Kesi is a special type of weaving peculiar to China. It is different from embroidery but rather similar to the making of tapestry.
It is done on a wooden handloom with raw silk as the warp and boiled-off silk as weft. The weft threads are usually of dozens of colors and are separately reeled in many small shuttles. First the artisan makes on the warp a sketchy drawing of the pattern to be woven and then guides a shuttle with the weft thread of a special color across the warp threads – almost never through the entire width but only where that particular color is needed. So, this is a form of weaving patch by patch. One could also say it represents an integration of the silk-weaving and painting. It is necessary to make frequent changes of the shuttles (i.d. threads of different colors), and a small piece of work requires thousands of changes to finish.
The art has its beginnings in the Han and Wei dynasties but blossomed during the Song (960-1279), producing a great master in Zhu Kerou. The art of kesi was introduced to japan during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). The belt of the Japanese kimono, which is woven in this way, is still called by the Japanese “Chinese Ming decorative belt”.