Pashmina — cashmere from the undercoat of the Changthangi goat — has been woven in Kashmir for at least 500 years. The finest pieces, made from hand-spun yarn on handlooms, take weeks to complete and were once reserved for Mughal emperors and traded across Central Asia as luxury goods. The craft is now under pressure from machine-made imitations, but working handloom operations still exist in the old city.
Several workshops in the lanes around Khanqah-e-Moula and the old bazaar area will allow visitors to watch the weaving process — the handlooms, the yarn preparation, the kani weaving technique where different coloured threads are introduced to create the distinctive patterns. The transition from watching to the sales room is rapid, but the demonstration itself is genuine. Understanding the difference between handloom and power-loom, between hand-spun and mill-spun, between cashmere and cashmere blends is genuinely useful knowledge for anyone buying pashmina. The government emporium on Residency Road provides the quality benchmark; workshops provide context for how the better pieces are made.