National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

pairs of broad triangles arranged with the points towards each other, a design known from Huai style bronzes (Umehara 1936, Pl. LXXXIII). The lowest part is too damaged to allow of any analysis.

As seen from the above the design is arranged in horizontal rows, but there is also a kind of vertical central stripe.

STEIN has found a similar shoe in one of the Chinese graves L. H. (Stein 1928, Pl. XLII and LXXXVIII, L. H. 04) and another, with decorations all over in the ruin L. B. NW of the Lou-lan station (Stein 1921, Pl. XXXVII, L.B.IV.ii.00i6). The main decorative elements recur on all three specimens. Especially the first mentioned of STEIN'S shoes have birds, but flying, and dragons, or lions as STEIN calls them. And his may possibly be lions. Their tails are not so elongated as on ours, and there is no neck crest.

Miss SYLWAN is going to deal with the technical aspect and what it signifies. Stylistically the decoration is Chinese, and the material used in the upper is silk.

The beautiful little square embroidery Pl. 22 : 3 was found on the breast. It is cut out of a larger embroidery, and closely resembles the one used for the small bags Pl. 22 : 4-5 from Mass-grave I. The silk is red, and the designs, which are slightly reminiscent of cicadas, are sewn in chain-stitch, blue, yellow-white and brown. A small pearl is attached in each of three corners, the fourth one is lost.

The silk pouch Pl. 23 : I with its beautifully preserved colours is one of the most attractive textile objects from the Lou-lan region. It is made of two different kinds of patterned warp-rib with interwoven Chinese characters. One of them is quite legible (I = harmony, union), the other two are not correctly woven, but most likely they are meant to represent Wu Chi (without end), i. e. characters identical with the two last ones in the sentence on STEIN'S silk L.C.o7 a for which I refer to GILES' appendix in Stein 1928, p. 1045. On the narrow strip of silk used in this pouch (Pl. 23 : I b) there are pairs of small birds (ducks?) facing each other, a floral design quite naturalistically executed, the end of a scroll, and an ornament with three rolled-in volutes and three slender prongs. The same pronged motif occurs as an element in the ornament on the broader piece of silk that forms the main part of the pouch, Pl. 23 : I a. This element is very common on the Noyan-ola embroideries (Kümmel P1. 55-59) , and on some of STEIN'S figured silks from Lop-nor, especially from L. C. It occurs also on a piece of Chinese silk from Oglakty in the Minusinsk region (Tallgren 1937 b, Fig. 23). On the inlaid bronze tube in the C. T. Loo collection which ROSTOVTZEFF places in the early Han period we find a similar element, though less dissolved (Rostovtzeff Pl. III).

As there are green and blue colours which in print come out almost the same as the back, ground the otherwise satisfactory Pl. 23 : I does not reproduce the intricate and dissolved pattern quite correctly. In reality the elements of the ornament form an oval figure; several of these recur on one of STEIN'S silks (Stein 1928, Pl.

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