Silk: Past and Present

It is said that China makes the most but not the best silk

Silk is the original Chinese export and development which is more identified with the country's past identity and to its commerce with the outside world than any other product.

As is the case with so many other goods, China leads the world in the quantity of its silk production, but not in its quality.

It takes more than technology to produce the best silk results

• China's thousand-year dominance of the silk art ended during the decades after the communists came to power, when Mao Zedong made austerity mandatory and elegance a crime.
• The inventors of silk lost not only their financial resources and technological advantages but also, in less than a generation, their skills and their feel for luxury.
• The China of today makes the most silk, but it is Italy that has the reputation for making the best silk products.
• The Chinese apparently can buy the machines and they have the weaving and printing technology, but they lack the skills in getting the right softness, the best finish, and the right feeling.
• Ancient Chinese may have discovered the secrets of silk while they were trying to determine how worms that crawled on the ground became moths that flew through the air.
• Unraveling the cocoons was also probably an attempt to unravel a mystery of nature.
• Silk production is said to be at least 5 000 years old which is the time span many Chinese give for their civilization, too.
• Silk has been central to Chinese identity abroad.
• The Romans called China Seres, which is derived from the Greek word for silk.
• This name appears to make China indistinguishable from its most coveted product of silk.
• It was in the 1200s that China's trade with Persia had already transferred the technology for processing silkworm cocoons to the West.
• Despite such extensions of silk production beyond China, the Chinese continued to innovate and adopt patterns and styles from abroad.
• In the late 1200s, Marco Polo wrote about the Mongols wearing satins that mixed silk with gold; a skill which they learned from the Persians.
• In modern China, silk-producers and manufacturers are now striving to restore Chinese silk products back to their historical place.

Unit of silk words.