Touched by Indigo - Royal Ontario Museum

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nations. They are flanked by playmates acting as attendants. For
visual variation and additional symbolic significance, two designs
are slightly different. They show the principal players playing the
role of laosheng (a middle- or old-age military character), wearing
hats with a high crown and long false beards that
cover their chests.14 They are probably relied on to
evoke the idea of longevity to complement two other
more obvious messages inherent in the majority of
designs—fecundity and career success. Because the
boys are depicted playing the role of military champions,
this quilt top may also be called a "champions"
quilt (zhuangyuan bei).
Technically, half of each design is the mirror
image of the other half. This is one of the fundamental
features of clamp-resist dyeing. The crease running
down the centre of the design is another indication
of the strip of cloth being folded in half lengthwise during the dyeing
process. Many children's features are either lost or faded. The defects
are caused other than by age, constant use, and periodic cleaning,
by the way human features are engraved on a woodblock. Not being
connected with the deep grooves that would allow the dye to flow
through, small areas indicating eyebrows, eyes, nose, and mouth
need to be treated differently. After the features have been engraved
on the surface of the woodblock, small interlinking side holes need to
be added to allow the dye to reach these small areas. We may surmise
that in the present specimen, either the woodblock engraver did not
do a good job in this delicate step or the narrow labyrinth became
clogged up through constant use of this set of woodblocks.
The antithetical arrangement of the top two horizontal rows and
the bottom two rows is typical of all quilt cover tops produced by the
technique of clamp-resist dyeing.15