The tale of how silk travelled from China and spread worldwide

A group of tourists ride double-humped Bactrian camels in the desert at Dunhuang City, China. The area is part of the historic Silk Road. Photo: iStock

Though desolate today, the Tarim Basin − encompassing an area around the size of modern Egypt − had once been the site of nearly forty city states. Among these were major trading posts, vital for merchants of various origins to rest before resuming their journeys to all points of the compass. In the early centuries CE, major trading routes between China and the West would approach and depart the river oases of this desert basin across long distances. They could be found along the upper Indus and what is now Afghanistan; down, past the Hindu Kush towards India, over the Indian Ocean, and then across the Red Sea towards the Mediterranean Rim. Many migrants settled there, too, from China, but also India, and people from the areas around what is now Uzbekistan, to the north, and Afghanistan, to the west. Some of the silks found around the Tarim Basin would have been those that continued to be imported from the east, those smoothest of silks made by the dextrous hands of Chinese experts, who by then had been creating it for around three thousand years. Those have been found in the Tarim, and also in other lands that neighboured China, from steppe burials in what is now Russia, dating to the fifth to third centuries BCE.

But the fragments of silk fabric were evidently not from China, or at least were not crafted as if they were. These were irregular, formed from discontinuous threads, and at the time Karadong’s textiles were abandoned were probably quite newly made in the settlements along the Keriya River. The cultivation of silkworms and the processing of their threads may only have been learned by the people who lived and worked at those crossroads relatively recently, but the differences in the quality of the silk first made outside China may not have been that marked because it was a newly adopted technology in those lands. Nor would it have been that the new silk makers lacked the skill, though they will have had more limited experience with raising the insect, and with working its long, fine threads. Instead, the silk cocoons cultivated in their new home seem to have given rise to broken threads, rather than the single long strand that emerges from the caterpillars’ immense tubular glands. That continuous strand secreted by the silkworm to wrap around itself could only have remained intact in one particular circumstance − if the moth being moulded inside the pupa was never allowed to emerge from its protective cocoon. The stifling or heating of the pupal stage of the domesticated silk moth so that it could not break apart the cocoon had been an age-old Chinese innovation; that, and the use of an alkali to strip the silk’s fibroin protein of its gummy sericin glue, was what had given the fabrics they created their coruscant, fluid-like gloss. It was also what made the silk more able to take, and hold, the dyes whose colours were still apparent after nearly two millennia under the desert sands. 

The people of Karadong, it seemed, had not adopted any one of these innovations in particular. Instead of killing the pupae inside their silken cocoon, the moths would have been allowed to emerge and live their short adult lives in which they might have mated and produced new eggs, some of which would hatch into caterpillars and continue the production of silk. That silk, however, would be damaged as the moth pushed its way free. And broken silk meant that woven textiles in which those tiny breaks and reconnections of the thread would be perceptible interruptions of what could easily have become a seamless cloth. Perhaps this was thought more beautiful; perhaps it produced the cashmere-like texture already more familiar to them. But it is also not unlikely that the preservation of the silkworm’s metamorphosis was a decision taken, perhaps enforced, because of the creed of its state rulers. The towns uncovered from the Tarim’s sands all included Buddhist stupas and relics. Karadong itself had been home to two Buddhist shrines, among the oldest discovered outside India, just to its south, where Buddhism was born, and from where its core principle of not harming living things — including the silkworm — was spread.

In among the vicissitudes of the fortunes of empires, of trade deals and conquests, the silkworm may then have passed from Central Asia just west to the Kushans, whose empire encompassed northern India in the first to third centuries CE. Then moving to Mesopotamia, spanning what is now Iraq and Syria by the fifth century, at the moment at which long-distance trade began to flourish through the Achaemenian Empire, which stretched from Turkey to India, and from Central Asia to Egypt. Along went the silkworm to Sasanian Iran, whose lands stretched west from Afghanistan across to the Mediterranean coast, covered large parts of Egypt and ran somewhat diagonally through Turkey, and nearly all the way to Istanbul, then called Constantinople, which was the capital of the Byzantine, or Eastern Roman, Empire. The people of Sasania may have long been content with the plentiful import of bales of silk cloths, still accessible from their eastern neighbours, rather than breeding Bombyx mori themselves — because the silkworm itself reached Iran rather later than its silk, starting, it seems, in the sixth century, up along the borders of the Caspian Sea. Four hundred years later, it had spread across most of the regions of the Iranian Plateau, with the tiny eggs of Bombyx mori still being taken there, even then, from Merv − at one time the world’s largest city, in what is now Turkmenistan — a majestic place with palaces and pavilions, gardens and ice houses that was famous for watermelons, chilled drinking water, its soft cottons and its fine silks. At one time it contained perhaps a dozen great libraries consulted by astronomers and mathematicians and doctors, and, no doubt, its natural historians interested in small insects, because translations of Aristotle’s most famous works would have, in all likelihood, been housed there, too. And it may also have been from that great city’s silkworm stocks that in the mid-sixth century trading Christian missionaries from the church in Central Asia acquired what would become Europe’s first Bombyx mori eggs. These, it is said, the monks brought to Constantinople, and with these tiny seeds the technology needed to initiate a silk industry in Europe went west, too.

Come the seventh century, the Islamic Empire would see the establishment of silkworm rearing across North Africa and all the way to Spain, which, later, in 1530, the conquistadors would take to Mexico. At around the same time, in the sixteenth century, in the hands of the Ottoman Empire, the silkworm would spread widely: across Turkey, Cyprus, Greece and Bulgaria. The first documented attempt at growing the white mulberry in Europe was in Tuscany in 1434, although silkworms seem already to have reached Sicily via the Arabs some five hundred years before that, in the tenth or eleventh centuries. Not until the thirteenth century would the breeding of silkworms be established in Malpighi’s Bologna, at roughly the same time as it also began, if more modestly, in France. Over the next two centuries France’s production scaled up impressively, piquing the interest across the English Channel of King James I of England. He would attempt to take silk production to his new colonies in North America, but would have little, if any, success in either the New World or the Old.

And so it is that the many silken fragments pulled from the sands around the Tarim Basin tell the story of at least one of the paths that would take Bombyx mori out into the world, from its eastern origin, towards the countries to its west. The peoples of that region set it on a route from the north of China that would make this silk worm the only insect to ever be truly domesticated, and the first to be dissected, eight thousand kilometres away and 4,500 years later, in the north of Italy. By then the breeding of this insect had already long been established further east, taken with skilled people who migrated from China to the Korean Peninsula by the second century BCE. And at around the time that the oases of the Tarim Basin traded and thrived, in the third century CE, the cultivation and care of the silkworm had also been taught to China’s nomadic neighbours, when silkworms and the white mulberry tree were gifted to peoples in the eastern Eurasian Steppe to their northeast, around what is today Mongolia.

Excerpted with permission from Silk: A History in Three Metamorphoses by Aarathi Prasad. HarperCollins India, Rs 699

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