One armguard, one room

In 1995 a Sino-Japanese team working at Niya, on the southern edge of the Taklamakan, opened a cemetery north of the site. Tomb 8 held a couple identified as the king and queen of Jingjue, the small kingdom the Han histories call by that name. The piece that made the excavation famous lay at the man’s upper right side, with a bow bag, a quiver and a brocade hat.

The excavators read the grouping as archery gear and the object as an armguard: a rectangle of silk worn on the forearm against the bowstring. It is a national first-class relic, and one of the first group China barred from going abroad for exhibitions.

The armguard is small; the weave is not. Five colours of warp — blue, green, red, yellow and white — carry phoenixes, luan-birds, a qilin and a white tiger, with clouds, mountains, stars and plants between them. The characters 五星出东方利中国 run through the pattern: a Han augury woven in, not a label added later.

In 2018 a team wove a replica on a reconstructed Han jacquard loom. The replica shows the logic of the cloth: the colour sits in the warp, and the pattern is built line by line as the loom lifts those threads.

On 13 July 2025 the regional museum opened a show built around this one object. The museum calls it the country’s first special exhibition devoted to a single national treasure, and scheduled it within the region’s seventieth anniversary. The armguard sits in a cylindrical case that holds light, humidity and temperature steady and can be adjusted remotely.

Around the case the museum added a theatre reconstructing Niya, a digital loom where visitors throw a shuttle, and a question-and-answer screen. Its curator, Yu Zhiyong, describes the aim as making the object visible, touchable and feelable. That is the museum’s own framing; what the room documents is how one textile is displayed now, and what a visitor can still check against the object.