Hol

Hol (ហល) is the Khmer weft ikat silk, whose patterns are tied and dyed into the threads before the cloth is woven. A wrapped skirt of hol is called sampot hol, and a pictorial hol hung in the pagoda is called hol pidan.

Illustration inspired by a silk-weaving village near Phnom Penh.

Tradition details
Khmer name	សំពត់ហល
Also known as	Sampot hol; Hol Lboeuk; chong kiet
Practice type	Craft practice
Subjects	Crafts & Material Culture

Names

Hol is the Khmer word for the ikat technique, known in Khmer as chong kiet. The word ikat comes from the Indonesian for "to tie." The cloth is also called hol lboeuk. One proposed origin for the name sampot hol is the Sanskrit sam-patola, "like a patola," after the patola silks of India; this remains a suggestion.

Technique

Hol is made with the ikat method. Weavers bind bundles of silk thread at chosen places with a material that resists dye, then pass the threads through a series of dye baths. The bound places keep their color, and when the ties are removed the pattern appears in the thread. Tying and dyeing are repeated with a new color each time until the whole design is fixed. The ties were once made of banana fiber; plastic strips are more common today.

The weft threads are stretched on a frame for tying. After dyeing, they are wound onto bobbins and taken to the loom. The hardest work comes before weaving, in the binding and dyeing, and the weaver must work out exactly where each tie falls. A mistake of a few millimeters can ruin weeks of work. At the loom the weaver lines up the pattern with every pass of the shuttle, and the colored sections meet in patterns with soft, slightly blurred edges. A single sampot hol can take weeks or months to make.

Hol has an uneven twill ground weave, a weave of three threads in which one thread shows on one side of the cloth and two on the other. One side is brighter than the other, while the pattern keeps the same shade on both. Traditional colors came from natural dyes such as indigo, turmeric, jackfruit bark, lacquer resin for red and mango leaves for green. A Cambodian loom usually stands between the posts under a raised house, where the woman of the household weaves in her free time.

Patterns and colors

Hol patterns are made of motifs called kbach. They draw on the natural world, on spiritual and mythic figures and on the geometry of the old court, and they once marked status, called on divine protection and joined the wearer to the powers of the cosmos. Designs are floral, geometric or animal, and more than 200 patterns are known, each using three to five colors. Hol krengao is a complex pattern of interlocking diamonds. Villages and regions have their own designs.

The traditional palette includes yellow, indigo, maroon and red, with blue highlights. Red dyed over with indigo gives purple, and yellow dyed over with indigo gives green. Culturekhmer lists yellow, red, brown, blue and green.

Variations

Sampot hol is a wrapped lower garment, usually worn by women, and can be worn in the chong kben or the samloy style. Culturekhmer names four kinds: sampot hol, sampot hol por, sampot hol kben and sampot hol ktong. Khmer communities native to eastern present-day Thailand also weave with the uneven twill, a practice older than the modern borders.

Hol is also woven from Cambodian golden silk, and blended and machine-made versions are sold. Handwoven hol shows slightly uneven, blurred edges where machine-made cloth has clean, regular lines. Hol differs from chorabap, a brocade: in hol the pattern comes from the dyed thread, while in chorabap it stands out from added gold or silver threads. Designers now use hol patterns in modern clothing, bags and decorative pieces.

Meaning and significance

Hol and phamung silk have long been worn for official occasions and ceremonies. Hol is worn at weddings and for national events, and it has long been used across social groups, while chorabap was kept for royalty and nobles. Petit Futé ranks hol as the most refined of the six kinds of Cambodian silk. Cambodian silks are handed down as heirlooms and used at weddings and funerals and to decorate temples.

Hol pidan

Hol pidan is a ceremonial hanging, not a garment. It is woven for religious use and was traditionally hung in village pagodas during ceremonies. Khmer people do not wear it, because they regard it as meant for the divine. Its images show temples, scenes from the life of the Buddha, Jataka stories, apsaras and nagas. Pidan is the most complex and refined form of ikat. A single piece takes months to weave, and some older pieces never repeat a design along their whole length. Most pidan weavers are women, who learn the story by heart in order to weave it. Ikat patterns of this kind have long been tied to wealth and prestige.

Today young people buy hol pidan to hang in homes, offices and places for visitors. La Sokheng of the National Museum of Cambodia said that it is now seldom bought for religious use because of its high price, and that the word pidan appears in Sanskrit inscriptions from at least the twelfth century. The Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts sets hol pidan apart from other hol by its Buddhist stories and its own styles of decoration.

History

Silk weaving is an old part of Cambodian life, and Takéo Province has been known for it since the Funan era. The ikat technique is believed to have come to Southeast Asia from India, and Khmer weavers made it their own with Khmer motifs and palettes. Culturekhmer traces the development of sampot hol to the influence of Indian patola cloth over many centuries. Carvings on Angkorian temples show a rich vocabulary of textile patterns, among them flowers, geometric designs, stripes and dots.

A late thirteenth-century account records that Cambodia imported raw silk thread mainly from Siam, with some from China, and that skilled local weavers dyed it and wove it into their own patterns. The same account records dark silk sampot with fine patterns worn by men and women at the Khmer court. In the Angkorian era, sampot hol became a valued trade good in the sea trade of Southeast Asia and was among Cambodia's finished textile exports.

Powerful Siamese officials often ordered hol garments from Khmer weavers in Cambodia. In the nineteenth century sampot hol reached the Thai court as a ceremonial skirt cloth under the names sompak poom or pha poom. In 1856, Siam's King Mongkut and Second King Phra Pin Klao presented President Franklin Pierce with three pairs of Khmer silk sampot chong kben of the hol kind.

Under the Khmer Rouge, the silk and hol traditions came close to being lost. Looms were burned, tools were seized and the passing of knowledge was cut off. Chhay Visoth, director of the museums department, said the National Museum of Cambodia once held 415 textiles, of which more than 300 were missing after the regime fell on January 7, 1979. Gifts from Cambodian and foreign donors brought the museum's hol pidan collection to 72 pieces from 2008, and in August 2023 a Japanese project team of the ministry gave 41 more. Revival work in the 1990s helped keep the techniques alive, and the Institute for Khmer Traditional Textiles helped recover natural dyes that had been forgotten after the genocide.

Community

For centuries, silk weaving in Cambodia has been almost entirely women's work, passed from mother to daughter. Women carry every stage of hol, from caring for the silkworms to working the loom. Hol was traditionally woven by women in rural villages, and villages in Takéo and Kampong Cham provinces are known for it. Koh Dach, a river island 15 kilometers (9 miles) north of Phnom Penh, is a center of silk weaving where families raise silkworms, dye thread with natural dyes and weave on large wooden looms. Silk workshops and training programs in Cambodia, among them Artisans Angkor, continue to teach and produce hol.

References