The Wuzhen Silk Factory

 Almost everything in Wuzhen was interesting....but the most fascinating thing to see, at least for me, was the silk factory.  Silk is forever one of the mysteries of the Orient.  Silk conjure up images of Emperors in the Forbidden City and Marco Polo and caravans on the Silk Road.  Silk is as Chinese as a fortune cookie.  (Actually, you probably already know that there are no fortune cookies in China.  They are a Western invention.)

 The silk factory at Wuzhen is not a commercial venture these days.  It is strictly a museum piece for the tourists.   The workers there demonstrate the history and processes of silk making over the ages.  It all starts with the silkworms, shown in the top photo.  The worms are introduced as hatchlings into bamboo baskets filled with fresh leaves of the mulberry tree. The worms eat, the worms grow, more leaves are added...and so it goes until the worms reach adulthood.  Then they are encouraged to climb onto branches and spin their cocoons.  I don't know for sure, but I'd guess the ones shown at top are getting close to that point.  They're about 2 1/2 inches long.

The cocoons are then harvested and sold to the cloth producers.  We were told that worm and cocoon production is still a big business in the surrounding rural areas.  The worm farmers are essentially independent contractors, selling the cocoons to the silk factories by the kilo.  

The first thing the factory does is to sort the cocoons to remove any with defects.  A good cocoon can be unwound into a single filament that is 1000 or more yards in length.  A defective cocoon is one where the filament is snagged or damaged so that cannot be perfectly unwound.  A defective cocoon would be like a ball of twine that tangles into knots as it unrolls.  (The defective cocoons are not thrown away, though.  One of the demonstrations was done by a woman who deftly stretched the defective cocoons like a pizza into a large disk of silk gauze.  The silk gauze is then used as stuffing for pillows or coats or quilts.  We earlier saw some silk gauze being used as netting to keep bugs out of the soy sauce fermentation vats.)

The second photo shows good cocoons floating in a bath of hot water.  The hot water causes the silk filaments to release so they can be unwound and spun.  Legend says this trick was discovered by an ancient empress when a cocoon fell into her afternoon tea.  The ones in the photo are in various states of unravelment, with the more translucent ones being farther along than the white ones.  If you look, you can see the dark brown silkworm larva in the translucent ones.  Which reminds me of another story....

It was probably in my second week in Suzhou that I screwed up enough courage to get some food at the neighborhood chicken place.  No English is spoken there, but they do have pictures on the menu.  So I walked in, successfully placed my order (by pointing), and then sat down.  To my surprise, the waiter brought out a tray of appetizers - a mixture of crackers, tofu, and beans.  Dark brown beans.  Dark brown beans which turned out to be stir fried silkworm larva.

The filaments are unwound from the cocoon and spun into thread.  The photos above and below show two different generations of spinning machines.  In the one at top, the woman drives the spinning wheel with a foot pedal as she tends the cocoons in the barrel of water between her legs.  In the more modern machine below, the woman is able to tend several spinning wheels at the same time.   What I never realized, but you can see clearly in the photos, is that a single thread of silk is actually made by spinning 10 or more separate filaments together.  It's amazing to see how skillfully these women can take a new cocoon, quickly locate the tail of the filament, and then lightly touch the tail to the spinning thread to start it to unwind. 

 By the way, in the photo above, the blue container at the bottom contains silkworm larva that are destined for deep-frying in restaurants all over China.

 After the thread is spun it is dyed and prepared for weaving.  There was a separate workshop for the weavers, where they displayed different types of looms and explained how the technology evolved over the ages.  They showed various generations of standard looms and a comparatively modern Jacquard loom (which is famous among technology geeks as the inspiration for the computer punch card).  The niftiest of the looms, shown below, was the two person loom for weaving of brocades.

The photo above shows the brocade loom - with the weaver below in the foreground and the warp worker above in the background.  The weaver is managing many weft threads of different colors to weave a pattern into the cloth.  Since he actually works the cloth from the back side, he relies on a mirror, just above his knees, to see the reflection of the final pattern as it develops on the front side.  They lady up in the rafters pulls the strings, at the behest of the weaver, to manipulate the warp threads up or down to produce the desired pattern.

After seeing this process, it's easy to understand why silk was the fabric of royalty.  Prior to the industrial revolution, the production of single bolt of cloth probably required an investment of several man-years....if you added up the time of the cocoon production and the spinning and the weaving.  Even if the workers were paid nothing, there would still be the cost of feeding and housing them.  Not too many people could afford that production cost.  And I'm sure the traders on the Silk Road were taking a retail mark-up.

Speaking of the silk trade, there was also a gift shop in the Wuzhen silk factory.  That goes without saying.  Though the prices are probably cheap relative to historical prices,  it is still possible to spend a king's ransom on silk in China.