National Treasures & Important Cultural Properties
of National Institutes for Cultural Heritage, Japan

Tandai is a kind of carpet, and thought to be laid over mitoko (bed-like furniture), judging from their sizes. This tandai has a vivid-red plain silk lining in its original size, with traces of soft rush on part of it. This suggests that the woven mat of soft rush was used as the filling of the tandai, while the front-side cloth was parrot-pattern roukechi (textile dyed by wax resist) plain silk, and the backside was red plain silk. However, since there are joku (rug) that have floss or woolen fabric as the filling, these materials are also possibilities, taking this piece's use as a tandai into account.
Roukechi of the front side uses two patterns arranged in a zigzag manner: the one consists of octagons of an arabesque-like style, each of which contains two bird motifs facing each other, and the other uses the arabesque pattern symmetrically in a slightly oval shape, with butterflies on the upper part of them. Those two patterns are not evenly arranged; they are close to each other in some places, while relatively far from each other in some others. Because of this, it is thought that wax was applied to each piece of the patterns to prevent the dyes from spreading. The roukechi method for dyed fabrics in the Asuka and Nara periods, called joudai-gire (lit. ancient cloth), mostly uses moulds rather than brush-painting, different form the way it is often done today, although there are some pieces made in the Nara period which use both molds and brush painting.