ONE
The Technology of silk
Chinese have long prized silk fabric for its softness, luster, and affinity for brilliant dyes. Although silk garments were worn mostly by the wealthy, they were not beyond the reach of or dinary people for special attire on ceremonial occasions such as weddings. The manufacture of sil~ is the result of a perfect union of natural miracle and human intelligence. In feeding on mulberry leaves, passing through four molting periods, and finally spinning a cocoon of silk fiber, the silkworm enacts a complete biological process. But without human attention and skill during this process, the silkworm would produce only wild silk, which is unsuitable for weaving into fine fabrics. silk manufacture can be divided into four basic stages: the cultiva tion of mulberry trees, the raising of silkworms (sericulture), the reeling of silk fiber from cocoons, and the weaving of silk
10 Mulberry Trees fabrics. In each of these stages, Chinese technology had in antiquity reached a level of skill unsurpassed in the world and, by the seventeenth century, the particular techniques of the Kiangnan region had reached a level unsurpassed in China. The purpose of this chapter is to examine this traditional technology, with particular reference to Kiangnan, in order to identify in what sense it was advanced, and in which ways-it was, or c~uld have been, improved by modern innovations.
MULBERRY TREES
Although silkworms will eat the leaves of various types of trees, only if they are fed the leaves of the mulberry tree will they produce silk of high quality. In China sometimes leaves from the che tree were fed to silkworms when mulberry leaves were scarce, but the cocoons produced were small and yielded much less silk. 1 In Shantung and Manchuria there were wild silk worms which fed on oak leaves, but their silk was quite coarse. Thus, the manufacture of fine silk could flourish only where mulberry cultivation was well developed. There are many varie ties of the mulberry, which belongs to the Moraceae family, but in the Kiangnan area only the white mulberry, morus alba, was grown. Traditionally, it was raised to produce two crops of leaves annually, the main one in the spring and a smaller one in the summer. By contrast, the morus latifolia, grown in south China, could produce enough leaves for seven crops of silkworms a year.2 Mulberry trees are hardy and can be grown in almost any type of soil and climate.3 In China it was widely held that mulberry could be grown anywhere except in low flooded fields. 4 The sericultural manuals said that there was no land suitable for grain which was not also suitable for mulberry. However, in or der for the trees to be highly productive, the ground had to have an adequate system of drainage and be well fertilized. 5
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