A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [127]
50
Silk Princess Painting
Silk painting, from Xinjiang province, China
600–800 AD
Once upon a time, in the high and far off days of long ago, there was a beautiful princess who lived in the land of silk. One day her father, the emperor, told her she must marry the king of the distant land of jade. The jade king could not make silk, because the emperor kept the secret to himself. And so the princess decided to bring the gift of silk to her new people. She thought of a trick – she hid everything that was needed – the silk worms, the mulberry seeds – everything – in her royal headdress. She knew that her father’s guards would not dare to search her as she left for her new home. And that, my Best Beloved, is the story of how Khotan got its silk.
This is my version of a ‘Just So’ story to explain one of the greatest technology thefts of history. It is known as The Legend of the Silk Princess and it is presented to us in paint on a plank of wood that is around 1,300 years old. It is now in the British Museum, but it was found in a long-deserted city on the fabled Silk Road.
In the world around 700, a world of enormous movement of people and of goods, one of the busiest highways of all, then as now, ran from China: the Silk Road – not in fact one single road, but a network of routes that spanned 4,000 miles and effectively linked the Pacific to the Mediterranean. The goods on that highway were rare and exotic – gold, precious stones, spices, silk. And with the goods came stories, ideas, beliefs and – key to our story here – technologies.
This painting comes from the oasis kingdom of Khotan in central Asia. Khotan is now in western China, but in the eighth century it was a separate kingdom and the linchpin of the Silk Road, vital for water and refreshment and a major manufacturer of silk. Khotanese storytellers created a legend to explain how the secrets of silk production – for thousands of years a Chinese monopoly – had came to Khotan. The result was the story of the Silk Princess, as told in our painting.
The wooden board on which the story is painted was found in a small abandoned Buddhist shrine in Khotan. The shrine was just one in a small city of shrines and monasteries which had vanished beneath the sand for more than a thousand years and which were rediscovered at the end of the nineteenth century by the polymath Sir Aurel Stein, one of the pioneering archaeologists of the Silk Road. It was Stein who revealed Khotan’s importance as a vital trading and cultural centre.
The picture is painted on a rough plank that is almost exactly the size of a computer keyboard. The figures are fairly simply drawn in black and white, with here and there touches of red and blue. It is pretty unprepossessing as a work of art, but then it was never intended to be one; this painting was made essentially to help the storyteller tell their story. It is an aide-mémoire. Right in the middle is the Silk Princess herself, with her large and prominent headdress. To make absolutely sure we recognize that this is the focal point of the story, a servant woman on the left is melodramatically pointing at it. The storyteller would then have revealed that inside it is everything you need to make silk: worms of the silk moth, the silk cocoons that they produce, and mulberry seeds – because mulberry leaves are what silk worms eat. Then, in front of the princess, we see what happens next – the silk cocoons are piled up in a basket and on the far right there is a man hard at work weaving the silk threads into cloth. The princess has obviously arrived safely in Khotan, and her ruse has worked. This story, plainly set out in three scenes, is a quirky document of a transforming shift of knowledge and skill from the East to the West.
We have known for a long time that the Silk Road was vitally important in the economic and intellectual world of the eighth century, but it is only relatively recently that it acquired