Silk Silk Silk

Today I discovered silk. At the Suzhou Silk Factory you can be given a guided tour in English. On this tour the silk making process is explained. It turns out there are 2 types of silk worm cocoons.

This worker is searching for silk threads from single pod silk worm cocoons. A single pod has only 1 silk worm within it and contains 1 very long silk thread. Double pod cocoons contain 1 male and 1 female silk worm within a silk sac inside the cocoon. This sac gets emptied by the worker, who then stretches the sac. After these pieces have been stretched, 4 workers take each piece and stretch it to the size of a double bed. Although each piece does not stretch this big, the pieces are staggered. It takes over 7000 stretched pieces to make the inside of 1 silk duvet. Somehow this process takes only 15 minutes for the workers. Here I am stretching a piece of silk. Eventhough I am much larger than these women I had a hard time stretching the silk. It was very fun though. Then when I left they giggled in Chinese

(I'm getting used to this).

This factory also sells silk duvets and covers as well as an abundance of clothing, but don't think it's fun to go shopping here...My very skinny house mate is an XXL.

The Silk Museum (just a few steps from the Silk Factory) documents the history of silk in China. It has several cases of silk from most of the many Chinese dynasties, while showing the route taken by many of the silk merchants/traders. This route was called the silk road.

This picture is only relevant to silk, because the shoes are silk embroidered, however it is the first time I have ever seen shoes for bound feet in person. These shoes were used for women with bound feet from the 17th-20th C, since a woman with very tiny feet was seen as a beautiful woman.

With years of binding the feet would be incredibly small, disfigured and constantly painful to walk on. The effects of this binding lasted a lifetime and even when the practice was banned, many Chinese women still suffered the effects.

On a lighter note, this is a worker at the museum breaking up Mulberry leaves to feed them to the very tiny silk worms.

The process of silk making is so intricate that the price is no longer surprising...in fact after seeing the process I am surprised it is not more expensive.