Silk comes from the silkworm. The worm spins a cocoon, people reel the cocoon into thread, and the thread is woven into plain silk, twill, gauze, pongee and satin; these steps together are silk weaving.
Silk fabric and ribbon over 4,700 years old were found at the Qianshanyang site in Huzhou, Zhejiang, among the earliest known silk textiles.
The oracle bones of the Shang already have the graphs for silkworm, mulberry, silk and cloth, and the bronzes of Yinxu still bear the imprint of silk, and by then sericulture had become part of the state economy.
In 417, the thirteenth year of Yixi of the Eastern Jin, a brocade office was set up at Jiankang, which began Nanjing brocade and later became the imperial yunjin of the Yuan, Ming and Qing. Silk was also the core good of the Silk Road trade, which is treated in the Silk Road class.
Silk & Brocade is the class in the chapter on Crafts on silk weaving. It covers the silk tradition from raising silkworms and reeling silk to fine fabrics: the silk fragments of Qianshanyang, the graphs for silkworm, mulberry, silk and cloth in Shang writing, the brocade office at Jiankang in the Eastern Jin, and the imperial yunjin brocade that grew from it.
