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Updated: May 13, 2025
They also brought with them the gorgeous silks of China, satin damasks, some white, and others grass-green and bright red; pink taffetas, with the profusion of satins and gauze of Tonquin, both plain and decorated with flowers; soft pekins, downy as cloth; and white and yellow nankeens, and the calicoes of Madagascar.
The sofas and chairs had a general square appearance, but the framework was much curved and carved and gilded. They were upholstered in silks, brocades, velvets, damasks in flowered designs, edged with braid. Gobelin, Aubusson and Beauvais tapestry, with Watteau designs, were also used.
Occasionally the experienced shopper can pick up at a sale of odd-length or soiled damasks something which is really a good offering, particularly during the annual linen sale which falls in January. But as a rule beware of bargains!
She must have her taffaties for the summer, her flowered silks for the spring and autumn, her sattins and damasks for winter.
As to the quality of damask, it depends not so much upon weight for the finest cloths are by no means the heaviest as upon the size of the threads and the closeness and firmness with which they are woven. Avoid the loosely woven fabric; it will neither wear nor look so well as the one in which the threads are more compact. In the better damasks the threads are smoother and finer in finish.
My partner and the old pilot had gone express back to the port where we had first put in, to dispose of some goods which he had left there; and I, with a Chinese merchant, whom I had some knowledge of at Nanquin, and who came to Pekin on his own affairs, went to Nanquin, where I bought ninety pieces of fine damasks, with about two hundred pieces of other very fine silks, of several sorts, some mixed with gold, and had all these brought to Pekin against my partner's return: besides this, we bought a very large quantity of raw silk, and some other goods; our cargo amounting, in these goods only, to about three thousand five hundred pounds sterling, which, together with tea, and some fine calicoes, and three camel-loads of nutmegs and cloves, loaded in all eighteen camels for our share, besides those we rode upon; which, with two or three spare horses, and two horses loaded with provisions, made us, in short, twenty-six camels and horses in our retinue.
Mrs Perch is in the kitchen taking tea; and has made the tour of the establishment, and priced the silks and damasks by the yard, and exhausted every interjection in the dictionary and out of it expressive of admiration and wonder.
The Generall promised their liues and good vsage. They declared what goods they had within boord, to wit, an hundreth and two and twenty thousand pezos of gold: and the rest of the riches that the ship was laden with, was in Silkes, Sattens, Damasks, with Muske and diuers other marchandize, and great store of all manner of victualls, with the choice of many conserues of all sorts for to eate, and of sundry sorts of very good wines.
"Now, as for this pretty doll, my little Alice," said Grandfather, "I wish you could have seen what splendid dresses the ladies wore in those times. They had silks, and satins, and damasks, and brocades, and high head-dresses, and all sorts of fine things. And they used to wear hooped petticoats of such enormous size that it was quite a journey to walk round them."
Probably the true secret of the never-failing appreciation of tapestries from the very beginning of their history until this day is this fact of their suggestiveness; since we find that damasks of silk or velvet or other costly weavings, although far surpassing tapestries in texture and concentration of colour, yet lacking their suggestiveness to the mind, can never rival them in the estimation of the world.
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