Silk, Silkwarm-breeding, and the Silk Road

Silk is one of the best materials for clothing that has hardly any match in the world. Reputed to be the queen of fabrics it is light, lustrous, and durable. Also it has the advantages of being soft to the touch, resistant to heat, and breathing very well. All these features make it an ideal fiber for beautiful satins, charming brocade and attractive dresses. If one goes to a traditional opera in China. One will find people from well-to-dl families in silk dresses, which are believed to be commensurate with their social status.

China is the first producer of silk in the world: silk production was started in the country circa 4,500 years ago. And today, centers of silk production are stringed along rivers in south China, in Suzhou and Hangzhou, for instance, in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, in Fushan in south china. And in Nanchong in south west china. And many other areas as well , where silk-worms are bred.

Silkworm breeding is done by the farmers in the rural areas. it takes an average of 26-27days for a silk worm, which is no bigger than an ant ,to grow old enough to spin a cocoon. In the very hot summer days, the breeding season lasts merely 22or 23 days In other seasons, it might be 30 days or so. The farmers used to breed the worms twice a year, in spring and autumn. Now, however, the farmers do the silkworm breeding 3,4 or even 5 times a year provided the mulberry leaves, the only food for the worms, are available.

Silkworms are delicate creatures. They can be easily killed by rats, mosquitoes, and flies, or by the dust on the mulberry leaves. That is why the cat is a familiar scene in every silkworm village. that is also why farmers will lime wash the rearing houses before the breeding season sets in ,and will sometimes clean the mulberry leaves one by one before they feed them to the worms.

Silk worms are hungry creatures, too. They eat a lot. In fact ,they have to be fed every four hours, including at night, In Wuxi ,where sericulture is a major agribusiness female farmers are said to take as much care of silkworms as they do their own babies. Hence silkworms are given the intimate name "delicate babies, Now as they eat a lot ,they drop a lot ,the droppings of the silkworms make an excellent manure, which is far superior to many chemical fertilizers.

Silkworms are heavy sleepers by nature. They keep eating the leaves for a couple of days and then go to a long sleep. In a lifetime of 20 to 30 days and then go to a long sleep each of which lasts about 24 hours. when they wake up form a sleep, they plunge into eating the leaves with a better appetite than before. The last sleep is the longest sleep-about 36 hours or even more. when they wake up ,they are ready to spin cocoons To show their readiness to spin ,the women farmers will pick then up one by one from where they stay, which is usually a bamboo tray ,and put then onto a straw mountain. It is not a real mountain, just straw arranged like the spikes of a wheel .The farmers have to see to it that no two silkworms stay too close to each other, otherwise they are likely to make one cocoon instead of two and the silk threads will all get mixed up and serve no reeling purposes. The spinning process, extending 3 to 4 days, is a fascinating one which has given rise to a Chinese idiom. i.e., spinning a cocoon around oneself, which means making rules and regulations only to have one's own hands and feet bound, as is the case of a bureaucrat.

Now what happens is that the glutinous stuff that comes out of the mouth of a full-grown silkworm is a long, long thread which goes round and round the worm, glued together, At the beginning, one will see a thin film of silk thread through which the worm is visible, When the spinning process is over, the cocoon is made ,and the worm is wrapped inside, invisible.

When the cocoons are made, the farmers will pick them up and put them into bamboo baskets. Then they will transport then to the purchasing centers set up by the silk companies right in the rural areas. There, heating has to be done in good time to all the cocoons in order to kill ,or rather, stifle the chrysalises inside. If they fail to do this, the worms will transform themselves from chrysalises into moths and emerge out of the cocoons rendering them useless for reeling purposes with a hole in each of then. Needless to say, not all the cocoons are heated. A few are selected and preserved for the next generation.

From one coon one can get a silk thread which is between 800 and 1,4000 meters long.A silk thread in actual use, however, comes not from one cocoon, but from 6 to 10 cocoons.

A talk about silk or silk or silk production in China is never complete without a reference to the world-famous Silk Road. In 139 B.C. ZhangQian was dispatched by the Han Emperor to China's western neighbors to promote Trade and friendly relations. From then on, for about 1,000 years, the Silk Road was the artery for the two-way flow of goods between China and what we now call the Middle East, Europe and Africa. Silk production in China was so well developed and silk products from China were so popular abroad that China was exporting huge amounts of silk and silk products in exchange for what the Chinese needed but did not produce themselves, such as ivory, precious stones and spices of various sorts in addition to the introduction of such alien fruit and vegetable as tomato and water-melon. The Silk Road extended from the Wei River valley in central China westward past the Hexi Corridor and the present Xinjiang, across the mountain passes, which served as the boundary between China and its western neighbors, all the way to the Mediterranean Sea. Silk and Silk goods from China would leave Xian, the then capital of China, for such destinations as Damascus, Istanbul, Cario, and Rome.