Chinese fine silk
2 min readChina was one of the earliest countries to producetextiles in the world.6,000-7,000 years ago, China, Egypt, Mesopotamia and India had already produced early textiles of linen, flax, wool and cotton respectively. China, in turn, is the origin of silk with the greatest achievements in use of reeled silk from bred silkworms as a plant fibre, which is an extraordinary contribution to the world’s textile technology.
In 1958,a piece of thin silk and a silk ribbon were unearthed from the Qianshanyang site of Zhejiang province, which dates back to 4,700 years ago or earlier.
Through studies, it is found that the silk and ribbon wereboth made of domestic silk. Observed from the fineness and length of the textiles, the silk reeling technique was already considerably mature. Besides, the silk relics also indicate China has a very long history of 5,000-6,000 years for natural silk application. During Shang and Zhou dynasties of the early ancient time, silk textiles enjoyed great Silk fabric rags (enlarged) on bronze drinking vessel of Shang dynasty development, manifested from a variety of silk productsalready unearthed so far, such as silk gauze, fine silk, damask, satin, and brocade. As recorded in Classic of Poetry, the first ancient Chinese poem collection, there were vast mulberry fields in northern China, where lots of silk textiles were unearthed including silk button, silk holes, silk turban, white thin silk, silk hat band, silk fishing wire, silk thread, silk rein, and other articles. Western Han dynasty witnessed a relatively complete technological system in silk reeling, spinning, and weaving, with the peddle twill loom emerging as the most representative.
The combination of the relief printing technology invented then and hand-painting was already prevailing in the country, as exhibited by those silk relics unearthed from the Mawangdui graveyard in Han dynasty of Changsha city, Hunan province:46 reels of silk,58 pieces of ready-to-wear clothing,27 pieces of clothes and ornaments, of which one piece of white silk Buddhist costume weighs only 49 White gauze of Western Han dynasty from the Mawangdui Graveyard in Changsha, Hunan province grams. In Tang dynasty, preventive dyeing and printing technologies were developed, such as tie-dyeing, wax dyeing, clamp dyeing, and grey dyeing. After that, more technologies and processes were invented for the production of silk, damask, satin, and lace, using newer type pattern-based jacquard looms to make brocade weaving enter a new stage. Moreover, lockup, split, and flat embroidery technologies were invented, of different styles in Jiangsu, Guangdong, Hunan and Sichuan provinces to make silk art a valuable treasure of China and the entire East.
