Silk Factory

After visiting Zhouzhuang, I have also visited the silk manufacturing facilities. According to legend it was empress Xi Ling who in 2640 BC, encouraged silkworm breeding on a large scale. Trading vast quantities of material around the world, China profited massively from the industry. It remained a Chinese monopoly for the next 3,000 years or so until refugees smuggled the secret to Korea and Japan. Another story tells that a Chinese princess who married the Prince of Khotan secretly brought silkworms with her as a gift for her husband. The western world, which knew China as a Seres or Land of Silk, learnt the secret of silk production via two monks, who hid silkworms in their bamboo staffs.

Silk was originally reserved for use by the imperial household. Silk was traded extensively as an important source of income and indeed was often used as a form of payment of taxes or payment of salaries.

Thousand of years of intensive breeding have rendered the silk moth. Bombyx mori, a blind, flightless, egg-laying machine whose larvae hold the secret of silk. The genius of the Chinese lay in the discovery of the potential of its ancestor, a wild, mulberry eating moth unique to China. The eggs are first kept at 65ºF (18ºC) rising to 77ºF (25ºC) at which point they batch. Silkworms (actually caterpillars) are now kept at a constant temperature and fed mulberry leaves at 30 minute intervals day and night, until fattened they are ready to enter the cocoon stage. When they are ready to pupate, with a figure-of-eight motion, they spin their sticky secretion into cocoons. The cocoons are steamed to kill the pupae and soaked to soften the sticky gum and allow the silk strands to be separated. Several strands are woven to make one silk thread.

(Source: DK - China).