Jiya Township stands beside the Yurungkash River, in Hotan City. A Hotan government page of 7 September 2023 sets the township there, in a region the page calls known for jade, and it names a village in the township for atlas silk. Jade is part of Hotan's public reputation on that page. A green stone in a shop is not identified by the reputation, and the page offers no geology of the stone. The riverbank is the setting for a cloth craft. The materials the page actually puts in Jiya are silk, dye and looms. The river explains where the township sits. It does not certify the pebbles on a counter.
From the journal
Dye before the loom
In Jiya, atlas means tie-dye: silk is bound and dyed, and only then woven, in houses and in factories.
In the same city · Hotan ↗A township by the river
Bind, then dye, then weave
Atlas, the page says, means tie-dye. Silk is bound and dyed before it is woven. The pattern is decided in the tying: dye takes the thread where it is free and stops where it is bound. Only then does the loom lock the coloured warp into cloth. The page records the weaving and dyeing craft on the national list of 2008. It names plant dyes, among them saffron, scholar-tree flowers and walnut husk, and patterns such as leaves, feathers and ears of wheat. The order is the thing to watch. Bind, dye, weave. A finished length of silk is the last object, not the first.
A household loom and a factory
The same page describes two ways of working: household production, and production in enterprises and cooperatives. A room with a loom and a factory floor both exist in Jiya. One does not cancel the other. The page's own chain runs from reeling silk, to dyeing the thread, to weaving, and then to clothes and shop counters. Thread, dye and the sound of a shuttle are the shared scene. In Tuan Cheng, in central Hotan, atlas is sold from shops under houses. Jiya is where the binding and the dyeing happen before that cloth reaches a counter. Buying a length of silk is a later act than tying it.