Attested From the Tang and Song, and Still Sewn Today

Liturgical use of an elaborate embroidered vestment of this kind is attested in Daoist ritual manuals from the Tang and Song dynasties, and the essential form has continued through the Zhengyi and Quanzhen traditions into the present, principally among the ritual masters of the Zhengyi lineage who conduct the jiao and related community rites for lay clients. Making a jiangyi is skilled and costly work, since the embroidery must render specific cosmological figures correctly rather than as generic decoration, and a priest's robe is treated as a serious ritual instrument in its own right, stored and handled with the same care given to the priest's other liturgical implements.

The Taoist Canon, the historical companion to the Daozang compiled by Schipper and Verellen, documents the ritual manuals that specify vestment and procedure together, underscoring that in Daoist liturgical practice what a priest wears is not incidental to the rite but part of its correct performance, on the same footing as the texts recited and the gestures made. Surviving examples and photographs held in museum and temple collections, together with the ritual manuals collected in the Daozang, are the main evidence scholars use to trace how the garment's specific embroidery patterns have and have not changed across the centuries.