Sold to a master weaver, a thirteen-year old apprentice called Fahng must divine the meaning of a “sampler” made of strings and bamboo to continue with her weaving sisterhood. Encoded in a forgotten language of knotted Patterns, the sampler is The Weaving Maiden's Mystery. Aided by clues from weaving lore and her master’s training in martial arts, dance, and fortune telling, Fahng discovers the guild’s wisdom and its closely guarded technique for making an exquisite gauze fabric. Her visionary talents lead her to become a weaving master in her own right.

The story is set in one of the numerous city-states of a legendary China centuries before Confucius. Silk was currency as well as fashionable wear, and with luck the women who wove it could work and live together independently. Fahng and her master are such women—artists and businesswomen finding ways to prosper in a system dominated by men. They can also channel magical powers from their mystery to protect their guild sisters through political upheavals in the dukedom.

Their understanding of the mystery is also the key to an actual puzzle. That is the question of why the sixty-four hexagrams in the Confucian Classic I Ching (Yijing, Book of Changes) appear in their cryptic order. When the Duke gives Fahng a post as a sorceress—the only government position that a woman could fill—the divination experts in the Spring Bureau where she works learn about the order of the Patterns from her. She shows them that both the Patterns and the hexagrams are remnants of the ancient knot language. Later scholars grafted the weavers’ mystery into their classic scripture.

Poems that became another Confucian Classic, the Book of Songs, were collected by Spring Bureau scribes at the time the novel takes place, and many are translated in the novel as weavers’ work songs and dances. These can be heard in the Audible Audiobook version of The Weaving Maiden's Mystery.