Color Millennium-Plant Dyeing: Ancient Beautiful natural dyeing Technology.

All kinds of clothes are inseparable from dyeing technology. Modern industry can realize large-scale accurate dyeing through chemical synthesis of dyes and mechanical chemical operation. In fact, as early as thousands of years ago, our ancestors had mastered the garment dyeing process called "grass dyeing".

Plant dyes with unique technology and excellent performance have dominated the dyeing history of China for thousands of years. Even now, compared with accurate and monotonous chemical pigments, pure natural plant dyes are more colorful and more environmentally friendly and durable.

Plant dyeing, as its name implies, is a technology that uses the colors of natural flowers and trees to dye. Its origin can be traced back to the Neolithic Age, and it is one of the oldest dyeing techniques.

Plant dyeing has a rich dyeing system, and various dyeing techniques are used to meet different dyeing needs. After a long period of exploration and development, it has matured and finally formed a complete system and business operation mode. Then let's learn about the ancient art of plant dyeing.

Vegetation hair dyeing originated in prehistoric times and is the crystallization of the life experience of the original residents. In the Neolithic Age, ancestors found that some plants could extract juice from flowers, fruits, stems, leaves and other parts in their daily life and work. These juices are colored. If they get on clothes or skin, they can be dyed, and even some colors are difficult to fade on the skin for a long time. So people began to extract plant juice for dyeing, and the art of plant dyeing was formally formed.

After long-term exploration and development, it is said that people can skillfully use vegetation to dye clothes in Xuanyuan period. In the Xia Dynasty, grass dyeing began to combine with agriculture. Perhaps because of the growing demand, the supply of wild plant dyes is in short supply, and people in Xia Dynasty began to grow blue grass artificially for dyeing.

Blue and cyan are both made of bluegrass, and indigo is extracted from bluegrass and can be dyed into bluer colors.

By the Zhou Dynasty, the technology and basic maturity of plant dyeing were more extensive, and the number, scope, color types and raw material sources of plant dyeing were more extensive. Moreover, under the blessing of Zhou etiquette, the court specially set up an official in charge of textile dyeing, named "dyer", whose only responsibility is to be responsible for industrial processes related to dyeing. During the Qin and Han Dynasties, plant dyeing officially replaced the original mineral dyes, which laid a glorious history of plant dyeing technology and became the mainstream plant dyeing technology in China for thousands of years.

The open folk customs and open ideas in the prosperous Tang Dynasty had almost no restrictions on costumes, which created the prosperity of costumes in the prosperous Tang Dynasty on the premise of the great development of grass dyeing techniques. What a long and gorgeous silk, along the Silk Road all the way west, through Central Asia to Europe. They have become the clothes sought after and flaunted by European aristocrats, and they have also made a prosperous trade road.

During the Song Dynasty, the prosperity of the Maritime Silk Road further expanded the influence of plant dyeing technology, which was not limited to the export of silk products. Plant dyeing technology came to Japan, Southeast Asia and other places with the ship, which affected the local fabric dyeing technology. "Guan Xue Embroidery Spectrum" records that there were nine colors of embroidery thread at that time, which can be divided into 745 colors according to the color depth, which shows how large the scale of use was and how rich the colors were.

From the late Qing Dynasty to the Republic of China, modern chemical dyes were more suitable for the market demand because of their advantages of cheap, easy preparation and mass production, and plant dyeing gradually withdrew from the historical stage. However, the art of plant dyeing is not extinct. In some places, people still insist on using plant dyeing to inherit this ancient craft.

There are many dyeing processes for plant dyeing, mainly because different plants have different pigment components, so the difficulty of extraction is different. According to different plants and different production needs, the ancients invented a variety of dyeing processes, mainly raw leaf dyeing, mordant dyeing, boiling dyeing, fermentation dyeing, knock-out dyeing, overlapping dyeing, tie dyeing and so on.

Dyeing raw leaves is the most primitive dyeing process for vegetation, that is, directly dyeing fresh and unprocessed plant leaves, mainly for those plants that can directly extract excellent pigments. The specific method is to pick fresh roots, stems and leaves of plants and crush or grind them, so as to destroy the structure of plants and let the pigment flow out, then extract the pigment and directly dye the fabric with juice full of pigment. The advantages are simple process and convenient operation, while the disadvantages are certain requirements for raw materials.

Mordant dyeing is aimed at plants that cannot directly extract pigments. Literally, it means that the pigment is attached to the surface of the fabric by means of the medium to achieve the purpose of dyeing. In addition, mordant dyeing is mainly used for dyeing plant pigments that have no adhesion to cellulose, and it is easy to fade simply.

Most pigments are difficult to preserve and easy to decompose after long-term storage. Adding mordant can prolong the storage time and make the dyeing more firm and not easy to fade. For example, we often buy jeans and soak them in salt water first, so that they are not easy to fade. This is the principle of mordant dyeing. Alum is the most common medium among many media, which can adjust the brightness of color, and some media use chemical reactions to generate special substances.

Fermentation dyeing is mainly aimed at indigo dyeing, that is, extracting pigment from bluegrass (the most important indigo in ancient times is bluegrass).

The main method is to put bluegrass into a container, press bluegrass under water with boards and stones, soak it in hot water for one night, then filter out the juice with cold water for two nights, and add a certain proportion of lime water to stir. The turbid substance under it is indigo. To be used for dyeing, it must be fermented to indigo white. Indigo can be dyed in alkaline solution and then oxidized by air to get bright blue for a long time.

Tie-dyeing should be the most familiar dyeing method for the public. This dyeing technique is not only limited to grass dyeing, but also widely used in other kinds of dyeing techniques. Tie-dyeing is to tie the fabric or clothes with silk thread, tie them in different ways according to different needs by means of tying, sewing, tying, sewing and clamping, and then put the tied fabric into the dyeing vat for dyeing.

After dyeing, the knotted place will not be dyed but left blank, and the degree of dyeing will be different with different pressure and thickness, so a specific pattern and dyeing effect can be obtained. Now there are some so-called fashion clothes that like to be created by tie-dyeing. In fact, tie-dyeing also has a specific binding process to get a specific pattern and color, just like a mold.

There are five primary colors for dyeing traditional plants in China: cyan, red, yellow, white and black. Through these five primary colors, other colors can be blended. In fact, these five primary colors are not only one color, and there will be differences according to different raw materials. Plant raw materials used to make pigments include various colored plants, including bark, roots, shells, flowers, fruit juice, Chinese herbal medicines, tea and so on.

Cyan is mainly dyed with indigo extracted from bluegrass. Tiangong Wu Kai: "All five blues can be indigo". In other words, there were five kinds of blue at the earliest. In ancient times, blue and cyan were homologous tones, and all kinds of blue were collectively called indigo. At the earliest time, blue came from Isatis indigotica. Later, through people's practical exploration, it was found that Polygonum cuspidatum, Malaya and amaranth (that is, wild amaranth we eat) can all be used as plant raw materials to extract cyan.

Red was called red in ancient times, and red dyes appeared very early. For example, the earliest iron ore is a very useful red dye, and cinnabar, which is often seen in TV dramas, is mercury sulfide. Cinnabar is also a traditional Chinese medicine mined from ores. In plant dyeing, red pigment is mainly extracted from the roots of madder, but the dyeing ability of madder dye is poor, so it is necessary to use the mordant dyeing method mentioned above and use alum to assist dyeing.

The main material of yellow is gardenia. Gardenia yellow is a direct dye that can be dyed with raw leaves. Yellow is red. Later, yellow dyes such as Rehmannia glutinosa, Turmeric and Huang Zhe appeared. Among them, it is ochre red in yellow candlelight and ochre yellow in moonlight, which has always been used as a coloring material for the emperor's robes.

In ancient times, gallnut, persimmon leaf and cypress leaf were mainly used to dye black. It is worth mentioning that there are no pure black plants in nature, so there is no black pigment. These plants that make black dyes all have a common feature, that is, they contain a large amount of tannic acid, which will generate ferrous tannic acid with copperas as the medium. After dyeing, they will form a stable black color after sun exposure and oxidation.

Plant dyeing is the crystallization of China's ancient wisdom. When there was no industrial dyeing system, it dominated the history of fabric dyeing for thousands of years and spread to all parts of the world through trade routes such as the Silk Road and the Maritime Silk Road. Hanfu is gorgeous and dazzling, and it can't be done without the process of plant dyeing.

Plant dyeing technology with a long history has evolved different dyeing processes for various plant raw materials, which can meet the coloring needs of special colors. At the same time, the mature plant dyeing masters have not stopped exploring and invented a plant dyeing color system with five colors as low as more than 700 colors, which may not be achieved even in modern industrial dyeing.

References:

Tiangong Wu Kai