The Forgotten Village

The story of silk began more than four thousand years ago in the court of China’s first emperor. It is believed that a young concubine named Lei Tsu had discovered by way of experiment the ‘finest natural textile thread known to man’. The art of weaving silk was, at first, restricted to members of the Imperial Court, over time spread to lower levels of Chinese society and achieved widespread fame. Gradually, a trade route to the West emerged. A tortuous passage known as the ‘silk road’ stretched through hostile lands and ended thousands of miles away at market places in the middle east. For centuries only the Chinese knew the secrets of silk production and the exportation of silkworms was strictly forbidden. Around 140 BC, silkworm eggs and mulberry cuttings reached Khotan (in present-day Afghanistan), allegedly smuggled by a Chinese princess who went to marry the king and found the prospect of a silkless life unbearable. From then it went to India, Korea and Japan. At the same time the art was moving South with migrating Chinese minority groups into South East Asia.

Since then silk weaving has remained an integral part of South East Asia’s countless villages.

Silkworms are really not worms at all. They are the larvae of ‘Bombyx Mori’ moths and silkworms are actually domesticated insects. After many centuries of inbreeding the silkworm is incapable of flight, mates quickly after emerging from its crysalis, and dies a day or so after laying eggs. They no longer exist in the wild.

An ounce of silkworm eggs yields about 35,000 worms. As they hatch each of the tiny creatures must be carefully moved to a circular flat bamboo tray to be fed with fresh mulberry leaves several times a day. The worms are protected from harmful flying insects by wrapping the trays in homespun cotton.

The newly born silkworm only eats mulberry leaves. A silk farmer must have a ready supply of mulberry leaves and fruits close at hand as even one missed feeding can kill the worms. There are times of the year when the mulberry leaves are not around, and continued food shortages can decrease the quality of silk any surviving worms make. If there are shortages lettuce makes a decent emergency dish, as long as it is well-washed (pesticides kill) and dried thoroughly.

Despite revolutionary changes in methods of manufacturing, the ultimate basis of silk remains the inconspicuous-looking silkworm, and the most critical period in silk production comes during the silkworm’s brief life span of 20 - 24 days. Nearly all silkworm-producing moths belong to the family ‘bombycidae’, of which one member, ‘bombyx mori’, is responsible for most of the world’s silk.

In the beginning, the worms need to be moved to a clean tray with fresh food every few days. The silkworms produce a lot of excement and cleaning the trays is not for the weak-stomached. The farmer must spend a growing amount of time tending to the bamboo trays, feeding and moving the silkworms and dividing the colonies when the silkworms are too large or hungry for that tray. By the fourth week the largest of the silkworms will be just over 5 cm in length.

When the worms stop eating and raise their heads it is a sign they are ready for the all-important job of spinning cocoons. The farmer can also pick them up and look between their rear pair of legs: if there is a grey mass there the silkworm isn't quite ready, but if it's milky and translucent it is definitely ready.

At this stage they are removed from their feeding trays and inserted into a specially woven circular bamboo scaffolding which will make the cocoons more uniform in shape and easier to collect. Again the worms are protected from harmful flying insects by wrapping the trays with fine cotton nets.

After about 36 hours the worms are sealed within a yellow cocoon and have embarked on the process of morphing in to a moth.

The satisfactory cocoons are now moved to a clean tray. Special care must be taken not to damage them when removing them from the old trays. The entire process, from silkworm egg to complete cocoon, takes about twenty-five days. Silk worms transform themselves inside the cocoon into a chrysalis and then into a butterfly. Most of the cocoons are used for the next step in silk making, but some of them leave the cocoon as a butterfly. They usually secrete a liquid onto the silk threads to dissolve them so it can emerge. The new moths must be moved to another tray to mate and lay eggs. The males will die after mating while the females lay between 200 - 300 eggs each.

Each cocoon consists of many yards of tightly woven silk thread. In the reeling process, a special wooden device is used to locate the end of the filament and it is carefully unwound. The cocoon is immersed in boiling water to help soften the gum coating. It begins to unwind and form an extraordinarily long thread of great strength.

After washing and degumming, there is a bleaching and drying process before dyeing. All our dyes are obtained from natural sources in the immediate sourroundings, offering an exquisite palette of different hues. For example, leaves of the wild indigo plant are a source of natural black or blue, grey from coconuts, and khaki from mango. The bundles of threads are soaked in the dye pots for several times over many days to achieve the proper color tone and quality, and then the colours are fixed. These traditional methods of dye production have almost been driven to commercial extinction.

After the dyeing process the threads are hung out to dry.

Despite the introduction of a wide range of new techniques, the traditional spinning wheel is still necessary for a variety of purposes, including unwinding dyed silk skins onto bobbins for the warping process.

The lengthwise threads of a woven material are called the ‘warp’. A lightweight silk fabric can have over 2,000 warp yarns. During the warping process the threads of each spool pass though suspended loops, then through holes in a warping paddle.

The weaving begins by pushing down a harness to separate two sets of warp threads, leaving space to shoot a shuttle alternately back and forth. Wooden looms can be found beneath houses throughout South East Asia, where silk-making is still a cottage industry. While there are some large factories near cities which make lower-end silk cloth, our finer silk is almost exclusively made by women working family-owned looms in their homes.

This basic weaving technique uses the same or different colors in the warp and weft. Some villages are experimenting with new designs and color combinations, yet still using their traditional techniques and basic patterns.