Pamela, thanks for your comments and observations above. In response, firstly, yes, all the covers are hand-spun and woven cotton cloth.
Given a choice, the Rao Jia would have liked to have been identified as a separate minority group, but in the 1950s, the powers-that-be decided to lump them in with the Miao. Then, in 1998, the Rao Jia in Majiang county agreed with the authorities to a change of status making them a branch of the Yao. Another group of Rao Jia living in Duyun county have remained with the Miao (for the time being).
About the two shades of blue used on some Rao Jia covers, this requires only one waxing, not two. After the usual batik process has been completed and the wax scraped and boiled off, the whole piece is dyed again to turn the white pattern a pale blue colour.
You make a good point about the difficulties in matching a pattern across the joins of the 2 or 3 pieces of cloth. There are many examples of covers where the patterns fail to meet at the join, particularly with the Bailing Miao (White Collar Miao), though the Ge Jia and Rao Jia were generally more successful, as is evident above. In the Ge Jia cover no.4 below, the top two pieces of cloth were sewn together before waxing, so the pattern flows over the join, which is pretty well invisible, but, because the dying vat would not have been big enough for a complete cover of 3 widths of cloth, the third piece was waxed separately and attached after dying leaving an obvious break in the pattern along the seam. Then there was also the problem of matching the design and style across the 2/3 pieces of material, the process perhaps being interrupted by a change in the weather, a crop that needed harvesting or even being completed by a different hand (see examples below).
Yes, the Bailing Miao did/do make and use batik coffin covers. These would always use the most traditional designs, such the one you show above, and would not include representations from nature such as birds, animals, plants etc. And yes, coffin covers were sometimes used as quilt covers, particularly by the old, the sick and the dying, who would use them to summon up the ancestors spirits/souls to help them recover, or more likely in readiness for their deaths and the task of helping guide their souls on the journey from this world to the next. If you will bear with me, I’ll get a collection of Bailing Miao covers together sometime in the future.
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File comment: Ge Jia quilt cover no.4

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File comment: Rao Jia quilt cover (detail of miss-matched pattern across join)

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File comment: Rao Jia quilt cover (detail of miss-matched style across join)

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