The History of Silk

The earliest archaeological evidence of silk — residues on tombs and weaving tools — dates to the Yangshao culture villages of Neolithic China, with silk-working at Jiahu possibly reaching back to the late 7th millennium BC. Sericulture, the domestication of the silkworm Bombyx mori, began here and would remain a Chinese craft for thousands of years.

Location: Jiahu, Henan, China

After Zhang Qian's expeditions west under Emperor Wu of Han, sustained overland trade routes linked China to Central Asia, Persia, and ultimately Rome. Silk became the route's signature commodity, and China maintained a virtual monopoly on its production for another thousand years even as the fabric itself traveled the world.

Location: Chang'an, Han China

Two monks, likely Nestorians, smuggled silkworm eggs from China to Emperor Justinian I inside hollow canes, ending China's monopoly on production. Imperial silk workshops in Constantinople made Byzantium Europe's silk center for centuries, and the sale of the fabric's secret was punishable by death.

Location: Constantinople, Byzantine Empire

King Roger II of Sicily's raid on the Byzantine cities of Corinth and Thebes — famous for their silk workshops — brought Greek silk weavers and their equipment back to Palermo by force. Royal workshops there later produced the coronation mantle of the Holy Roman Empire, one of the great surviving silk objects of medieval Europe.

Location: Palermo, Sicily

Italian city-states, led by Lucca and later Venice, Genoa, and Florence, built the largest silk industries in Western Europe, drawing on techniques from the Crusades and Mediterranean trade. Silk banking and guild wealth in these cities financed much of the Italian Renaissance, including Florence's banking dynasties.

Location: Lucca and Venice, Italy

King Louis XI established a national silk industry in Lyon, which grew into Europe's silk capital over the following centuries. The city's canut silk weavers became so numerous and organized that their 1831 and 1834 revolts over wages were among the first major industrial labor uprisings in Europe.

Location: Lyon, France

Louis XIV's revocation of the Edict of Nantes drove hundreds of thousands of Protestant Huguenots from France, among them master silk weavers. Their migration seeded and strengthened silk industries in England, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the German states, accelerating the craft's spread beyond Italy and France.

Location: France

Joseph Marie Jacquard unveiled his loom, which used punched cards to automate the weaving of intricate patterned silk. It cut labor costs dramatically and its punched-card control concept later inspired early computing, including Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine and Herman Hollerith's tabulating machines.

Location: Lyon, France

An epidemic of pébrine and other silkworm diseases had collapsed French silk production. Louis Pasteur was sent to the south of France and, over five years, identified the microscopic parasite responsible and developed a method of selecting disease-free eggs that saved the European sericulture industry and advanced germ theory.

Location: Alès, France

DuPont announced nylon, the world's first fully synthetic fiber, developed by Wallace Carothers's team. Cheap, durable, and easy to care for, nylon and later polyester displaced silk from mass markets, beginning silk's long decline into a niche luxury fiber.

Location: Wilmington, Delaware, USA

As Japan's silk industry declined with industrialization, China rebuilt its sericulture on modern lines and re-emerged as the world's dominant producer, eventually supplying roughly 80 percent of global raw silk. The fiber that originated in Neolithic China returned, on an industrial scale, to its birthplace.

Location: China