Exhibitions/ Chinese Textiles

Chinese Textiles: Ten Centuries of Masterpieces from the Met Collection

At The Met Fifth Avenue
August 15, 2015–June 19, 2016

Exhibition Overview

This installation, which explores the cultural importance of silk in China, showcases the most important and unusual textiles from the Museum's collection. In addition to three rare pieces dating from the Tang dynasty (618–906), when China served as a cultural hub linking Korea and Japan to Central and West Asia, and ultimately to the Mediterranean world, the exhibition also includes eleventh- and twelfth-century tapestries from Central Asia, as well as contemporaneous Chinese examples of this technique.

Spectacular embroideries—including an imperial fourteenth-century canopy decorated with phoenixes and flowers, and a monumental late seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century panel showing phoenixes in a garden—are also on view, together with theatrical garments, court costumes, and early examples of badges worn at court to designate rank.

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The exhibition is made possible by the Joseph Hotung Fund.


On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in

Exhibition Objects





Panel with Phoenix and Birds in a Rock Garden (detail), China, Ming dynasty (1368–1644), late 16th–early 17th century. Silk and metallic thread tapestry (kesi); Overall: 88 1/4 x 71 in. (224.2 x 180.3 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Seymour Fund, 1960 (60.1)