Institut für Kunstgeschichte Ostasiens From Lost Craft to Certified Intangible Cultural Heritage: Complex Gauze Weaving in Suzhou, China

The production of complex gauze, a highly intricate textile whose weaving cannot be fully mechanized, was most likely completely abandoned during the seventeenth century, in the late Ming or early Qing period. Since the 1970s, archaeologists and textile scholars have sought to reconstruct knowledge of complex gauze, as well as its weaving techniques, based on archaeological finds and historical records. In this reconstruction process, scholarly narratives aiming to describe craft processes have undergone three major changes since the second half of the twentieth century, ultimately portraying it as a “traditional” craft that had to be protected for future transmission in the early twenty-first century. Craftspeople in Suzhou initiated a parallel endeavor to reinvent the craft and looms for producing complex gauze through trade with Japan. In 2013, against the backdrop of the “heritage fever” in China, and the rapid development of the cultural industry, their newly developed practices for weaving complex gauze were recognized as intangible cultural heritage. This lecture examines how scholars, craftspeople and the state shaped and helped render the once abandoned craft of complex gauze weaving as authentic heritage and as a “tradition.”