Beautiful, smooth, soft, delicate, strong, and precious: silk. This amazing fabric has captivated human imagination for over 2000 years. Throughout history, it has clothed the rich and powerful. But more than this, it has been a form of currency, a tool of diplomacy, a badge of rank, and a fabric of the divine. And silk, above all other treasures, has been the thread connecting East and West. It is an artifact that has truly shaped history. The discovery of silk is said to have taken place in China almost two and a half thousand years ago by the wife of the "yellow emperor", Huang Di. Legend has it that the lady H'si Ling made her discovery when a silk moth cocoon fell from a mulberry tree into her hot tea where it began to unravel. The empress has been revered ever since as "the lady of silk" who taught the Chinese to cultivate mulberry trees and raise silk worms. Her discovery of the secret of silk would profoundly influence the history of China and the world.
View Silk - The Thread Connecting East and West. Video hosted on Google. Silk is a fiber produced as a cocoon covering by the silkworm, and valuable for its use in fine fabrics and textiles. The silkworm, in fact, is not a worm but a caterpillar. Although cocoon coverings of fiber are made by a large number of insects, only those of the mulberry silk moth, Bombyx mori, and a few other moths closely akin to it, are used by the silk industry. The silk of other insects, notably the spider, is used for certain manufacturing purposes, particularly for the cross hairs of telescopes and other optical instruments.
Silk is one of the oldest known textile fibers and, according to Chinese tradition, was used as long ago as the 27th century bc. The silkworm moth was originally a native of China, and for about 30 centuries the gathering and weaving of silk was a secret process, known only to the Chinese. Tradition credits Hsi-ling-shi, the 14-year-old bride of the Emperor Huang Ti, with the discovery of the potential of the cocoon and the invention of the first silk reel. China successfully guarded the secret until ad300, when Japan, and later India, penetrated the secrecy.
References in the Old Testament indicate that silk was known in biblical times in western Asia, from which it was presumably transplanted to the Greek Islands of the Aegean Sea. The Chinese are believed to have built up a lucrative trade with the West from the days of the Han dynasty in the 2nd century bc. The ancient Persian courts used Chinese silks, unraveled and rewoven into Persian designs. When Darius III, king of Persia, surrendered to Alexander the Great, he was clothed in such silken splendor that Alexander was completely overshadowed and demanded as spoils the equivalent of $7 million in silk. Caravans carried silk on camelback from the heart of Asia to Damascus, Syria, the marketplace at which East and West met. Here silk was traded for Western luxuries, some of which survive in China today. Silk became a valuable commodity in both Greece and Rome. The Roman statesman and general Gaius Julius Caesar restricted silk to his exclusive use and to use for the purple Roman stripes on the togas of officials he favored. Despite this, however, the use of silk in Rome spread in the era of pomp and display.
Until ad550 all silk woven in Europe was derived from Asiatic sources. About that time, however, the Roman emperor Justinian I sent two Nestorian monks to China, where, at the risk of their lives, they stole mulberry seeds and silkworm eggs, secreted them in their walking staffs, and brought them to Byzantium. Thus, the Chinese and Persian silk monopolies ended. With the spread of Islam, the silkworm came to Sicily and Spain. By the 12th and 13th centuries Italy had become the silk center of the West, but by the 17th century France was challenging Italy's leadership, and the silk looms established in the Lyons area at that time are still famous today for the unique beauty of their weaving.
Not until after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes did Huguenot weavers from France cross the English Channel and establish silk mills in Spitalfields, a district in the East End of London. The silkworm, however, did not flourish in the English climate, nor has it ever flourished in the United States. The first silk mill in the U.S. was erected in 1810. With the advent of the power loom and with the help of the high tariffs, introduced during the American Civil War, against imported woven goods, the American silk-weaving industry entered a period of growth. Only in China, Japan, and, to a lesser extent, Italy and France was the silk itself produced, however.
In addition to the true silk from the cultivated mulberry silkworm, a number of so-called wild silks are produced from other related species of insects in the uncultivated state. Tussah silk, for example, is produced from a species that feeds on oak leaves. Douppioni is a silk produced from two silkworms that spin a cocoon together and thus produce a double thread. Special types of weaves, such as shantung and other irregular types, are woven from these types of silk.
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