The Jakarta Post
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search results
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search results‘Woven air’: Bangladesh revives elite forgotten fabric
Change text size
Gift Premium Articles
to Anyone
Share the best of The Jakarta Post with friends, family, or colleagues. As a subscriber, you can gift 3 to 5 articles each month that anyone can read—no subscription needed!
Heritage fabric: A weaver uses a handloom to make traditional muslin cloth at the Dhakai Muslin Project facility in Narayanganj on Jan. 8. (AFP/Munir Uz Zaman)
W
ith wooden spinning wheels and hand-drawn looms, Bangladesh is painstakingly resurrecting a fabric once worn by Marie Antoinette and Jane Austen but long thought forever lost to history.
Dhaka muslin was stitched from threads so fine that popular folklore in European parlors held that a change in the light or a sudden rain shower would render its wearer apparently naked.
The textile once brought magnificent riches to the lands where it was spun.
But to revive it, botanists had to hunt halfway across the world and back for a plant believed to be gone from the face of the earth.
"Nobody knew how it was made," said Ayub Ali, a senior government official helping shepherd the revival project.
"We lost the famous cotton plant, which provided the special fine yarn for Dhaka muslin," he told AFP.
The muslin trade at one time helped turn the Ganges delta and what is now Bangladesh into one of the most prosperous parts of the world, historians say.
More from The Weekender
Siapa Anda? Mengapa Anda?
What begins as a small grammatical curiosity becomes a larger question about language, culture and the way we understand ourselves in relation to others - and, ultimately, about what we risk losing in a world increasingly impatient with reflection, ambiguity and the humanities.
A passport to the kingdom of the sick
A breast cancer diagnosis, a journey to the kingdom of the sick and a determination to describe what lies there without metaphor, euphemism or the word “fight.”
The weight of time
Richard Mille’s newest ultralight timepiece pares down haute horlogerie to its mechanical necessities, proving that sophistication often comes from knowing what to leave out.
