Sorry to be so long in writing! We've had a few good, busy days lately. We finished our time in Hunan by visiting an embroidery museum and workshop. Hunan is the home of one of the four main schools of embroidery in China. This art form began when a woman saw a beautiful painting and thought that it would be even more beautiful as an embroidered piece. She worked for a long time to develop the proper technique to represent the depths and colors of the painting with fine silk thread on fabric. The result was a very exquisite form of art that was then perfected and passed down through generations of women in this region. The most amazing thing to us about the pieces we saw was that they make the back of the threadwork as beautiful as the front. Many of the pieces were double-sided, and sometimes the front and back side showed different pictures.
One of the pieces we saw in the museum was a reproduction of a piece found in the 3,000-year-old tomb of an emporer's wife. The excavation site of this tomb, with its very well-preserved mummified remains of this woman, is on exhibit today at the Hunan museum. We did not go to this museum, because we thought the kids might be at best bored and at worst scared by it. It is interesting to me that both Davis' and Pearl's birth places are home to famous mummies, as Addis Ababa's museum boasts the "Lucy" remains.
The embroidered piece reproduced for the museum we did go to shows a lot about ancient beliefs in China. It depicts the deceased women with some other people in the center of the work which represents earthly life. Above her is a gate guarded by two men who decide whether or not you go to heaven. Heaven is shown as having dragons in it and nine suns, because people thought that it was so hot some days that there must be nine suns up there. The biggest sun has a silhouette of a crow on it - I saw a sun with a crow in it on the wall in our hotel as well. Our guide told me this is because that is what people see when they look at the sun - kind of like the man in the moon. Also, I imagine you do start seeing scary dark birds if you stare at the sun. Anyway - below the earthly life part was a picture of hell where a devil-man holding a big plank over his head stands on a fish. This is because the people believed that it was this devil man getting angry and shifting the plank over his head that caused earthquakes.
After visiting the museum we were taken to the room where the "housewives" (as the man who seemed to be overseeing everything called them) were working on different pieces. Twelve ladies were lined up working on one huge piece that had been commissioned by a company. They said it would take them a year to complete it. A few other women - the masters of the craft - worked seperately on individual pieces. One was working from a photograph of a tiger. The man said that making animal fur look real was one of the specialties of Hunan embroidery. The needles these ladies used were tiny, and the silk thread can be as slender as a single strand of hair.
There were many landscapes of Hunan in the embroidery museum, many of them showing magical looking mountain scenes. Our guide and the museum man told us that the mountains in the movie Avatar were based on those in western Hunan - near Pearl's hometown of Huaihua city. We must be looking like real smarties to our guide, because she was sure to mention that the mountains in western Hunan do not actually float in the air like in the movie. haha.
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