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History Of Silk
Sericulture or silk production has a long and colorful history unknown to most people. For centuries the West knew very little about silk and the people who made it. Pliny, the Roman historian, wrote in his Natural History in 7 BC "Silk was obtained by removing the down from the leaves with the help of water...". For more than two thousand years the Chinese kept the secret of silk altogether to themselves. It was the most zealously guarded secret in history.
Chinese legend gives the title "Goddess of Silk" to Lady Hsi-Ling-Shih, wife of the mythical Yellow Emperor, who was said to have ruled China in about 3,000 BC. She is credited with the introduction of silkworm rearing and the invention of the loom. Half a silkworm cocoon unearthed in the 1927 from the loess soil astride the Yellow River in Shanxi Province, in the northern China, has been dated between 2,600 and 2,300 BC. Another example is a group of ribbons, threads and woven fragments, date about 3,000 BC, and found at Qianshanyang in Zhejiang Province. More recent archeological finds - a small ivory cup carved with silkworm design and thought to be between 6,000 and 7,000 years old, and spinning tools, silk thread and fabric fragments from sites along the lower Yangzi River - reveal the origins of sericulture to be even earlier.
Silkworm And The Family
There are many indigenous varieties of wild silk moths found in a number of different countries. The key to understanding the great mystery and magic of silk, and China's domination of its production and promotion, lies with one species: the blind, flightless moth, Bombyx Mori. It lays 500 or more eggs in four to six days and dies soon after. The eggs are like pinpoints - one hundred of them weigh only one gram. From one ounce of eggs come about 30,000 worms, which eat a ton of mulberry leaves and produce twelve pounds of raw silk. The original wild ancestor of this cultivated species is believed to be Bombyx Mandarina Moore, a silk moth living on Mulberry tree and unique to China. The silkworm of this particular moth produces a thread whose filament is smoother, finer and rounder than that of the other silk moths. Over thousand of years, during which the Chinese practiced sericulture utilizing all the different types of silk moths known to them, Bombyx Mori evolved into specialized silk producer it is today; a moth which has lost its power to fly, only capable of mating and producing eggs for the next generation of silk producers.