islamic Lands, 7th-21st Century. Cleveland; New Haven: Cleveland Museum of Art; Yale University Press, 2015.
• "Highlights from North American Collections." IDP News: Newsletter of the International Dunhuang Project, no. 49-50, Summer 2017, pp. 4-7.

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.