English: Kesi roundel with five-clawed dragon design, China, late 17th century. Silk, metallic thread and peacock feather slit-tapestry weave, 0.30 x 0.31 m (11¾” x 12½”). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Fletcher Fund, 36.65.32

Native to the Indian subcontinent, the peacock (Pavo cristatus) has long been prized in South Asia and further afield for its brilliant blue-green colouring and showy ocelli tail feathers—around 200 of which make up a mature bird’s train. These are moulted and regrown annually. Occasionally, individual peacock feather barbules were wrapped around thread and woven into 16th- and 17th-century Ottoman and Chinese textiles.

Such iridescent thread is used to great effect in this Qing-dynasty (164 4–1911) kesi slit-tapestry where it is perfectly placed, among silk and metal threads, to highlight the scales of a fiercely animated fiveclawed imperial dragon, claws flexed, eyes bulging, teeth bared.

Using the interlocking tapestry technique, in a different material and on a larger scale, is a late 19th-early 20th-century dhurrie from north India. Such utilitarian cotton flatweaves were traditionally used by all levels of Indian society as bed covers, prayer mats and floorcovers for rooms, festivals or palaces from at least the 17th century.