Detail from Ku Kai-chih’s “Admonitions of the Court Instructress” showing a knotted sash.
A bronze vessel from the Warring States era, decorated with a knotted motif.
Other evidence leads to the conclusion that knots were cherished not only as symbols, but also as an essential part of everyday life. Chinese gentlemen of the Chou Dynasty, 1112-256 B.C., carried a special tool tied to their waist sashes, a hsi. Made of ivory, jade, and bone, hsi have been preserved in a number of museum collections. Their cresent-like shape with one tapered end suggest that they could have been used to loosen knots. Indeed, the Shuo Wen, one of the earliest Chinese dictionaries, tells us that the hsi was “a device to untie knots, part of adult attire.” Knots that called for a special tool to untie them must have been intricate, indeed. Moreover, the fact that a hsi was common to all adult wardrobes tells us that knots abounded in the Chou Dynasty, as commonplace as watches are today.
For example, the same gentlemen who could not leave home without their hsi were also fond of wearing elaborate belt ornaments hung from their waist sashes. These ornaments were composed of several small pieces of jade — delicately carved dragons, circlets, squares with holes in the centers, crescents, and the like — all strung together in a symmetrical array. Although jade belt ornaments with cord eyelets have been found dating from the Shang and Chou Dynasties, the cords that held them together have long since turned to dust. But surely such prized ornaments warranted equally attractive cord mounting, calling for intricate knotwork between each piece of carved jade.
Long robes with flowing sleeves, the traditional garb of both men and women, had to be fastened at the waist with knotted sashes. Simple examples exist in paintings, but it is not hard to imagine the Chinese of days long gone taking great care in tying their sashes, much as 17th century Europeans were fond of tying elaborate cravats. Looking elsewhere for a hint of these knots, perhaps the intricately knotted Japanese obi is not too far removed from earlier Chinese knotted attire.
Household objects in ancient China also made use of knots. Bronze mirrors were forged with rings on their backsides, so that they could be tied to walls by knotted cords. Although the earthenware jugs of old have long since disappeared, ceremonial bronze replicas of them from the Warring States Period retain a design of the knotted network that was used to hoist them. The fact that the knotted pattern was retained in the bronze replicas is interesting in and of itself, because it represents the first surviving use of a knotting motif for a purely decorative purpose.
With knots playing such an important role in personal apparel and household items, and having already been used symbolically, it was quite natural for the ever-artistic Chinese to further explore the decorative possibilities. Unfortunately, cord fibers rot away quickly, leaving no evidence for later generations to study. One of the very few extant firsthand examples of ancient Chinese knotting is the latticework holding together the jade plate-mail suit found in the tomb of the Han Dynasty Princess Tou Wan. Woven in gold thread, it includes little flower-petal knots at the junctures between each small jade plate. These relatively simple knots are quite artistically done, despite the stiffness of the medium in which they are tied. Imagine what the artist could have created with pliable cord.
Jade plate-mail burial suit of Han Princess Tou Wan.
String of knots decorating the back of a sash on a Tang tri-color figurine.
On the other hand, the jade plate-mail burial suit of the princess reveals little about the use of more commonplace knotwork. References from literary works of two post-Han Dynasty states fill in that gap. Both refer to the “true lover’s knot,” purported to have been tied in an endlessly repeating pattern and symbolizing, of course, romance and affection. The first ruler of the early sixth century state of Liang, Wu Ti, mentions the knot in a poem about the object of his adoration: “I dreamed the silk cords at our waists/Were bound together in a true lover’s knot.”
Towards the end of the sixth century, the “true lover’s knot” appeared in the Sui Dynasty, the brief unification that foreshadowed the Tang Dynasty. There, as recorded in the official dynastic history, Sui ruler Wen Ti’s young concubine Hsuan Hua attracted the admiration of Wen Ti’s son and successor, Yang Ti. When Yang Ti ascended the throne, he wished to express his pent-up feelings. Unable to broach the subject directly, Yang Ti turned to the “true lover’s knot.” He sealed several of them in a gilded box, and ordered it delivered to Hsuan Hua. The message was clear: She was the object of Yang Ti’s affection, and he wished to demonstrate his amorous feelings. Although we have no idea how the “true lover’s knot” was tied, it is obvious from these examples that knots were replete with symbolic connotations that allowed for extra-lingual communication centuries ago in China.
The “true lover’s knot” continued to enjoy widespread use, even finding its way into the titles of two popular melodies of the subsequent Tang Dynasty. The original lyrics are gone, leaving only the title and a hint of the rhythm. But it is a safe guess to assume that the “true lover’s knot,” and a variety of other knots as well, were known to almost every man and woman in the street by that time.
Even more significantly, Tang sculpture has preserved the designs of a handful of rather complex knots, ones that have survived to the present day. A swastika knot, designed after the ancient Indian motif which Buddhists hold as a symbol of all good fortune, hangs from the waist of a statue of the Goddess of Mercy in the Nelson Gallery of the Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. A string of knots, including the swastika knot and two simpler ones, can be seen decorating the back of a sash on a Tang tri-color figurine housed in the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.
Decorative knotting played an important role in the lives of these early Chinese, both as an aesthetic embellishment in personal attire and as a visual symbol of love and affection or religious concepts. The tying of these knots was long ago considered a necessary skill for all young unmarried women to master. The techniques were passed down orally from grandmother to mother to daughter, right along with spinning, weaving, and sewing. Sadly enough, the very nature of this folk craft precluded traditional scholarly attention. Knots were a mundane part of life, a skill common to most women that was surely not worthy of explication in serious classical treatise. The silence is staggering.
A butterfly knot and a good luck knot variation gracing a fan from the Ching Dynasty.
Fortunately, the advent of popular vernacular novels in later days opened the avenue for making incidental references to the marginal arts, decorative knotting included. These novels depict ordinary life with an eye for painstaking detail. Here and there,