The Silk Road: Fabrics From The Han to the T'ang Dynasty

Urumqi, China: Museum of the Sinkiang-Uighur Autonomous Region (Museum of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region), 1972. Slipcased. Everything very nice in general but for minor general shelf wear. The yellow single page is worn at the very top edge from sticking out. The very outer fore edges of the booklets are age toned. The main volume has art museum ex-lib. marks of bar code, blind stamp, title translation into English (in pencil) and off-white sticker remnant. Slipcase is age toned and has lib. sticker on one face.. Cream cloth with blind-stamp decoration and gold lettering. Decorative end papers. 8 pp. followed by 45 single-sided pp. with 66 color images. Laid in is a 1973 supplemental booklet of 8 pp. with a bw map and additional bw illus., a 1972 supplemental booklet of 17 pp. with 7 bw images, and a double-sided yellow sheet with no illustrations. All are folio size and housed in a plain, card slipcase with embossed face lettering and black spine lettering. Main text in Chinese. An excellent resource about silk fabrics woven by the Chinese, the general silk production, the proliferation of the art because of The Silk Route, and more. A cultural, textile, historical, industrial study and more. The single yellow sheet contains an English synopsis of the Chinese text and a list, with brief annotations, of the 66 color illustrations. The 1973 supplemental booklet appears to be in Chinese with the same title as the main volume (identical Chinese characters). It appears to contain essay material with a bw map, perhaps showing The Silk Road, another illustration showing two fragments, and a list of 25 entries, many with dates (bibliography?). The 1972 supplemental booklet contains a prefatory essay dated 1971, followed by 15 pages of entries of some sort, numbered from 1 to 152 (could be entry numbers, page numbers, ?). There seem to be occasional dates scattered among the listings, varying from 1966 to 1971. Each listing begins with characters in bold lettering (titles? names?). All volumes in this set have the identical Chinese lettering at the bottom of each cover (publisher?). The actual color plates in the main volume are beautiful and clearly-rendered, with individual stitches visible. Colors are realistic. A lovely set, whether or not you read Chinese.