This pea-green outer gown of tapestry-weave silk features butterflies and floral imagery, including hydrangea, lotus and gourds. It was probably made to be worn in the summer. The white cuffs are decorated with the ‘double happiness’ (shuangxi) characters in blue, signifying wedded bliss to the wearer. These delicately rendered ornaments are woven in the slit tapestry technique (kesi), using raw silk as warp threads and coloured silks, carried by tiny shuttles, as weft threads. A key feature of tapestry weaving is that the small shuttles carrying the coloured weft threads do not pass across the width of the cloth, but run back and forth along the pattern area.
This gown, decorated as weaving progressed, would also have been woven to shape according to the measurements of its eventual wearer. The tailor would then have cut around the pre-woven shapes and sewed them together. Silk tapestry was an extremely labour-intensive process. Creating a luxurious robe such as this example could take a year, even for the most experienced of weavers.