Didn't there be colorful neon clothes in ancient times? Here's some "colors" for you to see
Synthetic dyes can replace natural dyes to make textiles easier to color, but this does not mean that the dyeing of ancient textiles could not achieve the effect of synthetic dyeing.
"Datang Female Forensic Doctor", "Bright Ming Fenghua", "Under the Jinyi" ... These costume dramas have achieved good ratings. In these costume dramas, the exquisite and elegant costumes also left a deep impression on everyone. The beauty of costume costumes has many reasons, and color is one of the most important points.
But will the costumes of the ancients really be as colorful as in the costume TV series? With this question in mind, a reporter from Science and Technology Daily interviewed industry experts.
100,000 years ago mineral pigments already appeared
The earliest opportunities for dyeing may be that prehistoric humans stained colored dust on the side of the road, or drank the juice of plants on the skin.
According to Liu Jian, deputy research librarian at the China Silk Museum, about 100,000 years ago, abalone shells containing vermiculite appeared in the caves of Blooms, South Africa. Tattoo. 25,000 years ago, the remains of vermiculite were also found in caves of cavemen in China to color animal teeth, fish bones and shells. Since then, mineral pigments have been widely used in social activities such as petroglyphs, sacrifices and tombs.
Cotton fabrics dyed with indigo dye, found about 6,000 years ago in prehistoric sites on the northern coast of Peru, can be considered as the sprouts of plant dyes. Egypt and India also started using pigments from plant leaves, flowers, roots and other parts around 2000 BC to make cotton and linen fabrics more beautiful. In China, it is known that the earliest dye plant is sisal grass, which was used for dyeing wool fabrics in Lop Nur, Xinjiang, 3500-4000 years ago.
"The origin of dyeing in different parts of the world is different sooner or later, and the types of pigments and dyes used are also different." Liu Jian pointed out that, especially due to the geographical environment and natural climate of various regions, the variety of natural dyes is very rich and has obvious regions. Sex.
In Central and Western Europe, osmanthus is a common yellow dye, while the yellow dyes in East Asia are locust rice and yellow trevally; the most famous red dyes in Central and South America are cochineal insects, and the lac insects are usually used to dye dark red or purple in the Central and South Peninsula ; Same red dye, safflower is native to Egypt, and hematoxylin is from Southeast Asia.
However, with the full cultural and technical exchanges between the Eurasian continent represented by the Silk Road and the discovery of the Americas in the era of the Great Nautical Age, the variety of dyes from geographical origin was exported from the origin and appeared in textile printing in other countries in the market.
Ancient costumes are not only black and white
In the middle of the 19th century, British scientist William Perkin invented the world's first synthetic dye, aniline violet, and chemists from European countries followed suit. Hundreds of synthetic dyes of various colors appeared in the printing and dyeing market. By the end of the 19th century, China had imported such synthetic dyes.
So in ancient times without synthetic dyes, could people get colorful cloths?
The answer is yes. As long as you have been to the museum, you should be able to see colorful ancient textiles. The Palace Museum, the Confucius Museum, and the China Silk Museum all have many colorful textile relics on display. In addition, if you go to the Xinjiang Autonomous Region Museum, you can also see the colorful silk and blankets of the Han and Tang Dynasties.
"The invention of synthetic dyes can replace natural dyes to make textiles easier to color, but this does not mean that the dyeing of ancient textiles could not achieve the effect of synthetic dyeing." Liu Jian said.
According to Yu Ying, deputy research librarian of the Shanghai Museum's Technology Research Department, the history of dyeing with bluegrass in China can be said at least from the Zhou Dynasty more than 2000 years ago. For example, "The Book of Songs" reads "Choose blue at the end of the dynasty, and it is not profitable," indicating that people used to collect blue grass for dyeing.
With the continuous development of dyeing technology, the color spectrum of fabrics dyed by ancient people has continued to expand. The fabric chromatogram of the Han Dynasty is scattered in various books. Judging from the records in Shuo Wen Jie Zi and other books, there were dozens of colors at that time. For example, the red ones include red, coriander, scarlet, etc., the yellow ones include turmeric, half-seen, steamed chestnut, etc., and the green ones include green, coriander, and so on.
Not only are there written records, but the fabrics unearthed from some tombs and sites have made people see the beauty of ancient costumes with their own eyes. According to Liu Jian, the printed gauze unearthed from the Mawangdui tomb in Changsha has bright robe surfaces, including vermilion, pink, black, silver gray, cold gray, and warm gray. Some people have performed chromatographic analysis on a group of Tang Dynasty silk fabrics unearthed in Turfan and found 24 colors.
"It can be said that during the Han and Tang Dynasties, the variety of dyes was the most abundant. After Song and Yuan Dynasties, the types of dyes gradually decreased, but because the dyers have mastered the overdyeing and mordant methods, the same dye can be obtained with less than 10 Hue colors of different purity. "Liu Jian said.
Plants were the main source of dyes of the ancients
Since the ancients could produce colorful textiles very early, where did the ancient dyes come from? In ancient times, the substances used for coloring textiles mainly came from mineral pigments and natural dyes. More than 90% of natural dyes are plant dyes, in addition to animal dyes and lichen dyes.
According to Liu Jian, plant dyes are mostly extracted from the pigments of plant roots, stems, leaves, flowers, and peels. According to color classification, red dyes include safflower, hematoxylin, madder, etc .; yellow dyes include locust rice, scutellaria baicalensis, scutellaria baicalensis, gardenia, etc .; black dyes include gallic, oak bowls, etc .; blue dyes are derived from plants containing indigo such as horse Blue, osmanthus, osmanthus, etc .; purple dyes are mainly grass and walnut skin.
There are fewer animal dyes, but they are more expensive. Among them, the most famous are snails and cochineals. Bone snails produced from the coast of the Mediterranean can extract the trace pigment precursors in their glands to dye the famous Tyr violet, which is one of the most precious dyes known in ancient times. Due to its complex dyeing process, it is also one of the most mysterious dyes. One. Cochineal insects are produced in Central and South America and can dye silk wool fabrics to obtain red with high saturation. Lichen dyes are used less often and are produced in countries along the Atlantic coast. They can be dyed in purple and rose red.
The dyeing methods of natural dyes include direct dyeing, mordant dyeing and reduction dyeing. Liu Jian introduced that the direct dyeing method is to extract the dye with water and directly put it into the fabric for dyeing. The mordant method is further divided into pre-mordant and post-mordant. The common mordants are alum and alum. Pre-mordant is to dissolve the mordant in water, then soak the fabric in the mordant solution, and then dye it in the dye solution. After mordant, the fabric is dyed first and then soaked in mordant. The reduction dyeing method is aimed at indigo dye, which reduces the water-insoluble indigo to a water-soluble indigo dyeing fabric by biological fermentation, and then oxidizes in air to make the fabric blue. The above mentioned Tier Violet is also a reducing dye, but the process is more complicated, and it needs to be sun-dried to get purple.
In addition, there are few natural green dyes in nature. Ancient dyers obtained green through overdyeing. The common method is to dye the fabric first with indigo dye to get blue, and then dye the yellow dye to get green. In addition, purple, sauce, orange and other colors can also be obtained by overdyeing.
According to Ying, there is an important difference between plant staining and chemical staining. An interesting phenomenon is that chemical dyeing often fails to stain the effect of plant dyeing. "In the beginning, I thought that chemical dyeing had reached the point of omnipotence. However, this is not the case. It is not easy to restore the color of ancient fabrics. As for the specific reason, it is not clear at this time. This is also a cutting-edge subject in the field of ancient fabric dyeing research. "
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What is the difference between pigments and dyes
The difference between "pigment" and "dye" lies in the way it dissolves and colors. Pigments are generally incompatible with solvents (such as water, oil, alcohol, etc.) and are only physically dispersed uniformly; dyes are directly soluble in solvents.
In the early days of human society, ore was mainly used to dye clothes. Most of the ore belonged to pigments. However, for the above reasons, mineral pigments have higher requirements for the quality of minerals and dyeing techniques in order to achieve better dyeing effects. In "Kao Gong Ji Zhong Shi", it was described that dyeing feathers with Dan, Dan is cinnabar. On the linen unearthed from the Tomb of Rujiazhuang, Baoji, there are traces of cinnabar. Because the color of cinnabar is red and pure, it has been used to paint precious clothes until the Western Han Dynasty.
Before the pigment is dyed, it must be ground, and the glue must be added to prepare a slurry, before it can be applied to the surface of the fabric with a tool. In addition to red cinnabar and vermiculite, other natural mineral pigments include sericite dyed white, yellow stone yellow, and green stone green.