The hard part of “Duobaolianping” (多宝联屏) was never the carving or the weaving — it was the seam, the place where a three-dimensional cloisonné wall vase has to sit on a flat Yunjin brocade surface without either side crushing the other. On August 13, 2026, the work’s global launch at the Beijing Arts and Crafts Museum presented the answer: a “seamless suspension mounting” technique that lets the enamel vases float against the brocade ground, closing what the makers call the first meeting of two royal crafts — Yunjin brocade with 1,600 years of history and cloisonné with 600.
August 13 doubled as a celebration: the reopening of the Hall of Mental Cultivation (养心殿) at the Palace Museum after renovation, the restoration of the Three Rarities Hall (三希堂) to its original layout, and the 20th anniversary of both crafts’ listing as national intangible cultural heritage items. Two China Arts and Crafts Masters — Jin Wen (金文), representative inheritor of the Nanjing Yunjin wooden-loom Zhuanghua hand-weaving technique, and Dai Jialin (戴嘉林), representative inheritor of the Beijing cloisonné technique — co-created the work, each bringing the specialty that carried his reputation.
The screen follows the rare wall-vase form used in the Three Rarities Hall, the Qianlong emperor’s private study in the Palace Museum, and consists of three linked panels named “Longzhang Fengyi” (龙章凤仪, Dragon and Phoenix), “Fulu Daji” (福禄大吉, Fortune and Blessings) and “Taiping Youxiang” (太平有象, Peace with the Elephant). Roughly 300 production steps and more than 1,000 hours of handwork went into the piece. The Yunjin ground is woven in imperial lucky red, the color reserved for the palace, while the cloisonné vases carry the auspicious motifs; the designers rebalanced the two materials repeatedly until neither overwhelmed the other — the phrase the masters repeat is “the brocade does not outshine the vessel, the vessel does not overpower the brocade.”
Jin Wen has worked brocade looms for more than five decades, holds more than 300 national patents on Yunjin designs, and is known in the craft world as “the first man of dragon-robe weaving” for reproducing dozens of national-treasure brocades from the Warring States through the Ming and Qing dynasties. “Yunjin was the fabric of the imperial robe,” he said. “Laying the lucky-red ground gives the whole work its scale; Master Dai’s vases carry the auspicious energy. We tuned the visual weight again and again until each found its place in the other.” Dai Jialin, nicknamed “the first colorist of cloisonné,” whose works include the celebrated “Great Wall” piece, said the pairing was long overdue: “Yunjin dressed the emperor; cloisonné furnished his court. Joining the two crafts is a fulfillment, and it opens a new road for passing imperial techniques into the present.”
Chen Lihua (陈丽华), former deputy director of the Palace Museum, called the work a rarity in the history of the decorative arts. “The Three Rarities Hall was the core literary studio of the Qing court, and its wall vases were the emperor’s private refined objects — very few survive in the Palace collection,” she said. “This piece uses the vase as a bridge between cloisonné and Yunjin, gathering on one object the robe the emperor wore, the vessel he displayed and the treasure he handled. Three royal lineages, one work — that has never happened before.” Ye Xiaoxi, executive vice chairman and secretary-general of the Beijing Arts and Crafts Society, added that combining the softness of woven silk with the rigidity of fired enamel fills a gap in the cross-regional history of court craft.
The launch ceremony ended with a “good fortune falling on brocade” ritual, and authorization plaques were presented to two art companies — Zhongyihui (Beijing) Art Co., Ltd. (中艺汇) and Boyaxuan Zhenpin (Beijing) Art Co., Ltd. (博雅轩臻品). The name “Jinshangjing” (锦上景) under which the work is branded carries a double blessing: “adding flowers to brocade, rising step by step,” and “the flame passing on, the nation’s fortune flourishing.” The event was organized by the Nanjing Jin Wen Yunjin Art Research Institute and the Dai Jialin Master Studio, with the Beijing Arts and Crafts Society as co-organizer.
Neither craft lends itself to shortcuts. Yunjin, ranked first among China’s four great brocades and famed as “an inch of brocade, an inch of gold,” entered the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009; its “flower-chasing color-shift” effect, in which different colors appear as the weave catches the light, cannot be reproduced by machine. Cloisonné — copper-bodied, wire-inlaid enamel — is a national intangible heritage item whose technique traces back to the Yuan Dynasty and reached its peak under the Ming Jingtai reign, which gave the craft its Chinese name. In “Duobaolianping,” the two long lines finally cross, and the joining seam is invisible.