Chinese Silk and The Chinese Silk Road

Chinese Silk:
A Cultural History

Chinese Silk Textile

The Silk Route:
7,000 Miles of History

Silk Cocoons, from "The Process of Manufacturing Silk in 24 Stages"

Raising silkworms and unwinding their cocoons is known today as silk culture or sericulture. It takes approximately 25-28 days for a silkworm to grow old enough to spin a cocoon. Sericulture is a painstaking process that requires a great deal of human labor. About 1,000 meters of silk can be unwound from a single cocoon. To make a tie, about 111 cocoons are necessary. A woman's blouse requires about 630 cocoons. This is why silk is a much prized and valuable fabric up to now.

What's Silkworm Anyway?(Three Stages: Larva, Pupa and Adult)

Larva on a Mulberry Tree

The silkworm is the larva or caterpillar of the domesticated silkmoth, Bombyx mori (Latin: "silkworm of the mulberry tree"). It is an important economic insect since it is the producer of silk. A silkworm's preferred food is white mulberry leaves, but it may also eat the leaves of any other mulberry tree (i.e., Morus rubra or Morus negra) as well as the Osage Orange. It is entirely dependent on humans for its reproduction and does not occur naturally in the wild. Sericulture, the practice of breeding silkworms for the production of raw silk, has been underway for at least 5,000 years in China, from where it spread to Korea and Japan, and later to India and the West.

The silkworm was domesticated from the wild silkmoth Bombyx mandarina which has a range from northern India to northern China, Korea, Japan and far the eastern regions of Russia. The domesticated silkworm derives from Chinese rather than Japanese or Korean stock. It is unlikely that silkworms were domestically bred before the Neolithic age. It wasn't until then that the tools required to facilitate the manufacturing process of larger quantities of silk thread, had been developed. The domesticated B. mori and the wild B. mandarina can still breed and sometimes produce hybrids.

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Cocoons with Pupas in Them

Identifying Features- Appearance (Morphology):

*Larvae are worm-like with a short anal horn

*Three distinct body parts: head, thorax, abdomen

*Adult has four wings covered with scales

Picture courtesy of Flickr CC License

Article courtesy of Insected

Adult: Silk-moth

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Silkworm is spinning

Silkworm is producing eggs

© Copyright Katie Clay, University of Michigan
and reuse under CC Licence

Silk Making Process- Still at the carpet factory. This time we got a demonstration of silk making. Those are silk moth cocoons in hot water, the man is gathering up twenty-odd cocoons and feeding them to the spooler.

Picture courtesy of Flickr CC License

Weaving, from a Book on the Silk Industry