Silk Panel with Dragon and Cloud Motif

This panel of silk produced in one of the imperial factories is the end part of a bolt of silk, some of which were shipped to Beijing as tax payments. The inscription woven into the lower body of the fabric reads Jiangnan Silk Factory under Superintendent Wen Feng(?). An additional signature by the weaver is woven into the left corner. Since the Southern Song dynasty in the 1100s, the production of silk for imperial use was increasingly concentrated in the Lower Yangzi Delta, also called Jiangnan. By the Ming and Qing dynasties the main official imperial workshops were situated in the region’s cities of Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Nanjing.