Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [93]
IN CHINA, the manufacture of silk was quintessentially women’s work; in the spring, the reigning empress inaugurated the silk season as part of her official duties, and her female subjects followed suit, spinning and weaving and embroidering silk at home and in workshops. In silk-rich regions, three generations of women in the same family would feed and supervise the maturing silkworms. The production of silk, labor-intensive as it was—with spinning, weaving, dyeing, and embroidering—occupied half of China’s provinces. Despite the ubiquity of silk manufacture, the key techniques of sericulture remained closely guarded by Chinese authorities; it was an offense punishable by death to reveal those secrets to foreigners, or to smuggle cocoons or even eggs beyond Chinese borders.
At first the wearing of silk was restricted to the emperor and his family. But over time, people from many classes of Chinese society took to wearing silk tunics, and silk eventually found a variety of industrial applications in fishing lines, strings for musical instruments, and silk-rag paper. By the time of the Han dynasty, 206 BC to AD 220, silk had become so widespread in China, and so deeply embedded in the Chinese economy, that it was a valuable commodity in itself, useful for paying debts. Farmers remitted taxes to the government in the form of silk they produced. The government in turn compensated civil servants in silk, and rewarded subjects for outstanding services in silk. Soon silk supplanted gold as a standard measure; rather than pounds of gold, value was calculated in lengths of silk. Eventually, silk became a form of currency, not only within China but also in settling debts with foreign nations. Silk became so much a part of the Chinese economy, way of life, and culture that 5 percent of Mandarin Chinese characters referred to some aspect of silk.
The Chinese monopoly on silk was eventually broken by competing countries. By 200 BC, the Koreans had mastered the rudiments of sericulture thanks to Chinese immigrants who brought the specialized knowledge with them. Five hundred years later, sericulture had spread along diverse “silk roads” to India, where it was embraced with the same vigor. Silk reached all the way to Rome, which became fascinated by the alluring textile. In about the fourth century BC, Roman accounts mention Seres, the semimythical Kingdom of Silk.
It is possible that the Roman legions first encountered actual silk at the Battle of Carrhae, near the Euphrates River, in 53 BC. It was said that the Parthians’ vivid silk banners unfurling in the wind startled the Roman troops, who promptly fled the battlefield. Within only a few decades, nobles in Rome wore Chinese silks as a sign of status, much as Chinese emperors had done for thousands of years. The Roman emperor Heliogabalus, who reigned briefly in the third century AD, insisted on wearing only silk. And near the end of the fourth century, one Roman report noted: “The use of silk which was once confined to the nobility has now spread to all classes without distinction, even to the lowest.”
Despite the inevitable dispersion of silk, the Chinese remained vigilant, and they succeeded in keeping the secrets of advanced sericulture to themselves until AD 550, when a pair of Nestorian monks appeared in the court of the emperor Justinian I with silkworm eggs concealed in their hollow bamboo walking sticks. In short order, the eggs hatched worms, the worms spun their cocoons, and Bombyx mori had come to the Byzantine Empire, bringing silk with it. Emulating China, the Byzantine Empire attempted to monopolize the production of its silk, and to retain control over the secrets of sericulture. While Byzantine silk soon eroded the market for the ordinary Chinese variety, most luxurious Chinese textiles continued to dominate markets in Central Asia, and were prized wherever they could be found. Soon Persia joined India and the Byzantine Empire in the war for sericultural supremacy. But even as Chinese silk lost ground to lower-grade foreign competitors, it continued