Tie dye is a resist dye process of binding and dyeing a piece of fabric to make pattern. There are basically three major tie methods to bind the fabric before the dye process: with only threads, with threads and needles and without threads.

The earliest tie dyed textiles are wools excavated from the Zagunluk, Cherchen, in southern Xinjiang. One of them was tied and dyed in circles within a check pattern, and the other was tied and dyed in the stripe pattern. Since the tomb is dated from the 10th century BCE, this excavation is probably the earliest evidence of the tie dyed textiles in the world. It shows that the history of tie dye on the Silk Road could be traced back to the early bronze age and first tie dyed textile is wool.

More tie dyed silk fabrics were found on the Silk Road during the 3rd to 4th centuries. Excavations in Astana in Xinjiang and Dunhuang in Gansu brought a big number of tied dyed silks from the 4th to the 9th centuries, but the earliest dated tie dyed silk was from a tomb in Huahai in Gausu, 376AD. The tie dyed silks were more collected in Shosoin, Nara, Japan, which tells that this technique was introduced to the far east of the world during the 8th century.

There are more illustrations of tie dye shown by the arts in various styles on the Silk Road from the 5th to the 8th centuries, for instance, decorative textiles in tie dye pattern on the murals in Kizil grottoes, tie dyed costume on the painted wooden figures found in Turfan, a tie dyed cover woven on the jin silk with Helios and his carriage, and even on those three color ceramics found near Xi’an, the capital of China during the Tang dynasty. All these evidences show how popular the tie dyed textiles were and how close the relationship between all these places was.

The power of the tie dye was getting stronger during this period too. Wax resist dye with dot pattern is considered as the imitation of tie dye during the 5th to 6th centuries. Jin silk started to copy tie dye pattern as a ground for some other animal motives during the 6th century. After the clamp resist dye was invented in the High Tang, 8th century, tie dye pattern was also made with clamps resist method, to make the patterning process easier than the real tie dye.