Who kept the secret of silk, and how did it leak out?
For thousands of years silk was a Chinese monopoly, until some eggs travelled west inside hollow canes.
▶ Start the storyChina kept it, for a very long time, and the keepers were its emperors. Silk is believed to have first been produced in China as early as the Neolithic period, and legend credits an empress, Leizu, with developing it. Silks were first reserved for the emperors, who used them for themselves and as gifts, and only gradually did the cloth spread through Chinese society and then to other regions of Asia.
The secret itself is a living thing. Silkworms are fed on mulberry leaves and, after the fourth moult, spin cocoons. One worm spins about a mile of filament in two or three days, and about 2,500 of them are needed to make a pound of raw silk. The domestic silkmoth can no longer live in the wild, since breeding has left most of them flightless and defenceless. To own the technique you needed the eggs, the worms and the know-how.
2,500
The Chinese emperors strove to keep that knowledge secret and so protect their monopoly, but it leaked: partially to Korea around 200 BC, to the ancient Kingdom of Khotan by AD 50 and to India by AD 140. Meanwhile Rome bought it: Chinese silk was the most highly priced luxury good it imported.
The leak that mattered to Europe came around AD 550. Contemporary accounts say that monks working for the emperor Justinian I smuggled silkworm eggs to Constantinople from China inside hollow canes. The Byzantine Empire became the gateway through which silk-making reached Europe.
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Recap
Silk was a Chinese secret that leaked to Korea, Khotan, India and, via smuggled eggs, Byzantium.
💡 A trick to remember it · A mile of thread per worm, a cane full of eggs: the secret walked out inside a stick.
Surprising fact · The domestic silkmoth can no longer live in the wild: breeding left it flightless and defenceless.
Sources (2)
No source, no claim. Every fact in this lesson (15 claims) cites at least one of these.