Entering the Beijing Dongyun Silk Culture and Art Museum in the capital’s Tongzhou District, one is greeted by a hall full of looms from various periods of Chinese history and across the country. The collector of these looms is museum curator Ni Dongkan.
Textile odyssey
Ni was born into a family deeply rooted in the silk industry in Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province, and his grandparents were skilled in mulberry cultivation and silkworm farming. “In my childhood, my hometown was surrounded by mulberry trees, and I used to walk through a forest of them on my way to school every day,” he told Beijing Review.
In 1991, after graduating
