It is a small gallery on a side street in Carmel, California. There are more prestigious and glamorous sites in town, such as the Hogs Breath Inn Restaurant and Bar, owned by local resident Clint Eastwood, and it may be easily passed amid the maze of galleries of various arts.

My wife and I would never have seen it except for a sequence of failures, and we never would have met the lady who ran it had we been there one minute earlier, or if my wife had not loved embroidery and needlepoint.

Whatever the events, had we not encountered problems finding what we HAD been looking for, or had we not had trouble navigating the narrow streets of Carmel, and finally decided to park and search on foot, we might never have been introduced to Lu Luo, owner of Lu Lu Silk Art Gallery of Chinese silk embroidery. That would have been a shame, for then a certain macho dude, i.e. yours truly, would never have stood gazing in awe at what might be the last examples of a dying art.

We were actually looking for a scent shop when my wife, a lifelong devotee of various forms of needlepoint, glanced in a window. One more gallery in a sea of galleries, we commented on the beauty of the "paintings" and almost walked on. As we were about to leave, however, she realized that we were seeing for the first time in our lives exquisite examples of an art she had only read about and I had never even known existed...Chinese silk embroidery. She called me back and I took another look at one of the "paintings" in the window. As I looked more closely, I realized that what had appeared to be tiny brushstrokes were actually threads, some of which seemed much smaller than a human hair. Using tiny silken threads, some of which actually are finer than a baby's hair, the hands that had held the needle had created a masterpiece equal to those of any brush wielding artist. In fact, as we gazed through the window into the closed shop, we saw that many of the works were almost of photographic quality!

Sadly, the shop was closed and we began to walk away, but as we left, we heard someone calling out for us to please wait. We turned and saw a diminutive oriental lady, who, as it happened, owned the gallery.

As one interested in art and needlework, my wife was in awe of all she saw. As a writer, I was in awe not only of the artwork, but of the story Lu Luo had to tell.

What we saw before us in her gallery were perhaps some of the last examples of an art begun a mere 2,800 years or more before. It was an art form developed for the pleasure and adornment of Chinese royalty, but modern times were drawing a line it could not cross.

Developed in Suzhou, China, this form of silk embroidery begins with a finely woven silk cloth as the "canvas", and the finest silken threads as the "paint". They are the finest threads because the artist must split each silk thread into as many as 64 smaller threads as one of the first steps in preparation for the creation of the work. This is the first stumbling block, as the artist must begin learning her craft when still a child, when eyes and hands are still keen and nimble enough to do this well. Attempts to teach even this apparently simple task to older women have failed.

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