Touched by Indigo - Royal Ontario Museum

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While the technique must have
suffered considerably in areas situated
close to the central administration,
fortunately it continued to
flourish in areas under the rule of the
Liao and Xixia, two barbarian political
powers that co-existed with the
Song and were located to the north
and west of China.8 During the Ming
and early Qing periods, although the
technique was still practised, it seemed to be confined to certain
areas. The multicoloured clamp-resist-dyed
fabrics manufactured were mainly used for
covering tankas (religious paintings). Many
of them are still preserved in Tibet.9
A serious lack of records and extant
examples after the early Qing led many
twentieth-century Chinese textile scholars
to assume that clamp-resist dyeing had
completely died out. Fortunately, though,
during the latter half of the 1980s, it
became known that the technique was
actually still alive in southern Zhejiang
province, in particular, in rural areas around the coastal cities of
Wenzhou and Taizhou. The modern product, however, is quite different
from those manufactured in the preceding periods. Instead of
multicoloured repeat patterns dyed all
over a luxurious silk fabric, it has now
changed to a monochromatic assemblage
of individual linear designs dyed
on cotton, a utilitarian fibre. Instead of
serving multi-purposes, it is now primarily
used for making quilt covers.
The modern technique involves essentially cleaning and marking
of a length of handwoven cotton (10m long and 25 cm wide);
wrapping it in accordion fashion around a set of seventeen engraved
woodblocks, with each block being positioned one on top of the
other; setting a metal or wooden clamp in place to tighten the stack
of cloth-wrapped woodblocks at both ends; and
placing the whole apparatus in an indigo dye bath
for twenty-five minutes before lifting it out for
five minutes to bring about oxidation. The actual
dyeing needs to be repeated four times to reach
optimum intensity of the blue colour.10
A design is made up of outlines cut in deep
and wide grooves on the surface of a woodblock.
These grooves are mostly interconnected to allow
the indigo dye to flow through from several small
holes made on one long edge of the woodblock.
Because the relief lines and surfaces of the woodblocks
are clamped together firmly, the cotton
sandwiched tightly between does not come into
contact with the dye and remains white. After dyeing,
washing, and sun-drying, the long strip is cut into four strips of
equal length and sewn together to make a large
rectangular piece, ready to be used as the top
of a quilt cover.
For various reasons, such as the labourintensive
and time-consuming nature of both
the preparation of the raw materials and the
dyeing process, changing social values,
and unfavourable marketing prospects,
there is hardly any demand for clampresist-dyed
products nowadays. In the
area around Wenzhou woodblock
engravers and dyers have closed shop
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