China was synonymous with the word “silk” long before anyone had heard of the Great Wall of China or tea. To this day, no other country in the world is as advanced in knowledge and awareness of silkworms and silk weaving as China, which first discovered the material's potential 5,000 years ago.

The history of silk has always been inextricably intertwined with the history of China. The earliest maps of China, found in an emperor's tomb in Hunan province, were drawn on silk and are believed to date back more than 2,000 years. Silk has also been part of some of the most important aspects of Chinese cultural heritage, such as calligraphy and embroidery traditionally done on silk.

The best works of silk embroidery date back to the Ming and Qing dynasties, when four schools of embroidery were formed - Suzhou, Hunan, Guangdong and Sichuan.

Each of them had its own characteristics. For example, Suzhou embroidery emphasized detail and elegance, while the Guangdong embroidery style was characterized by bright colors and decorative designs. Sichuan embroidery emphasized pattern composition and vibrancy; Hunanskaya specialized in mastering the methods of Chinese painting.

Real fine hand embroidery is rarely seen on large items such as bedspreads and long dresses. A common silk embroidery called "xiu pyen" can be found on pillowcases in many hotel stores and specialized craft shops.

Silk is a traditional export product in China. Currently, China is the largest producer and exporter of silk in the world. 70% of all Chinese silk is produced for export. Raw silk production accounts for 70% of world production and 85% of world exports. Raw silk is silk cocoons broken into fibers that have not been processed. The export volume of silk fabric accounts for more than 40% of world exports. China plays a leading role in the global silk trade and is gaining an impeccable reputation throughout the world.

Natural silk

Natural silk is a delicate soft fabric. The material is hygroscopic and hygienic, extremely pleasant to the body and forms magnificent draperies. Where is the best place to buy natural silk? Of course, it is better to do this in its historical homeland - China; Chinese manufacturers provide a huge selection of silk fabrics of various types of excellent quality and at a low price.

How to distinguish real silk from a fake?

The simplest way is by touch. Real silk is like real pearls: the fake will be very slippery, but in real silk you can feel the smallest grains. For raw silk: a piece of raw silk will burn to ashes while rayon, if set on fire, will become sticky.

Traditional types of Chinese silk

Silk Damascus is a silk fabric with a continuous pattern.

Silk Gas is a simple weave fabric. It is distinguished by its lightness, transparency, tenderness, holds its shape well, without shine.

Shu silk is known as the most complex type of silk fabric. It was popular during the Han Dynasty.

Song style silk

Silk Tapestry is a decorative art that tells a story like a painting, but using silk and silk fabrics.

Currently, there are many modern varieties of silk fabric, these are: satin, satin, crepe, chiffon, organza, dupont, taffeta and others.

Silk production in China

The main silk production in China is concentrated in the southern regions of the Yangtze River Delta. Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Sichuan are famous provinces for silk production. Silk production is one of the main industries in the cities of Suzhou, Hangzhou, Nanjing and Shaoxing.

The city of Shengze is located in Jiangsu Province, Wujiang County, a two-hour drive from Shanghai. Shengze is an example of manufacturing concentration in China. This city is considered the largest center for the production of silk and light fabrics.

Zhejiang Province is one of China's leading silk producers, as well as synthetic fibers and wool. A feature of the silk produced here, in addition to its high quality, is its relatively low cost.

Production process

Silk is obtained from the protein fibers of the silkworm cocoon, which was domesticated in China around 3000 BC. e. Silk production is a long and delicate process that requires careful control.

Silkworm butterflies lay approximately 500 eggs during their life cycle, which lasts 4–6 days. The larvae, hatched from the eggs, are fed mulberry leaves in artificially created and strictly maintained conditions. The larvae have a voracious appetite, their weight increases by leaps and bounds.

After the larvae accumulate enough energy, a substance resembling mucus (bioglue) appears around them. This substance is produced by their special glands. As a result, cocoons are formed that look like white fluffy balls.

After 8 - 9 days the larvae are killed.

Workers immerse the cocoons in hot water to dissolve the adhesive and release the threads. The length of one such thread can be from 600 to 900 meters. 5 - 8 threads are twisted into a single whole, resulting in yarn that is used in production (raw silk).

To obtain 1 kg of raw silk you will need about 45,000 cocoons. The available silk threads are then made into fabric or used in embroidery.

When silk is used to make items such as pillows or blankets, the threads are drawn out into flat sheets. These sheets are then placed on top of each other.

Price of silk from China

The price of silk fabric depends on the composition of the material - artificial or natural; as well as the presence of drawings, which can be plant and floral motifs, images of animals, coins, frescoes and even paintings.

On average, the price varies from 300 to several thousand rubles per meter.

Always wash silk items with a mild liquid detergent by hand in cold water, or select the delicate cycle on your washing machine. A few drops of vinegar in the final rinse will help revive faded colors. Do not dry silk items in direct sunlight. Silk is essentially a protein, very similar to the human epidermis, and therefore does not tolerate high temperatures. Iron at moderate temperatures on the reverse side; a good result will be achieved when the clothes are still slightly damp. And the last tip: the iron should move in the direction of the fibers of the fabric.

Organization of textile supplies from China:

Silk products from China are always popular. Therefore, if you decide to start a business selling Chinese silk, you will surely succeed. However, there is one important condition: first of all, you need to find a trusted supplier.

Our company can offer the following services:

• Over the years of work, we have accumulated data on leading manufacturers of silk fabrics and their products, so we will promptly select and give you their contact information;
• we can work

Silk is a soft fabric made from threads extracted from the cocoon of the silkworm. Silk originally originated from China and was an important trade commodity that was transported to Europe along the Silk Road.

In China, it was prohibited, under penalty of death, to export silkworm caterpillars or their larvae outside the country. In 555, however, two monks managed to take several larvae to the Byzantine king. From these larvae and thanks to the knowledge they acquired in China about silkworm breeding, silk production became possible outside of China.

Silk - etymology

That the art of making silk was discovered in China is perhaps not an accident, since the silkworm, which produces the best fiber, feeds on the leaves of the white mulberry, which is native to China. According to ancient Chinese legends, silk (ssu - silk in Chinese, sheshi - in Hebrew) was accidentally discovered by the first wife of the Chinese Emperor Huang Ti (reigned 2698 - 2598 BC), after which the emperor's wife was elevated to the rank of Goddess of Silk . Archaeological finds suggest that silk was actually known in some regions of China about a thousand years before Huang Ti.

At first, silk in China was used mainly to sew clothes for rulers, and only later did silk products become available to the middle strata of the population. Silk clothing differed favorably from the coarse cotton products that existed at that time in many respects: softness, breathability, moisture permeability, protection from heat and cold, and, perhaps, the antiseptic properties of silk fabrics, known in those years. Therefore, overseas rulers, despite the fabulous prices, immediately switched to a silk wardrobe as soon as they had access to silk.

When the financial benefits of trading silk with foreigners became obvious, the Chinese imperial house monopolized silk production and began trading it with other countries; how profitable it was to trade silk can be seen from the fact that there were periods in China when silk acquired the status of currency. Chinese emperors strictly controlled the preservation of commercial secrets of silk production - under pain of death, no one had the right to divulge the secrets of the silk business. The know-how was guarded so strictly that in the ancient Mediterranean, where silk began to arrive from China in ancient times, no one knew the technology for making silk. For a long time in the Mediterranean it was believed that silk yarn grew on the leaves of some special tree; however, around the time of Pliny, the Mediterranean became aware of the silkworm, although Scandinavian sources in the 12th century still mentioned sulphurs that combed the yarn from the leaves and sold it to other countries to make textiles.

It is known that in Central Asia, Chinese silk appeared in the first millennium BC; in Egypt they knew about silk already in the 11th century BC - it is from this period that one of the Egyptian mummies of a woman is dated, in whose hair a piece of silk fabric was found, and there is no data on the time of the beginning of the silk trade in the Mediterranean, although J. Thomson (History Ancient Geography, p. 61) mentions that pieces of silk fabric were discovered in prehistoric layers during the excavations of Troy; in the Saka burial mounds of the Pazyrnak valley in the Altai Mountains, Soviet archaeologists discovered Chinese silk fabrics from the 5th-6th centuries BC (In the footsteps of ancient cultures, editor G.B. Fedorov, p. 136), preserved due to permafrost conditions. It is assumed that silk became widespread in India during the reign of the Han Dynasty in China (206 century BC - 220 century AD); It was in the second century BC that Chinese merchants opened up a large-scale silk trade with India. It is believed that the Indians became intermediaries between the Chinese and the Mediterranean in the trade of silk fabrics.

So, we have information about the city of merchants Surozh/Sugd, through which the Slavs traded with Greece and Italy, there is information about the Sogdians/Sugdians in Central Asia, who controlled a large section of the Silk Road along which Chinese silk was delivered to Europe. In addition, here is the etymology of the English word silk, according to the Oxford English Dictionary:

1. Silk, n. and a. Forms: a. sioloc, seolc, seohic, seolc, seolk (solk), seolke; selk, selk(e, silk, silke; sylk(e, sylcke. Stapro-Indo-European sioloc, seoloc, etc (early *siluc) masculine, differs in form and gender in Old Norse and Icelandic silki (Norwegian, Swedish and Danish *siluc), is not found in other Germanic languages, but is found in Old Slavic silk. It is assumed that it comes from the Latin sericus or Greek silk (Seres, ?????), an eastern people (possibly Chinese), which imported silk. The transition from R to L probably occurred in some languages, from which this word passed into the Slavic languages.
2. Seric. Lat. Sericus (1) belonging to the sulphurs, (2) made of silk.
3. Seres. Lat. Seres (Greek ?????), from where sericum – silk. The name of a people anciently inhabiting some part of East Asia (possibly China), from whose country silk was believed to have originated. From: Serial wool, silk.
4. Serian. Serial worm, silkworm.
5. Serge. Options: Sarge, surge, searge, sierge, serg, sharge, serge. Old French Serge, sarge (Modern French serge) = serga, sargua, Portuguese, Catalan sarja, Spanish sarga, Romanian sarica - Latin *sarica = classic Latin serica (lana). From French the word passed into other Teutonic languages: German sarsche, Danish sargie, sars, Swedish sarge, sars. This is probably what silk was originally called, although there is no evidence for this in early English. But fabric names are often used to name fabrics that are cheaper and coarser than those from which their name is derived.

A woolen fabric whose properties probably varied significantly between periods. Until the 16th century, this was mainly the name for fabrics for curtains, bedspreads, etc.; after the 16th century, this was the name for the fabrics from which clothes were made for the less wealthy segments of the population (men and women), probably due to wear resistance, and not price, which apparently was not so small. This is now the name given to a very strong diagonally woven worsted or combed wool fabric that is often used for clothing and other purposes.

It turns out that the ancient Greeks and Italians used the word sericus, ???????, silk to call silk fabrics, and the silk itself was called Seres wool, named after a certain East Asian people Seres/Seres, which, as historians suggest, were Chinese people (in the same way, in Western Europe, porcelain products are simply called China, which literally means China, since it was from China that porcelain “came” to Europe, and in the Middle Ages in Rus', qini was the name for a type of fabric, Chinese material); these ancient Greek and ancient Latin words are considered the ancestors of the word silk in modern European languages ​​(it is curious that one of the Germanic forms of the word silk, namely sarsche, translates the sound Zh in transcription). It is assumed that the French were the first to borrow the word seric from the Italians, from where this word came into the Germanic and Slavic languages, where in English the word serge initially meant only silk, and then began to mean woven material in general, and among the Slavs, twill meant silk (M. Vasmer) ; later P was replaced by L, and the modern form of the word silk appeared, silk (in the same way, in the old days the name of the city of Amsterdam was written either through P or through L - Amsterdam). In Korean, silk is sir, which is also very close to the ancient Greek and ancient Latin forms.

Most likely, the ancient Greeks called the Chinese silk merchants serami, but interpreters of the terms of later times hypothesized that the Greeks and Latins called the Chinese bringing silk from China serami. Probably, the Sers, they are Surozhians, they are also Sogdians, are one and the same people who were an intermediary between China and the Mediterranean in the silk trade, on whose behalf silk itself in Europe began to be called Serge/Tarzha. The presence of two forms of this word - seres and serje, suggests that the ethnonym ser is a shortened or modified form of the ethnonym, in the last syllable of which the sound K/G/Zh was present.

It is possible that sarga, which in Russian means gray household cloth, as well as twill, which in Russian means a way of weaving threads into fabric, Ukrainian serdak, meaning cloth dress among the Galicians, Cherkasin is a gray cotton fabric, and Cherkeska is a type of outerwear In Ukrainian, Karelian sarga and Finnish sarka, meaning coarse woolen fabric, Estonian sarah, meaning a shirt, Erzyan sarga, meaning cotton or silk fabric and a sarah, which meaning a thread, as well as a Sermyga, which means simply rough fabric, Chuvash sarah, meaning a female nabedman, Bashkir sergetysh, meaning felt sweatshirt, Moksha sergat, meaning woolen windings, derived from a word originally meaning only silk, but then used to mean simply fabric or various products made from any fabric. For Indian women, the word sari, sarhi refers to a robe made in the form of a long, bright, usually silk piece of fabric, and the fabric itself from which sarhi is made is also called sari, or sarhi; sargon/sarung is the national dress of the Indonesians; in Akkadian sirijam it is a vest, a camisole, and the ancient Jews, when praying, wore long white linen shirts, which were called sargeness; among the ancient Greeks this is an outer dress, this is a robe, rags, this is a long linen dress (the latter term is of Egyptian origin). Regarding the Slavic sundress, shirt, Old Church Slavonic asshole (meaning the Old Church Slavic pronunciation of the word shirt), English and Scandinavian sark, Malaysian sarong, which mean approximately the same thing - etymologists have not finally decided, although the answer is obvious. Also, sharpan means a piece of fabric that women wear on the back of their heads (Chuvashia), sorpan is a women’s scarf among the Cheremis and Mari, and among the Kazakhs, sarpai is an honorary garment. It is interesting that in some ancient Russian chronicles silk fabrics are called daragas, roads, which is considered borrowed from Tatar or Kyrgyz, in which the word darai means heavy silk fabric, and in Chuvash taraj simply means silk - probably in these examples S turned into T and D, as well as in the words from the Ukrainian language kireya (long cloth outerwear) and kir-Kitayka (a type of fabric), S turned into K.

It is curious that the following sewing terminology is not only the same in modern languages ​​and Sanskrit, but is also consonant with the European word silk. Sanskrit sivana, meaning sewing, schov, meaning weaver and siv, meaning to sew, and sivan, meaning sewing in Hindi, very close to Greek ?????, Slavic sew, seam, English sew (sartor - tailor), Swedish sy and Danish sye; the Sanskrit siri, meaning female weaver, is very similar to the Slavic seamstress and English sewer; Sanskrit sutra, meaning lace, thread, similar to Slavic lace, English thread, thread; Probably, this also includes the Akkadian sake, kravchiy and subatu, meaning clothing, fabric. The word Sarj in Sanskrit has two different meanings: 1) to flow, to pour; 2) weave, weave, twist, which is close to the English sewer, - 1) Swedish; 2) drain, gutter.

Contextually, the circle of sewing terminology also includes the words wool and flax, the appearance of which probably dates back to the times of the Indo-European community. Common Slavic wave (which may be related to fiber, hair), meaning wool, is related to Sanskrit vala (hair) and vellana (waving), English wool, Old High German wolla, Germanic wol, Swedish ull, Danish uld, Lithuanian and Latvian vilna, Latin lana, Greek ?????, Old High German wolla, Welsh gwlan, Irish olann, Latin vellus, Sanskrit urna. Common Slavic flax (to which line, rope and line are possibly close) are related to Latin linum, Greek ?????, Lithuanian linai, Latvian lini, Gothic lein, Irish lin; as well as the word thread, line - English line, Old High German lina, French ligne, Danish linie. The word rope also has its distant relatives in other languages: rope in English, virve in Lithuanian and Latvian, reip in Norwegian, rep in Swedish, reb in Danish, varatra in Sanskrit.

Silk fiber and silk fabric have always aroused increased interest, surrounded by an aura of mystery. Returning to the origins of this amazing material, one cannot help but recall one legend.

A LEGEND FROM THE DEPTH OF CENTURIES

Five thousand years ago in the Celestial Empire, the wife of the third ruler Huang Di, a young empress named Xi Ling Chi, gave her husband a luxurious gift - amazing clothes worthy only of an emperor. She wove thin silk fabric from the threads of silkworm cocoons, from which a noble outfit was sewn.

The 14-year-old empress learned about the amazing properties of silkworm cocoons by accident: while drinking tea in the garden, one silkworm cocoon fell into her cup. He fell and turned around, stretching out like a thread, beautiful and strong. Thousands of cocoons were collected by Xi Ling Chi's maids so that she could please her beloved husband.

Thanks to the empress and the silkworm butterfly, the world learned about silk, and the discoverer herself became a real deity for the Chinese people, immortalizing her name in the history of China.

THE PROPERTY OF CHINA OR HOW DID THE WHOLE WORLD KNOW ABOUT SILK?

Chinese traders quickly appreciated the value of silk, and for the state, trade in this material, amazing in its properties, was of real financial interest. That is why for more than 3 thousand years the secret of its creation was vigilantly guarded. Many brave adventurers laid down their lives when trying to take at least a small batch of cocoons out of the country. Under pain of death, they tried to steal the secrets of silk several times, but only in 550 AD. Silkworm larvae were secretly transported to Byzantium, hidden in the staves of two wandering monks.

In India, the appearance of silk is associated with the tricks of a king who wooed a Chinese princess and demanded silkworm larvae and mulberry seeds as a dowry for his young wife. The young princess was fascinated by the groom and risked taking away the precious gift in the depths of her intricate hairstyle. What won't you do for love?

Silk was also in great demand in Europe. The Great Silk Road, the caravan route between the Mediterranean and East Asia, appeared precisely thanks to him. But the price of the precious material was exorbitant - in Rome, silk became a trade currency, the privilege of very rich people and was practically worth its weight in gold. Let us give at least this example: Julius Caesar, during his reign as emperor, ordered the awnings of carts and palanquins to be covered with silk fabric, thereby demonstrating his wealth, power and strength.

Silk has another undeniable advantage - hygiene. Clothes made from it did not harbor insects that terrorized rich people who were not accustomed to spending too much time on personal hygiene.

French womanizers covered their beds with silky fabric to tone up and increase amorous agility, and the famous conqueror of hearts and fashion trendsetter Marquise de Pompadour introduced the fashion for pure silk underwear, seductive and luxurious.