Beyond the Silk Road, Across the Seas: Inside the 9th IASSRT Conference

What a splendid event this was! Scholars from all over Asia, America and Europe gathered at the University of California at Berkeley to present their research on a wide variety of textiles as this 9th conference of the International Association for the Study of Silk Road Textiles. The event included special tours for the speakers, with a visit to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco to view rare Southeast Asian ikats, as well as private collection visits to see Arthur Leeper’s extraordinary early Sogdian masterworks, Thomas Murray’s intriguing Sumatran ship panels, and Tracing Patterns Foundation’s colourful South American and Tibetan textiles.

This was the first IASSRT conference held in the United States. Titled ‘Beyond the Silk Road, Across the Seas: Circulations of Textiles, Ideas, and Techniques Pre-1900s’, it drew a mixture of established scholars and PhD candidates presenting their research. The keynote speakers were Lee Talbot, Christopher Buckley, Alejandro de Avila Blomberg and Elena Phipps.

Textile Museum curator Lee Talbot spoke about the curious independent appearance of ikat around the globe, as did Avila Blomberg, curator of the Museo Textil de Oaxaca. By studying the spread of ikat along maritime routes from China to Southeast Asia or from Spain to Peru and Ecuador, Talbot explored the global reach of ikat through trade, cultural exchange and conquest. Reaching even further back, Christopher Buckley of the Tracing Patterns Foundation discussed his research on the ancient backstrap loom and its permutations, concluding that there is a close relationship between the American and Asian looms. Elena Phipps, an expert on the textiles of the Americas, reported on the use of silk in the creation of splendid weavings by Indigenous artists in the Andes from the 16th century, a tradition originating with the Spanish colonists.

Many scholars explored individual motifs that were carried across the Silk Road. Zvezdana Dode, of the Institute of Archaeology and Ancient History of the North Caucasus in Stavropol, investigated the lotus motif in China, exploring the conflation of the stages of the blossoming of the flower in a single image in textiles. Minjee Kim revealed the widespread use of the fleur-de-lis format as a heraldic and religious symbol in Chinese and Korean visual traditions, suggesting its meaning there as Buddhist rebirth, regeneration, divinity.

Zumrad Ilyasova, PhD candidate at the University of Basel, traced the journey of a Tang-rosette silk, noting the complications of assigning a specific site of origin or meaning due to the mobility of silks across continents. Yaomin Luo, PhD candidate at Zhejiang University, described the ‘rams in trees’ motif from the 5th to 6th centuries CE in China and its iconography (3).

Independent researcher and gallerist Thomas Murray presented a review of Lampung, South Sumatra ritual cloths—palepai, tampan ship cloths, tapis initiation skirts, among others—revealing new radiocarbon dating and contextualising them in relation to similar items from Mainland Southeast Asia and Borneo. Ji-Young Yu, PhD candidate at the Korea National University of Heritage, investigated the ‘bird with object in beak’ motif, tracing its path from Sasanian Persia to East Asia.

Other scholars discussed their research on types of textiles. The present author, collector and scholar Joan Hart, described the contribution of William Moorcroft to the understanding of the production of Kashmir shawls in the early 19th century (2). Sarah Faulkner, from Jacksonville State University, Alabama, analysed Lepcha textiles that are woven from nettle fibres made by Sikkimese in India, who are still active in their production.Serena Lee, independent researcher, gave insight into the continuity of ethnic dress among various minority groups—the Pathen, Buyi, Lolo, Hmong, Dao—into the present day, even when they are far from their homelands.

Minyoung Kim, conservation student from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York, investigated metal threads on a type of short jackets from Kauer, Lampung.Sarah Fee, senior curator at the Royal Ontario Museum, described working with other textile scholars to unearth and describe the pasted textiles in the covers of highland Ethiopian Christian manuscripts. The diversity of these ‘buried’ textiles reveals the incredible paths that this fabric has taken.

Some speakers had wonderful tales about singular textiles. Sandra Sardjono, president of Tracing Patterns Foundation in Berkeley and one of the organisers of the conference, featured an 18th-century chintz painted cloth depicting the epic Ramayana battle that she encountered in Ambon in the Moluccas, Indonesia. The cloth became a magical part of the costume for a ceremonial war dance which was entwined with the history of a local mosque. Seeking to preserve the original that is deteriorating, Sardjono initiated an intervention: creating a substitute copy. Remarkably, the magic of the original cloth was successfully transmitted by laying the new onto the old.

Similarly, Helen Wang scrutinised the one silk remnant salvaged from the famous Royal George ship that sank in 1782. When the ship was excavated in 1840, a durable silk waistcoat emerged in excellent condition. Karthika Audinet, of the Cotsen Textile Traces Study Center at George Washington University, explored images of cotton clothing in a Malabar Hindu temple near Karala, revealing how vast the maritime trade in cotton from India to Egypt became through Judeo-Arabic traders during the Middle Ages.

These many contributions to our understanding of the Silk Road were brought together by the Tang Center for Silk Road Studies, the Center for South East Asia Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, and the Tracing Patterns Foundation of Berkeley. The next IASSRT conference will be held in Japan in autumn 2026.