Early Chinese Silk Production

China is justly famous for its silk production which probably began more than 6,000 years ago. Excavations of Neolithic sites have revealed clay artifacts with impressions made apparently by silk cloth, as well as stone ornaments carved in the shape of silkworms. The earliest find of silk itself, dated to around 2800 B.C., is from Zhejiang province, where a fragment of cloth was preserved in damp conditions inside a bamboo box. Zhejiang province, in southeast China, has always been an important silk-producing area and was probably also the center of one of the major prehistoric cultures.

Later writers attributed a well-organized system of production to the Western Zhou dynasty(1050-771 B.C.). A text compiled or revised in the Han period(206 B.C.-A.D. 220)describes a silk supervisor, a hemp supervisor, dyers, and weavers working in the women’s section of the palace. Although one silkworm, making its cocoon, spins a pair of filaments that may be up to one kilometer in length, because of the fineness of these filaments, thousands of silkworms are required to produce enough silk to weave a length of cloth. From an early date in China, it was found best to carry out the manufacture of silk cloth on a large scale, with division of labor according to the various tasks: picking the mulberry leaves to feed the silkworms, reeling the filaments from the cocoons, weaving, etc. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this highly organized and subdivided industry fascinated Westerners, who collected sets of illustrations of the different stages. Silk production has traditionally been associated with women in China, and in imperial days the empress would perform an annual mulberry-leaf-picking ceremony outside the Hall of Sericulture in Beijing.

By the Han dynasty the silk industry was already highly specialized, producing in addition to plain cloth, self-patterned monochrome cloth figured gauzes, and thicker, multicolored cloth. The last was highly valued, costing up to fifteen times as much as plain silk. Chain stitch embroidery also became widespread at this time and was used to decorate clothes, wall hangings, pillows, and horse trappings. Elaborate examples have been found in Han dynasty tombs in Hubei and Hunan provinces, where waterlogged land has preserved much organic material.

Although produced in large quantities, silk remained an expensive luxury. Both woven silk and raw silk were used as tribute to the emperor and as offerings to foreign tribes, such as the Xiongnu on the northwestern borders of China. From here Chinese silk must have been traded along the Silk Route through Central Asia and the Middle East as far as Europe. Most early examples of silk cloth in the West appear to have been woven locally, but from cultivated silk fiber of the Bombyx mori worm. The fact that China was the origin of this fiber was acknowledged by the ancient Greeks and Romans, who referred to silk as serica, literally, “Chinese. “By the end of the Han period, silk cultivation and knowledge of silk processing must have begun to spread westward, and by the fifth or sixth century had reached the Mediterranean area. But Western silk production throughout the Middle Ages(fifth to fourteenth centuries A.d.)was never sufficient to satisfy demand from Europe and Mediterranean areas, and imported Chinese silk remained very important.

Trade along the Silk Route was at its most vigorous during China’s Tang dynasty (A.D. 618-906), and travelers record the bazaars of the Middle East as being full of Chinese patterned cloth and embroideries. Simultaneously, we are told that the Tang capital of Chang’an was populated by large numbers of Iranian craftsmen. A silk weave now known as weft-faced compound twill appears among Chinese textiles for a few centuries from about A.D. 700. This may well have been a technique introduced by foreign weavers, as it seems to have developed originally in Iran. In the West it was particularly associated with repeating designs of roundels(circles) enclosing paired or single animals, with flower heads or rosettes between the roundels. The paired animals, rosettes, and the ring of pearl-like dots that often made up the roundel frame all passed into Chinese design.

Indeed, trade in textiles or other items may have carried the motif of the pearl roundel to China before any transfer of technology, since it first appears in China as early as the fifth century a d. on stone carvings at Buddhist cave temples.?

1.China is?justly?famous for its silk production which probably began more than 6,000 years ago. Excavations of Neolithic sites have revealed clay artifacts with impressions made apparently by silk cloth, as well as stone ornaments carved in the shape of silkworms. The earliest find of silk itself, dated to around 2800 B.C., is from Zhejiang province, where a fragment of cloth was preserved in damp conditions inside a bamboo box. Zhejiang province, in southeast China, has always been an important silk-producing area and was probably also the center of one of the major prehistoric cultures.?