Images of Eros from the Hellenistic world appear on a garment unearthed from a burial site in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

Zhao Feng (center) examines a textile collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2024, as part of the international publishing project of A Comprehensive Collection of Chinese Silks.

Published volumes of A Comprehensive Collection of Chinese Silks, which aims to catalog silk artifacts from more than 80 institutions worldwide.

The boys-in-floral-scrolls motif found on Chinese porcelain.

A similar motif on a fragmentary silk textile in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The first things likely to catch a discerning eye are the tiny nude figures delicately woven into a woolen robe, their forms unmistakably those of Eros, the god of love from the Hellenistic world. They stand beneath pomegranate trees, surrounded by goats and oxen, in a scene that feels at once Mediterranean and Central Asian.

Yet, this textile was not discovered in Greece, Persia, or Rome. It emerged from the desert sands of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region's Yingpan Cemetery, a burial ground located along the ancient Silk Road — a place where cultures met, mingled, and stitched themselves together in silk and wool.

The robe, once wrapped around an adult male, is a highlight in a volume devoted to the textile collections of the Xinjiang Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology. The book forms part of A Comprehensive Collection of Chinese Silks — an ambitious international publishing project that seeks to gather dispersed silk treasures housed in museums around the world into a single intellectual space.

Launched in January 2022 and led by Zhao Feng, former director of the China National Silk Museum in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, the project has so far produced 12 volumes. Each is compiled by the institutions that hold the works, with scholars collaborating across borders to catalog, analyze and interpret them. Another 88 volumes are planned over the coming years.

"Every detail of this man's clothing could warrant a chapter of its own," says Zhao, now director of the Silk Art and Silk Roads Research Center at Zhejiang University.

Between the 2nd century BC and the 4th century AD, Yingpan served as a key Silk Road hub and an important outpost within the ancient Kingdom of Loulan, a major oasis state that later declined rapidly in the 5th century.

Excavated in the late 1980s, Yingpan has revealed a trove of textiles unlike any other in China: silk robes and wool coats, embroidered trousers, braided ribbons, printed silks, and fabrics shimmering with gold foil. These garments reveal a world in which cultures overlapped and left their lasting mark in thread and pattern.

Nowhere is this fusion more striking than in Tomb No 15, where the man — swathed in splendor — was laid to rest. His garments combine Chinese weaving traditions, Central Asian tailoring techniques, and decorative motifs rooted in Sasanian and Greco-Roman cultures. The double-woven woolen robe bearing the Eros figures clothed his body, while his pillow — adorned with confronting birds and beasts in geometric grids — echoed textile designs found as far away as Palmyra in Syria and as near as Mawangdui in Changsha, Hunan province.

"Chinese silk textiles provide key evidence of contact and exchange in human history," says Luk Yu-ping, curator of Chinese paintings, prints and the Central Asian collection at the British Museum in London, and one of Zhao's principal collaborators.

"The remarkably well-preserved textiles from Xinjiang reveal materials, techniques, motifs and functions that capture life along the Silk Road, as well as the transmission and adaptation of Chinese, Central Asian and broader Eurasian cultural elements."

In 2004, while serving as deputy director of the China National Silk Museum, Zhao personally removed the entire set of clothing from the Yingpan mummy and later oversaw its conservation.

"Analysis suggests that the fabric used for the embroidered pants may have been rewoven from a dismantled silk textile originally produced in central China," he says.

"The original piece was unraveled into filaments, spun locally into silk thread, and then woven anew."

For Zhao, this process offers a metaphor: silk becomes a material expression of how cultures encounter, reinterpret, and ultimately bind themselves together.

"We are now collaborating with more than 80 museums globally to tell the story of these well-traveled threads," Zhao says.

"From the early Silk Road caravans of the 2nd century BC to the maritime networks of the Age of Exploration, Chinese silk has always moved through multiple worlds — prized as symbols of power, yet also serving as ambassadors of cultural exchange."

He notes that this circulation intensified during the Mongol era, "when Mongol rule drew Eurasia into an unprecedented commercial web".

Among the notable examples he cites are a sacred skull relic wrapped in Chinese silk damask at Turku Cathedral in Finland, and a ceremonial robe decorated with an eagle, made from Chinese twill damask and once used as imperial regalia. A single motif — such as the Chinese character shou (longevity) — now appears in fragments scattered across London, Toronto, New York, Berlin, Cairo and Doha, as tangible proof of silk's global reach.

From time to time, pieces that were cut apart and dispersed across continents — often by antique dealers seeking separate buyers — can be reconnected, at least virtually.

"Last year, using pattern reconstruction, we brought four fragments of silk damask from the Textile Museum at The George Washington University together with another piece from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It became clear that they had once belonged together," Zhao says.

Pattern reconstruction does not involve physically rejoining fragments. Instead, researchers digitally match repeated decorative motifs across different pieces of cloth. Because many silks feature repeating patterns, partial motifs from separate fragments can be aligned to re-create the original design layout. Once restored, the pattern strongly suggests that the surviving pieces originated from a single, larger textile, even if most of it has long since been lost.

The four fragments now held by the Textile Museum were acquired by George Hewitt Myers — the American businessman and scholar-collector — in 1931, 1934 and 1951. Their widely separated purchase dates quietly reveal just how far a single silk textile could travel.

"By sheer luck, these fragments eventually came to rest in the same museum — a fortune many historical textiles never share," Zhao says.

"That is one of the impulses behind our project: to reconnect precious pieces that history has scattered."

The reunited group — five fragments in all — shares the same color, texture and boys-in-floral-scrolls motif, and is believed to have been produced in China. They were originally discovered at Rayy, just south of modern-day Tehran, one of Iran's oldest continuously inhabited cities. The fragments date to the 12th and 13th centuries, corresponding to China's Song Dynasty (960-1279), when this decorative theme flourished and Chinese silk traveled widely along the Maritime Silk Road, reaching the Indian Ocean regions and the Persian Gulf. Porcelain from the same period — likewise exported through these sea routes — has also been found at Rayy.

"Even more remarkable is the discovery of the Greco-Roman origin of the floral scrolls," Zhao says.

"The motif — an ivy scroll pattern (Hedera in Latin) — has deep roots in the visual culture of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, where it was closely associated with Dionysus, the god of wine and festivity, and his Roman counterpart Bacchus."

After the conquests of Alexander the Great, he explains, this decorative language spread eastward through Hellenistic artistic networks across Central Asia and Gandhara, entering the broader Silk Road world and gradually becoming part of a shared Eurasian ornamental vocabulary.

"More often than not, tracing the cultural journeys of Chinese silk means rediscovering a shared historical narrative," Zhao says.

Contact the writer at zhaoxu@chinadaily.com.cn