China is renowned for its "Silk Road," which brought Chinese silk and embroidery to Central Asia, Western Asia, Europe, and Africa. The silk trade between China, India, Greece, and Rome acted as a link between these four ancient civilizations and promoted trade between them. China has always been famous for its silk and its exquisite handmade silk embroidery. People in China craved to enliven their surroundings, clothing, toiletries and linens by adding hand work of some kind over the woven fabrics.

Different civilizations devised their own peculiar styles according to their tastes. The type of threads, colors, motifs, and presentation of each area and style are unique. The motifs were related to nature, religion, and day-to-day life of people. In addition, each region had a few stitches, which were unique to their style. There are several different levels of Chinese embroidered silk visual art, which are:

• Antique (all handmade obviously)
• High quality, classical handmade
• Ordinary quality handmade
• Machine made

In addition, the four most famous styles of embroidery in China are Suzhou embroidery (Su embroidery for short), Hunan embroidery (Xiang embroidery for short), Sichuan embroidery (Shu embroidery for short), and Guangdong embroidery (Yue embroidery for short).

The embroidered silk is truly a representative of the Chinese Art. Handmade embroidery is done with pure silk thread and has an exquisite, glossy feel to it. Since the actual silk thread will break when used in a sewing machine, the thread that is used in a machine is thicker and has an artificial fiber feel to it because it is a mix of fabrics and not pure silk. The Chinese handmade silk embroidery is highly sought after, in Germany, the rest of Europe, the USA, Japan, and Africa and in other countries, particularly among the affluent art aficionados all across the world. Today, machine embroidery is fast catching up with Handmade Embroidery, because it is more economical but the uniqueness, variety, intricacy, art and fineness of hand embroidery is unmatched and unchallenged as yet.

The double-sided embroidery is another technique in which, stitching is done on both sides of a single transparent silk fabric. The design shows on the front and the reverse side. Normally mounted on a wooden frame as a screen, one really cannot tell which side is the front or the back. Most of the double-sided embroideries seen in shops have the same images on both sides. However, there are a few double-sided embroideries, which have two different images on both sides.

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