Abstract
On April 28th of 2006, a set of Buddha's reliquary was excavated from the pagoda in n Nacsan Temple. According to the record, the relics were put in the pagoda in the 18th year of King SookJong in the Chosun Dynasty (1692). The present paper examines ten pieces of wrapping clothes covering reliquary found in the pagoda. They are especially precious data in the history of textiles because they were blocked off from outside and was preserved in good condition with vivid colors still remaining after more than 300 years. Of the ten pieces of wrapping cloth, five were double-layered and the other five were single-layered. They include 15 pieces of silk fabric but, excluding repeated use of the same silk fabric, the total of 11 pieces of silk fabric were examined. All 11 kinds of silk fabric were patterned, 9 of which were Satin and the other 2 were Twill. Of the 9 Satin pieces, 8 pieces were 5-end satin which had the ground of 5-end warp satin with the figure of 5-end weft satin. The remaining 1 Satin piece were more splendid with prominent figures by using warp and weft of different colors. The 2 Twill pieces used twill weave-the ground was 3-end warp twill and the figures were 5-end weft twill. Both of the Twill pieces were weaved with character patterns, partly using wrapped gold thread as supplementary weft. The patterns of 11 pieces of silk fabric include flower, dragon/phoenix, cloud, and geometric patterns. Five were flower patterns, three were dragon/phoenix patterns, two were geometric pattern, and one was cloud pattern. In addition, various treasure patterns, character patterns were utilized as supplementary patterns. The flower and phoenix patterns reflect characteristics of the textiles of the 17th century whereas check pattern and cloud pattern were very unique.
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