Miao Hundred Birds Coat - Unisex - Jas

A Miao 'Hundred Birds Festival' coat.
Miao culture, Guizhou province, China, 20th century.

Dimensions:
Length 121 cm, width from arm end to arm end 149 cm.

Made out of polychrome coloured silk, felt, cotton, bird's feathers, beads, Job's tears. Jacket; for festival, to be worn by man or woman. Base cloth of unbleached, undyed cotton in diamond twill weave.

Decorated with thin sheets of applied light green silk felt, with satin stitch motifs of mainly birds, in soft maroons, blues, greens, silks, probably stitched over paper cuts. Also applied narrow strips of shiny dark indigo cloth have had diamonds cut out, and are glued on then stitched over with silk. Front squares have a bird with a spiralling body and no wings. Twelve free-hanging panels at bottom.


Condition:
Some beads missing, small areas of discoloration and small areas of wear to the felt.


Ref (see last 9 photos):
Similar Hundred Birds coats can be found in several museum collections:
-Minneapolis Institute of Art, accession number 2007.105.83
-Minneapolis Institute of Art, accession number 2003.243.58
-Minneapolis Institute of Art, accession number 2004.67.28
-British Museum, museum number As1998,01.175
-British Museum, museum number As1998,01.182
-British Museum, museum number As1998,01.173
-The Chung Young Yang Embroidery Museum, Sookmyung Women's University
-The Bowers Museum, accession number 2015.9.20
-Museum of International Folk Art, object number FA.2023.17.1




About the Hundred Birds coat:
The Hundred Bird Costume is a labour intensive piece of work, and a well-told story in the folklife of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. While each tribe may have carried a different version of the story, for the Miao, the origin was from the worship for the bird. During their migration and after they settled down, they would hunt all kinds of birds as their food. Out of gratitude, they began to worship the birds. They not only embroidered bird patterns on clothes, but also decorated the lap with all kinds of feathers.

It takes 6 months to a year to make one – from farming silkworms to making silk-felt sheets, to dyeing the silk-felt, to heavy embroidery of numerous motifs with silk threads, to sewing up to 40 pieces of panels together. Batik fabric are sewn on cuffs and at the joints between front and back panels, completed with twelve hanging panels at the lower part. The result is an exquisite costume!


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