Four Lion Hunting Design Brocade

A Persian Hunt, Woven in China, Kept in a Japanese Temple

Two tiny Chinese characters give the secret away. Woven into the rumps of the galloping horses are the graphs 山 ("mountain") and 吉 ("good fortune"). They are easy to miss among the lions, riders, and beaded circles, but they settle a question that the imagery alone leaves open: a silk that looks thoroughly Persian was in fact made in China.

This is the Shiki Shishigari-mon Nishiki, the Brocade with a Design of Four Mounted Lion-Hunters, a single panel of patterned silk measuring 250.3 by 134.5 centimeters. It belongs to Hōryū-ji, the temple in Ikaruga, Nara Prefecture, that Prince Shōtoku founded in the early seventh century. The cloth itself was woven slightly later, during China's Tang dynasty, and it has survived roughly thirteen centuries.

The composition repeats one bold motif. Inside a beaded ring about 45 centimeters across (a "pearl roundel," a hallmark of Sasanian Persian design) stands a flowering tree. Around it, arranged in mirror symmetry above and below, left and right, four riders sit astride winged horses. Each twists backward in the saddle to loose an arrow at a lion behind him. The pose has a name in the history of warfare, the "Parthian shot," and here it becomes pure pattern, frozen and quadrupled into perfect balance. Between the great roundels, smaller beaded circles enclose a central blossom ringed by a curling honeysuckle scroll.

Why Japan Counts It Among Its National Treasures

The textile was first listed as a protected property in 1909, under the cultural-property law of the late Meiji period. When Japan rewrote that law after the Second World War, the brocade was elevated to National Treasure status on June 9, 1951. Designation number 00033 places it among the earliest items recognized under the modern system.

Three things explain the honor. The first is simple survival. Ancient cloth rots, fades, and falls apart; a large, legible silk from the Tang era is a genuine rarity, and few comparable pieces exist anywhere. The second is the weaving itself. The fabric is a weft-faced compound twill, a structure in which the pattern is carried by the horizontal threads rather than the vertical ones. The technique reached East Asia from West Asia, and producing a design this intricate without the motif blurring or stiffening into a formula took weaving of a very high order. The third is what the object records. Sasanian Persia favored the royal lion hunt as an emblem of kingly power, and its workshops loved the pearl roundel and the tree of life. Those ideas traveled the overland trade routes, were absorbed by Tang weavers, and were set down in silk that eventually crossed the sea to Japan. Few surviving objects make that long transmission so visible in a single glance.

How the brocade reached Hōryū-ji is bound up in legend. One tradition holds that envoys to Sui China carried it home and that Prince Shōtoku used it as a banner; this is a story handed down rather than a documented fact, and it is best treated as such. The cloth is said to have come to light in the modern era when the octagonal Yumedono hall was examined by the art historian Ernest Fenollosa and his colleague Okakura Kakuzō (Tenshin), the same pair associated with the unwrapping of the temple's hidden Kuze Kannon statue.

What to Look For

Look first at the riders' shoulders and reins. The backward twist is the whole drama of the piece, a hunter at full gallop turning to shoot the beast pursuing him. Notice that the horses are winged, closer to the Pegasus of the western imagination than to any animal a Tang stable held.

Then look at the color, or what remains of it. The silk now reads as muted browns and tans, but it was once vivid, dyed with safflower reds and indigo blues. A modern full-scale reconstruction, woven on a large drawloom over a period of years and now held by the Tokyo National Museum, shows how saturated the original palette must have been, and it offers the clearest sense of the brocade's lost brilliance.

Finally, hunt for the two Chinese characters on the horses. Finding 山 and 吉 yourself is the small detective's pleasure the cloth offers, and the moment they resolve out of the pattern is when the object stops being decorative and starts being evidence.

One practical note shapes any visit: this is among the least-shown of Japan's National Treasures. Textiles are fragile, and the brocade appears only in occasional special exhibitions rather than on continuous display.

Around Hōryū-ji

The temple that keeps the brocade is itself extraordinary. Hōryū-ji preserves what are generally regarded as the oldest wooden buildings on earth, and in 1993 its monuments became Japan's first entry on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The five-story pagoda and the Kondō main hall date to the temple's early reconstruction more than thirteen centuries ago.

Even if the brocade is not out during your visit, the temple's Gallery of Temple Treasures (the Daihōzōin) rewards the trip on its own. It displays a remarkable run of National Treasures year-round, among them the slender, smiling Kudara Kannon, the lacquered Tamamushi Shrine with its beetle-wing inlay, and the Yumechigai Kannon. The rotating "secret treasures" exhibitions held in spring and autumn at the separate Daihōzōden hall are where rarely seen objects, the brocade among them, are most likely to surface.

Hōryū-ji sits in the rural Ikaruga district west of Nara city. The simplest approach is by JR to Hōryūji Station, then a roughly twenty-minute walk or a short bus ride to the temple gate; buses also run from central Nara. A single combined ticket (around 1,500 yen) covers the Western Precinct, the Gallery of Temple Treasures, and the Eastern Precinct with its Yumedono hall, so the whole complex can be seen in one unhurried half-day.