These delicate flowers on wooden stalks would originally have been attached to a piece of painted fabric. The pointed ends of the wooden stalks would have been pushed through holes in the fabric to give a three-dimensional effect of lotus flowers floating on a pool. The monochrome flowers have six to eight petals and are cut flat from plain-woven fabric in pale red, pale blue and buff-coloured cotton and silk. Tufts of thread have been tied to the heads of some of the pegs to represent stamens.

The textiles were recovered from the site of Miran on the eastern verge of the Taklimakan Desert in north-west China, where material was discovered at a Buddhist shrine abandoned in the 4th or 5th century. The site is part of an area of central Asia now called the Silk Road, comprising a series of overland trade routes that crossed Asia from China to Europe. The most notable item traded was silk. Camels and horses were used as pack animals and merchants passed the goods from oasis to oasis. The Silk Road was also important for the exchange of ideas. While silk textiles travelled west from China, Buddhism entered China from India in this way.

These textiles were brought back from central Asia by the explorer and archaeologist Sir Marc Aurel Stein (1862-1943). The Victoria and Albert Museum has around 700 ancient and medieval textiles recovered from the Silk Road by Stein at the beginning of the 20th century. Some are silk, while others are made from the wool of a variety of different animals.