Lao-Tai ceremonial cloth is woven dark and read like a text. The ground is many-dipped indigo silk, nearly black; the pattern lives only at the ends, where discontinuous supplementary weft — chok — is hand-picked in turquoise, turmeric gold and lac red. The dominant figure is the naga, the crested serpent of river and rain, coiled and mirrored inside diamond lattices.

This system keeps that discipline. The field stays dark and quiet. Colour arrives as narrow horizontal bands, never as a wash. Lac red is reserved for the crest — a single signature line, never a surface. Every hue traces back to a plant, an insect or an ash lye, and reads that way.