When you last saw this embroidery, we had just begun the process of removing that
1912 restoration fabric.
As you can see we've now completed that
process and you can see the full extent of the back of the embroidery.
It took us about a week and a half to remove the restoration fabric and really the reason
why it took such a long time and was quite challenging is first of all the
extent of the thousands of restoration stitches and also due to the fragility
of the object. So we're very careful to remove all of those restoration stitches
so we could peel the fabric back without causing any damage to the
embroidery. So areas like this where there's a lot of damage to the hemp if we
hadn't removed all of the stitches first there would have been a great risk of
damaging the fabric and damaging the silk in particular. Here you can see the
one piece of the restoration fabric that we've left. The embroidery stitches are
loose and the only thing holding them down really are those restoration
stitches. So it would be very difficult to remove these without damaging that
area, so we've decided to leave that piece it's also quite nice to just leave
one section as a record of that so that campaign of
conservation back in the early 20th century.
This is a really fantastic opportunity to see the back of the embroidery and to learn a bit more about
its construction and what techniques were used in its making. So one thing
that you can see more clearly than from the front are these seams that run the
full length both here and here and we can also see several patches on the
reverse of the embroidery. Those were all put in place whilst the embroidery was in
use between the eighth and eleventh centuries. It was thought that
split stitch was used for most of the embroidery and that some areas such as
this arm was stitched using chain stitch and looking at the back we were able to
confirm that actually it is all split stitch. So in this area, there's lots
of information about the embroidery and how the embroidery was carried out
because there are so many knots and threads on the back where they have
changed colors or jumped from one area to another. So here you can see a blue
thread that's been left loose on the back and then after carrying out the
blue embroidery, they've then stitched in cream and those cream stitches have
accidentally caught the blue thread at the back so this is quite useful
information because it tells us what order the embroidery has been carried out.
And here you can see there are lots of knots where they've started the
embroidery so they've started all these different stitching threads in the same
place before carrying them around the circumference of the halo.
On the back you can see a lot of the staining that we saw on the front so there are stains
generally across the bottom section here and that's likely to
be from use, it could also be from its time being stored in the cave at Dunhuang.
Another area that's particularly interesting, we were looking at the stains
on this side here and then suddenly just thought oh that's, that's very odd
that stain looks like lines it looks like a character and it does seem to be
actually a Chinese character on the reverse of the embroidery so we're quite
excited about this and today earlier have been using infrared photography to
try and get a better image of that because it's likely to be carbon black
so that will show up better under infrared photography than normal light.
We've been hypothesizing it could be the mark of the embroiderer
of one of the makers of the piece or or of the donors or it could be
something a bit more mundane and everyday such as the mark put on the
fabric when it was being bought and sold or made so we're hoping that we can get
someone to read that but it may or may not be legible enough we'll see.
Another tool is using UV light it can be quite a useful and non-destructive way of
identifying dyes or helping to identify them.
So I'm going to put my goggles on and have a look.
So I'm going to shine the UV light over the
embroidery and compare the different threads. Let's take a look. Oh wow!
And I can already see a lot of the threads are really fluorescing quite brightly the
cream-colored threads in Buddha's face and the kind of yellow and cream threads
in the halo really strongly fluorescing. A little bit of orange coloured
fluorescence in those pinky threads which would suggest that it's a
Safflower dye and again here, there's this very striking orange fluorescence
So when we were looking at this part of the
bodhisattva's robes earlier you could see it was two different shades of green
on either side. Looking at this under the UV light it becomes quite clear that that
difference in green is due to different yellow dyes present on one side and the other.
This is a very striking section of the Buddha's torso and arm that's really
glowing under the UV light.
Now we've had a really good thorough examination of the
reverse of the embroidery and it's been really great to use a variety of
techniques, the infrared, the UV to really look at those colours. This is a
once-in-a-lifetime opportunity because nobody's seen the reverse since 1912 when
it was restored before, and hopefully if our conservation project does its job
then nobody will see the reverse again for another 100 years.
It will be hard to say goodbye to the reverse,
but we've got to move forward with the project and get the
embroidery safely conserved so it can go on display.