• A mystifying group of carpets and tapestries created along the Silk Route over five hundred years ago is the topic of this richly illustrated book.

The carpets and tapestries with riveting yet puzzling designs have been preserved in closed treasure houses in the former Japanese capital since the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries. They are brought out only one day a year for a Shinto-Buddhist festival procession and quickly returned to storage. This book is about their shrouded origin in China, the pariahs who wove them, the meaning of their obscure motifs, and the reasons for the secrecy continuing to surround their exhibition.

Early Carpets and Tapestries on the Eastern Silk Road is written by Gloria Granz Gonick, Art Historian and Research Associate at The Fowler Museum at UCLA, former Guest Curator for Matsuri Japanese Festival Arts, and former Museum Curator for the Los Angeles Craft and Folk Art Museum. She has studied the collections and their intriguing past over the past two decades during multiple research visits to China and Japan. The sites in Asia where the carpets and tapestries were created centuries ago, and over two hundred exemplary artworks have been photographed in color, and documented for this fascinating volume.

Contents: Introduction: A Collection of Carpets and Painted Wool Tapestries; The Two Mystery Collections: The Pile Carpets and Painted Tapestries; The Search for Provenance; The Painted Tapestries Preserved in China; Manichaeanism - The Religion Of Light, Vegetarianism; Change: The Challenge in China: Time, Space, and Terminology; Chinese Minority Costumes and Textiles: The Monguor; Painter-devotees in Northwest China: Murals and Mandala; Features of the Carpets and Painted Tapestries Preserved in Japan; Manichaen Motifs Depicted on the Carpets And Painted Tapestries; Painted Tapestries ( crane tapestries ) Produced in China's Southern Coastal Towns; Conclusions.