The study of antiquity and the Middle Ages my name is Nick Barksdale and today I am excited to announce that I'm bringing you yet another episode from the China history podcast given to us by none other than Laszlo Montgomery if you remember his earlier video that I posted on the early years of the Silk Road if you enjoyed that you are going to absolutely love this one this one is titled none other than the ancient history of silk I'm incredibly excited about this one because it gives you not only a cultural history and of course more Chinese history but it have also dives into something many of you have requested repeatedly from me which is a study of economics from ancient China all the way into ancient Rome and eventually across the globe silk has played a vital role in the textile industry and I'm really excited to present this lecture to you it's absolutely amazing also don't forget to check out the description below this video because it contains a variety of links where you can go to explore the vast treasure trove information that the China history podcast provides it's absolutely phenomenal you're not going to regret it and definitely give this gentleman and his podcast the best review possible and as many stars as you can muster thank you all so much and have a great weekend hey everybody Laszlo Montgomery still no intro music and from the responses I got from the inquiry I made last episode into how all y'all's thought about it it's looking like there will be no melodic tones forthcoming at least in the near term this is the second podcast in a row where the scheduled topic was preempted by a sudden inspiration from one of you my listeners to do something else that happened last time with William Messner and now again with this silky.
Smooth topic remember 40 episodes ago I did this 10 part series where I discussed the history of from shandong to the Ching dynasty well today's subject the history of silk is a story that I instructed my loyal interns to condense down to a single episode you know me if I could find some way to drag this one out eight or ten episodes I'm more than happy to do so but I think we could get this one told in the usual 45 to 55 minute window that these CHP episodes invariably come in at when I came to that point where I exhausted everything there was to know about this subject that was worthwhile to tell I couldn't help thinking the whole story of silk really had a lot of similarities with what I mentioned in the history of tea as the narrative unfurls I'll wander off on my usual sidebars and show where silken tea shared a similar story or history I can't guarantee I'll return back to whatever the main point was that I was making but we'll get to where we're going by hook or by crook China is a world export powerhouse gave me a livelihood for 30 years didn't start with the dung shellping reforms in the 1980s that national network of designers artisans engineers scientists merchants and laborers went way back to the earliest days in Chinese history when a sufficiently large enough economy existed to support all these combined talents all kinds of manufactured goods of Chinese design and from designs brought to China for reproduction have been exported to the west since the Ming Dynasty when ships from China and Europe sailed back and forth between their respective homelands in China trade with other Asian countries that's been going on since even before the Tong it was all kinds of stuff that China had that the world's traders were happy to go to the trouble to get and bring back to wherever they had set sail from but besides silk tea and porcelain we almost have to stop and think what else was there garments Tex dials salt bullion whatnot but everything else combined all those other raw materials manufacturers semi finished goods that China exported nothing touched the kind of volume of those big three silty porcelain long before you could fit the world in the palm of your hand there was nothing that evoked the whole idea of China cafe like those three products in the consciousness of the common everyday people to the masses these three things were China's primary calling cards no matter whether you were rich poor somewhere in between this is held true for as long as people from other lands began coming to China and great numbers since at least the Western Han Dynasty such wondrous products they were too silty porcelain the magnificence of those three products alone gave face and prestige to China that was Universal among users of these three manufactured products everyone in the world going back to the beginning of the Common Era and even before then everyone who was aware of these three commodities knew these wonders of mankind came from China or whatever and their day they called that exotic and mysterious place to be able to claim that they were first to market with something as important to mankind as T is already an incredible achievement in China's case they not only had bragging rights to being the first to cultivate tea they were also the first to figure out how to cultivate silk and how to create durable but eggshell thin translucent porcelain that was so exquisite that only a son of heaven himself was good enough to sip from it.
Dang no one could take that away from China silk tea porcelain talk about global soft power these three products were the primary link between China in the Western world they were the whole reason for the Silk Road in the case of tea a war would even be fought over it and you remember from that history of tea series there was more to the whole tea making process than simply picking leaves from a tea bush and steeping them in a tea pot it was slightly more complicated porcelain too I mentioned in one of those episodes that Europeans had been ogling over Chinese made porcelain since the day they first laid their hands on it and it took Europeans fresh out of the Renaissance with all those brilliant minds and new learning until birth occur in 1709 to figure out how to make porcelain the way the Chinese did it tea the British East India Company by the 19th century still hadn't figured out how to turn tea leaves into a beverage the way the Chinese could they had to send Robert fortune to China in 1846 to go dress up like a Chinese Mandarin and sneaked into the tea producing regions of on way in Fujian to steal seeds plant cuttings know-how and a few consultants then he brought all this back to the company's experimental farms up in the hills of northern India and with all the secrets he had surreptitiously secret away from China he helped kickstart the whole tea industry in northern India the secrets of how to make tea and porcelain the Chinese managed to hang on to those secrets from antiquity all the way into the modern age but silk that secret didn't last long it wasn't as difficult to figure out as tea and porcelain was tea took thousands of years to evolve from its crudest state to the point of the tribute teas of the Song Dynasty but silk once someone tipped you off about wear silk came from and you were told exactly what kind of moth laid the eggs that made the worms you needed in it they only ate one kind of leaf and once you saw how mother nature did her thing and observed everything very closely you could get the main idea pretty quick and once she knew the basics all he had to do was simply apply your current spinning and weaving technologies to this new material it wasn't easy but it wasn't rocket science either historically what gold was to metal silk was to fabric still rings true just because was easy how to figure out to produce didn't mean it became a cheap commodity as we'll see as readily available fabrics go anywhere in the world quality top grade silk is rarely found hanging on the markdown racks at t.j.maxx of silk tea porcelain so came first yeah just like opium somehow the way that everything unfolded in the development of civilization those two things were one of the earliest gifts humankind managed to stumble into being an organic material in all silk doesn't have the staying power that stone and metal do so it's hard to find silk relics and the kind of volume of those two materials but under the right conditions silk can last for millennia buried deep underground in the proof that silk existed on this planet was found as far back as 5000 years ago the time of yungshao culture in China sometimes get young shale culture in young Shaw County mixed up young joys the place where those gorgeous cursed peaks of whaling are located young shell culture young show wen hua lasted from 5000 3000 BCE roughly speaking he was discovered and first excavated by archaeologists in the town of Yong Zhao just northeast of Cheung Chau in Hunan and the Yellow River in 1984 you know how it goes someone was digging somewhere it always happens that way this was in a village called Ching Tai the northwest corner of Cheung Chau on the south bank of the Yellow River one of the things they unearthed was a coffin for a child and the shroud used to wrap the body was made from silk this was dated to about 36 30 BCE this whole region surrounding that location in China was ground zero as far as core washa Han Chinese civilization goes so by any accounts this was a long time ago that time was contemporary with ancient Sumer pre dynasty Egypt Jericho one of the oldest cities in the world was the crossroads of the east back then in shocked County in Shaanxi province in 1926 a silk cocoon was found inside a tomb that was cut in half it was dated from between 4000 to 3000 BCE a half-centimeter piece of ribbon was found in another tomb from 47 hundred years ago unearthed in Qin Xianyang at the south end of Lake tai near Hojo and in the tombs of Shang Dynasty Kings and Nobles they were already adorning themselves with silk the Shan lasted from 1600 to 1046 BCE so silk has been around since long before recorded Chinese history like T however silk during the Shang was not nearly as exquisite and refined as it would later get in some antiquarian book from 1845 I dug up on the history of silk and other textiles had said quote the lawful wife of Emperor Huangdi named shilling shirt began the culture of silk it was at that time that the Emperor Huangdi invented the art of making garments this great prince Huangdi was desirous that shilling sure his legitimate wife should contribute to the happiness of his people he charged her to examine the silkworms and to test the practicability of using the thread shilling sure had a large quantity of these insects collected which she fed herself in a place prepared for that purpose and discovered not only the means of raising them but also the manner of reeling the silk and employing it to make garments lead us through gratitude for so great a benefit that posterity has deified shilling shirt and rendered her particular honors under the name of the goddess of silkworms end quote the Shenyang tea legend and the silk legend of shilling shirt have a lot in common in fact as mr. Paul French says on his website quoting Mark Twain they rhyme you remember.
Shandong there were a number of legends attributed to him that all ended with the words and that's how he was discovered the DNA of that story says tea leaves fell into his boiling water and that's how we figured tea out with shilling sure and the story of how silk was discovered same thing a cocoon fell in her hot cup of tea and she noticed the filaments unfurling shilling sure is probably better known in Chinese myths and legends as late Zhu and as far as her title of goddess of silkworms she's also called it's han 9i it's han is a silkworm so late zoo in the Yellow Emperor they were a couple the Yellow Emperor discussed a long time ago and their three sovereigns and five emperors episode CHP 60 he lived roughly 2,700 to 2600 BCE contemporary with Joseph from the Bible during his years in Egypt.
According to no less a source than Confucius himself blades who discovered the silk secret in 26:40 BCE this is post yungshao culture but not by much so the timing of the legend and what archaeologists have been able to discover yeah isn't off by that much the number thrown around most sources I read was 2700 BCE as to the beginnings of sericulture sirak alter the cultivation of silkworms for producing silk Sarah come is latin for silk sarah Coase and the greek the legend has it that late zoo was sitting under a mulberry tree and a cocoon somehow broke free from its scaffold and fell right into her teacup she plucked it out and immediately noticed how the loose end when she began to unravel it just kept going and going and going until it reached from one end of her nice-sized garden and back again as she carefully inspected the tree she had been sitting under and noticed it was filled with these white cocoons she spent a lot of time observing everything and figured out these worms spinning these cocoons loved eating mulberry leaves so she went to her husband and the Yellow Emperor arranged for a whole grove of mulberry trees to be planted and before long she domesticated all the worms and then for an encore she designed the reel that could mechanically unravel the cocoon in one single nearly one kilometer long filament and if that already wasn't enough she invented the first silk loom that spun it into cloth another late Seuss story says that she was kicking back in the yellow Emperor's magnificent garden and couldn't help but notice one day how the leaves of the mulberry trees seemed to be disappearing at an alarming rate and that led her to go check this situation out personally and from this observation it led her to discover the worms the cocoons and a whole metamorphosis thing and again if you could sort out how it works from the worm to the unraveling of the cocoon the rest is easy so late sue she is I guess you could call her the shun dong of silk or perhaps we should call shun knowing the late Zul of T the silkworm goddess she's given credit for the whole shebang noticing the cocoons how to unravel them how to turn the filaments into thread and how to turn that into garments and other useful items so said Kong foods ooh and if he said it it had to be true I happen to know a distant ancestor of late sue she lives in the Commonwealth of Virginia and I have to give a shout out to Carol for inspiring me to dust off this topic and turn it into an episode finally so we can say with a high degree of certainty based on archaeological.
Evidence that at least fifty six hundred years ago Silke existed was being used as a fabric that meant that some smart person living along the banks of the Yellow River back then near some mulberry trees presumably somehow figured out how it all worked this is really a great story of how amazing humankind is here's what either one person or maybe it was a husband-and-wife team or a group of people we'll never know but someone figured out this one particular moth the ancestor of what will one day be known as Bombyx mori emerged from these cocoons and that these moss would lay something like five hundred or a thousand pinpoint sized eggs and a hundred of them would only weigh one gram the eggs hatched they became larvae and in six weeks the larvae became full-grown silkworms that had been feasting on mulberry leaves 24/7 and these tiny worms will grow and increase their weight 10,000 times before they start the next phase of their metamorphic process and just like they had to do with tea as the centuries passed these ancient Chinese figured out what were the optimum conditions to handle these eggs and worms the temperature humidity how much light was required and so on the larger these silkworms became the more they ate yet you have a lot of leaves 30,000 silkworms can eat one ton of mulberry leaves I kid you not and from all that my friends all you get is twelve pounds of raw silk so this isn't just a few trees in the backyard to feed these worms you needed forests of these Morris Alba or white mulberry trees you know in China today there are six thousand two hundred and sixty square kilometers of land solely dedicated to growing morris alba to support the silk industry China is number one in the world six thousand two hundred and sixty square kilometres of mulberry trees that's bigger than Delaware first state plus you could throw la in there to this particular tree the white mulberry Morris Alba besides the leaves has other uses in traditional Chinese medicine the actual mulberries themselves are used to counter pre maturing gray hair constipation and diabetes the bark of the tree was used to treat costs wheezing edema fever headache and red eyes and one other thing if you ever walk you through the forests of India then you get bit by a Russell's Viper that mulberry tree has a leaf extract that will get you out of that Jam then these young Chou farmers probably noticed that the worms as they grew fat on these leaves change color shed their outer skin three times and again a fourth time inside the cocoon but after that third time molting a scientific process called ecdysis that meant it was time to start spinning that cocoon once these silkworms were big and fat with plenty of energy stored up to carry out the whole metamorphic process they really needed a lot of special attention they have to be carefully shielded from wind loud noises pungent odors and must be kept at a constant temperature and then when everything is ready the show begins some jelly-like viscous slime starts oozing out of a hole in their head as soon as this goo comes in contact with the air it starts to harden three four days later of non-stop waving their head in this figure-eight pattern back and forth back and forth these silkworms build this cocoon around them and the amazing thing here is that they do this with one single unbroken strand almost a kilometer long and one other interesting thing when that silkworm is squirting out that protein out of its head a mixture of two substances called fibrin and Saracen the stuff exits through some kind of natural triangular-shaped extrusion mold so that when the liquid hardens upon making contact with the air The Strand is prism shaped so that when light hits the silken strands they refract from different angles and this gives silk its patented shimmering colors that substance is a very long chain of repeating sequences of a few types of amino acids the silk molecule is four hundred thousand amino acids long and quite extraordinary in its strength if you let that pupae inside that cocoon turn into a moth sooner or later they will break through the cocoon and there goes your one single kilometer long unbroken filament so you had to kill that pupae before it did any damage inside the cocoon eight or nine days into the process the cocoons are steamed or baked to kill the pupae then the cocoons are placed inside boiled water they loosen up a little and begin to unravel there are tools that were created that helps find the loose end and from each cocoon the filament is unraveled and reeled onto a spool the lucky few pupae that are allowed to live emerge from the cocoon lay their eggs and promptly die their job is done you needed to twist together five to eight of these filaments to form the finest single thread of silk and some heavier threads require 48 individual silk filaments then that thread is either woven into fabric are used for embroidery there are about four main different kinds of silk thread and depending on what you're trying to make you use that thread and from the earliest times this is mentioned in both these shirt G and the lead G the records of the grand historian and the book of rites in the parts of China that were conducive to silk making three generations of women in a single household would toil side-by-side tending silkworms feeding them unraveling them spinning weaving dying always women and the deity late zoo also a woman and each year the Empress of China wife of the Emperor would perform a ceremony in the spring to kick off the silk racing season yeah silk making was woman's work part of the new comb the feminine arts if the climate was right farmers raised these silkworms themselves and the products they made from the silk were used by themselves there were no malls or department stores to go purchase these things if you wanted to see your son wearing some silk garment at Chinese New Year you had to make it yourself and that included making the silk to sow some clever enterprising Chinese person living during the tail end of yungshao culture over 5000 years ago figured this all out and as I said the silk produced at first wasn't as high quality as what followed but that didn't take terribly long to perfect by the way very recently weeks ago from when I'm recording this episode archeologists in central Hunan found evidence of these proteins in a couple of tombs excavated from 8,500 years ago that's like 6500 BCE now there was no actual silk fabric recovered from the site but they isolated one of these two silk proteins and the soil samples from the tomb so while there's no fire there's sure a lot of smoke so the secrets of silk might have been revealed even long before what's presently considered silks beginnings in time these silk brocade x' coming out of su cho nanjing and chengdu would astound the kings queens nobles and highborn all living west of China remember Chun Chen CHP episode 47 one of my favorites from 138 to 126 be seee during the time of the Han Emperor wool Hangul D John Chen journeyed to parts of Central Asia and among other things he discovered he learned of other great civilizations on planet earth besides the great and mighty Middle Kingdom and back then people in China thought they were the only advanced civilization they didn't know about India Rome Persia so we give credit to the Han Emperor rule for seeing the big picture and for championing the trade routes that in 1877 beer and Ferdinand von Richtofen would call this iDEN Strassen the Silk Roads it wasn't called the Silk Road way back when it was in use but if not for silk it's doubtful these ancient trade routes would be as famous as they are in our day just like the first ones to taste tea the first ones who handled silk knew this was something special and again just like with tea at first silk was reserved solely for royalty and later to other Nobles once silk production reached a certain level of efficiency now pricing came down and before long the more vulgar parts of Chinese society could also afford to wear silk but it was never cheap and it wasn't every day where for many of the lower classes who could afford to buy it silk was always reserved for special occasions only weddings the Spring Festival other major holidays and events the Chinese knew this material was special the same went with people who came from lands east and west of China silk was found in an Egyptian tomb excavated at the Valley of the Kings and Thebes that was dated to 1070 BCE and that is about as far back in history as we can go to show proof of silk being traded or at least carried to lands far away but it was the Silk Road that provided the wherewithal to bring vast quantities of silk from the markets of China to other Central Asian markets that are today found throughout whose Becca Stan and Turkmenistan like a central hub these cities Tashkent Samarkand boo Hara Merv would receive the silk and from there it would be carried further south and west where it Altima ended up in Rome actual Romans and a Chinese wouldn't meet face to face until the time of Marcus Aurelius in the mid 2nd century Silk joined these two civilizations together the demand in Rome was insatiable and only China had the goods so in order to get this high value but extremely light material from China to roam the Silk Roads emerged and as I mentioned in that previous Silk Roads three-part series it wasn't just silk and other precious commodities being traded in all these Central Asian trading centers there emerged the great cities were some of the smartest and most talented people from different lands in the known world would meet up and exchange ideas and knowledge and this whole process would act as a catalyst to speed up the dissemination of knowledge and culture you know which acted as a is a lubricant that hastens the ongoing development of humankind around the 4th century BCE.
Before John Chan's adventure the Greeks and Romans began mentioning this land called series or the kingdom of silk and the first Chinese they either laid eyes on or heard about were referred to as the silk people I read that it was marcus crassus during his disastrous governorship in syria who's the first roman to get his hands on silk whether or not that's true I can't say but certainly in the time of the late Roman Republic and into the time of Augustus silk became wildly popular in Rome they knew it came from this place far away plenty of the elder wrote in the year 70 quote silk was obtained by removing the down from the leaves with the help of water end quote Virgil said that silk came from quote fluff combed out of unknown Chinese leaves end quote these guys had no idea yet what silk was the hand feel of the fabric is like nothing else of course nowadays the great textile manufacturers of the world have produced all kinds of synthetics through the amazing power of genomics engineers and scientists have come up with ways to produce silk in bulk without the hassle of carrying out the whole silkworm and mulberry leaf chores silk filaments are five times stronger than steel in tensile strength and three times tougher than Kevlar it's one of the strongest fibers known to man or woman and because of its low density compared to other fabrics like wool or cotton it's much more absorbent being able to absorb as much as 1/3 its weight and moisture yeah by reputation it's the fabric that keeps you cool in the summer and warm in the winter so tea according to the ancient historical record claims 27:37 BCE as the time shun gnome discovered it and we know silk went back almost a thousand years earlier and believe it or not the Chinese people were able to hold on to the monopoly on silk for about three thousand years China was the only place for mythical times and into the beginnings of Chinese recorded history that had the process down and knew about the magic of the Bombyx mori and the Morris Alba but like I said the process of making silk didn't require the thousands of years it took 40 to go from bitter medicine to the tasty rock teas of the Rui Mountains pretty much as soon as people from other lands began to come to China they got hooked up with silk merchants and just prior to the Silk Roads and all throughout its early growth in its heyday the countries to the west of China no matter how expensive it was the demand for silk was always high and before those guys far to the west of China got to feel that fabric with their fingers for the first time there were people closer to China who got to see it and feel at first these were of course China's neighbors to the east Korea and Japan they like silk - around the time of the founding of the Han Dynasty Chinese migrants brought the secrets of silk making to Korea and before long they developed their own sericulture about 100 years later around 300 AD sericulture was well under development in India and around the same time in Japan they too figured out the whole thing there's also a story that says that in the year 440 the king of cotton that's present-day hood yen in Xinjiang he had won the hand of a Chinese princess no details on how that came about but this princess was informed by a representative of the king who told her if she was expecting to continue enjoying the pleasures of silk she had better bring some with her so as this legend went this princess from China secret Adamo berry tree seeds and some silkworm eggs and her hairpiece and brought them to this great Silk Road trading center and the people of coton launched their own sericulture industry and protected their secret no less vigorously than the Chinese did the next great leap and the spread of silk production happened in 550 when two historian monks were sent on a mission to retrieve silkworm eggs and in the hollow of they're walking staffs they brought them back and presented them to Emperor Justinian the first at the court in Byzantium they must have taken the Concorde and by the way this time in China basically the Jin dynasty up to maybe the sway this was a real great leap forward in China as far as taking the science of sericulture to a higher level of refinement during the Tong and Song dynasties sued was the center of the silk trade in China there was an old saying that said that the yardage of silk produced in Suzhou every two weeks could be used to pave the Silk Road from Chang'an to Rome by the time of Qin long in the Ching dynasty there were 12,000 silk looms in operation and Su Jo employing over a hundred thousand workers and artisans Chengdu by the way as far as the silk industry was concerned was the SU Jo of the West and by this time when the indigenous Byzantine silk industry had ramped up and was operating at full capacity world silk prices finally became low enough for more people to purchase and enjoy it in Persia they also loved Chinese silk within 200 years of the kingdom of co'tin getting their silk industry up and running the Persian textile masters too threw their hat in the ring by the seventh century the Arabs had wrestled the secrets of sericulture from the Persians and set up their own Arab silk industry and by the 10th century Andalucia in southern Spain was the center of the European silk trade as I said the whole science behind sericulture isn't that difficult to learn by the time the secret had made its way to the Middle East it didn't take long for everyone else to get in on it so again like tea silk started off because of its scarcity is something enjoyed only by the Royals and aristocrats then to the moneyed class and finally when prices came down low enough it became more commonplace among urban and rural dwellers and starting in the Han Dynasty silk began to be used as a quasi currency standards existed that determined how many yards of silk of a certain width roll would be worth you know a certain amount of gold or silver even foreign countries accepted silk as payment around 1147 during the Crusades 2,000 skilled workers from the Byzantine silk industry a ship from Constantinople to Italia and there began the European continents first silk industry and once silk production landed in Italy it was only a matter of time before anybody who could get into the business got into it some places rose higher in achievement and prominence in the industry than others but a 15th century Lyon became the center of the European silk trade Frances the first granted the city of lyon a monopoly on silk trading in the fourth our own DeSimone Lacroix ruse is where it was centered with so many cities producing silk market prices fell but if you had the money and only wanted the best quality the most cutting-edge fabrics and broke aids you still had to buy from China those Chinese silk brocade designs they loved him in all the great fashion capitals of Europe and in all their colonies as well there was just something about those Chinese designs that so attracted Western tastes but she had to be loaded to afford them and it wasn't just the popularity of the designs it was the quality of the fabric nobody could do it like China and today well the silk industry is so complex and like tea again so many countries now produce it there are synthetics now that can fool anyone except the experts despite all that if you wanted the real thing it still takes about 2,500 silkworms to yield you one pound of raw silk that's been the bottleneck for 5000 years silk on average is about 20 times the price of cotton today's worldwide production of silk is about two hundred thousand metric tons that's a lot of silkworms that's a lot of mulberry leaves but as big as that number seems of the overall total worldwide trade and textiles.
Silk only makes up 0.2 percent of the total China is by far and away at about 80 percent the largest so producer in the world India at 10% market share is a distant second with Uzbekistan an even more distant third Thailand is fourth and Brazil the only non Asian major producer is fifth so that is going to be that as far as my encapsulation of the history of silk into a single podcast episode I guess now I'll have to do porcelain since tea and silk are now behind me I want to thank everyone who took my humble request to heart last episode and wrote me a stellar iTunes review and thanks to all of you who didn't write me a review but gave me a five-star rating anyone else willing to help me out and get me to the top of the Pops if you live in an iOS world go give me a nice review so that's gonna be it ladies and gentlemen's this is Lazlo Montgomery signing off from a nice wet and wild Los Angeles California we got drenched these past few weeks so you won't be hearing me signing off from any bone-dry locations join us again next time if you're so inclined for another informative and entertaining episode of the China history podcast.
