BLY Travel Far. Live Well.
How the Secret of Silk Was Smuggled Out of China
By: Corianne Brosnahan, October 07, 2013
They say the secret of silk goes back to the Yellow Empress of China, who was enjoying her afternoon tea beneath a mulberry tree when a silkworm cocoon plopped into her cup. As she tried to fish it out, the cocoon began to unravel, and the shimmer of that long, silken thread would inspire the Empress to invent sericulture, or the art of raising silkworms. (Moral of the story: as Newton would no doubt agree, there is something to be said for hanging out under a tree and waiting for a falling object to give you a bright idea).
This was way back in 2700 BCE, and China would fiercely guard the secret of silk for many thousands of years, even issuing an imperial decree condemning to death anyone who tried to spirit silkworms or their eggs out of the Empire. Meanwhile, foreign demand for the lustrous stuff was growing. When, in the 2nd century BCE, the Han Emperor sent an imperial envoy named Zhang Qian to sniff out potential military allies against the hostile Xiongu tribes that hemmed in China to the West, Qian returned home to report that while there was not much enthusiasm for fighting the Xiongnu (who apparently were just not people you really wanted to mess with), the lands of Central Asia would make excellent trading partners, noting in particular their fascination with the silk togs he’d been sporting when he made his appearance there. This intelligence would ultimately lead to the development of the Central Asian link of the Silk Road, which connected China to the Mediterranean Sea.
And speaking of the West, the Roman appetite for silk was so voracious that the Senate tried to prohibit it, both on moral and economic grounds. Here’s Seneca the Younger, getting his toga in a twist:
I can see clothes of silk, if materials that do not hide the body, nor even one's decency, can be called clothes… Wretched flocks of maids labour so that the adulteress may be visible through her thin dress, so that her husband has no more acquaintance than any outsider or foreigner with his wife's body.
So who eventually smuggled the secret out of China? There are a lot of theories, including
one about a Chinese Princess, who, upon leaving to marry the Prince of Khotan, decided
that she could not live without her favorite fabric and took some silkworms along with her,
and another about Japanese spies who stole eggs, along with four girls practiced in the art
of sericulture. Then there’s the story about the Nestorian monks sent to Central Asia by
Byzantine emperor Justinian, who hid their booty in bamboo staffs.
Today, China remains the world’s leading silk producer, with India coming in at 2nd place, and Uzbekistan at 6th. Visit any Uzbek silk factory, however, and they’ll tell you that their silk is of much finer quality than its Chinese counterpart. The reason? According to our guide at Rasuljon Mirzaahmedov’s ikat factory in Margilan, where we purchased some extremely fine silk scarves, Chinese producers chop up the cocoons before unraveling them, while the Uzbeks method leaves the cocoon intact. When we head to China, we’ll let you know what Chinese silk-makers have to say about that.
