Shoulder cloth (limar)

Because of its location along the Straits of Melaka, the city of Palembang in southeast Sumatra became an important trading port between China and India. As early as the 1100s, Chinese silk was imported to Sumatra. Textiles became one of the most important items of trade and were used as prestige markers and exchanged as ritual gifts. Silk textiles produced abroad were especially valued by the courts of the region. By the mid-1600s India, rather than China, was the major exporter of fabric to Indonesia, with more than a million pieces traded between 1652 and 1653 alone.
In the 1680s the Dutch established a monopoly on trade of textiles from India and began demanding high prices for them; in response, manufacture of textiles in Palembang burgeoned. Local weaving traditions established in that era have continued to the present day.
The production of high-quality textiles was a pastime of court women, who could afford to buy the imported silk and gold thread used in the most spectacular pieces. Historical records indicate that noblewomen in the Palembang courts were frequently of Chinese descent, and some scholars have described the prominent use of gold and red, as well as the floral patterning seen on textiles of this sort, as indications of Chinese influence.
The women were esteemed as much for their ability to dye the threads as for their skill in weaving. The pattern on the body of this textile was created using a technique called ikat, in which the threads are tie-dyed with the pattern before the textile is woven. In the case of this cloth the weft, or fibers running across the width of the fabric, were tie-dyed before being woven through the warp, the fibers attached lengthwise to the loom. Each of the colors seen on this cloth indicates a separate dipping of the threads of the cloth in dye. The ends of the cloth are decorated with a supplementary weft technique in which an additional set of gold threads are woven on top of the background.
Textiles of this kind often show the stylized wings of a garuda (a mythical bird from Indian mythology), but in this case what seems to be depicted is the whole body of a bird in flight.