Did You Know... about the history of silk?

We all love the luxurious way silk looks and feels but did you know silk can be traced all the way back to around 3000 BC China? The history of silk is a fascinating subject and it all begins with a moth, a blind, flightless moth. It lays 500+ eggs in 4 to 6 days and dies. From one ounce of eggs come about 30,000 worms which eat a ton of mulberry leaves and produce about 12 pounds of raw silk. These tiny worms are quite the little munchers and their care and feeding were duties given over exclusively to the women of the silk producing provinces for 6 months each year. They tended to them in their growing stage, cocoon stage and then to the unraveling, spinning, weaving and dyeing stage. Each cocoon is made up of a filament between 500 and 1000 yards long. Five to eight of these filaments are twisted together to make one thread. The technique and process of sericulture were such closely guarded secrets that anyone caught smuggling the silkworm or cocoons outside of China was punished by death.

When silk was originally discovered it was reserved exclusively for the emperor, his relatives and dignitaries. It was so valued it was used as a form of currency, used in trade with foreign countries. Values were calculated in lengths of silk as they had been calculated in pounds of gold. Gradually the various classes of society began wearing tunics of silk as it came into more general use. Amazing hey? Now we can just tie dye a silk island shirt and be off to the beach.

It wasn’t until around 200 BC that China lost their monopoly on silk production when Chinese immigrants reached Korea. Shortly after 300 AD sericulture was established in India. It was only in the 13th century that it spread to Italy. China and Japan produced more that 50 % of the worlds silk for many years and in the late 1970’s China dramatically increased its silk production and is again the biggest producer of the worlds silk.