Nature's Evil

The first silk moth farms appeared round contemporary Peking long before our era. Only the higher echelons of society had the right to wear silk garments; a peasant who dared to wear silk could pay with his life. Silk was used as a currency. The salary of civil servants, and later of army personnel, was calculated in rolls of silk, and commoners paid their taxes in silk. Thus silk products became the embodiment of luxury throughout the civilised world. There were many producers but very few carriers who could lead their caravans across the deserts. The regional monopoly meant that prices could be maintained, producing high profits even with low volumes and extremely long cycles of trade. Hardly anything had more impact on world affairs than this substance secreted by the grubs of a strange insect which ate the leaves of the mulberry tree.

Legend has it that Europeans first encountered silk during Alexander the Great’s campaign; he may even have wanted to conquer India because of silk. Rolls of silk travelled from the East; sacks of silver and bales of wool went from the West. Pack camels travelled for months, covering about 10,000 kilometres. In the mountains the bales were transferred onto horses. For the camels and merchants this was more often than not a one-way journey; many perished on the road. But for those who survived the profits could be colossal. Dozens of books have been written about the Great Silk Road, but some researchers doubt if it ever existed. Up until the Industrial Revolution, Asia was a more capacious market than Europe. But trading in Asia was quite different from carrying a cargo across an ocean on a ship that sailed to its destination without calling in at any ports on the way. It was more a case of the slow diffusion of goods from one transit point to another. Whatever the merchants couldn’t sell locally, they sent on further towards the West.

Silk was popular in ancient Rome just at the time when the severe Romans began to acquire the taste for luxury. ‘Wretched flocks of maids labour so that the adulteress may be visible through her thin dress, so that her husband has no more acquaintance than any outsider or foreigner with his wife’s body,’ fumed Seneca. 3 The Romans used this airy fabric for every style of tunic and cloak, but they didn’t know the secret of its origins; this was a mystery which travellers, scholars and missionaries tried to solve. Warm fur and water-repellent silk were often worn together. The Roman custom was to wear a silk cloak with a fur lining. The Renaissance fashion was the opposite – a fur coat with a silk lining. The contrast between the fine silk, which fitted the body like a second skin, and the coarse animal skins or wool garments of peasants and paupers built an image of the noble body that was characteristic for Western man. Followers of ascetic traditions chose wool in preference to silk and fur; Franciscan monks still wear a brown wool robe tied with a white girdle, also made from wool. In Central Asia there was a useful myth that the Koran forbade Muslims to wear silk, so people there wore a mixture of cotton and silk while pure silk was exported.

Later, silk dressed the walls of the elegant rooms of the wealthy – the house was compared to a human body and took on the same kind of class distinctions. Carriages and gondolas were upholstered in silk and decorated with pennants and standards – the symbolic bodies of Western states. During the Renaissance the global demand for oriental silk was so high that Europe was constantly in a trade deficit with China and Japan, paying them with silver from the Spanish mines in Mexico. In this global trade one primary commodity was exchanged for another – silk for silver; but the proportion of paid work invested in silk was much higher than that invested in silver, and thus China prospered while Europe lagged behind.

Sericulture remained a Chinese secret until two Christian monks brought back some silk moth eggs and seeds of the mulberry tree; according to legend, on the journey to Constantinople they hid them in a bamboo stem, just as Prometheus had hidden fire in a hollow reed. In any case, sericulture flourished in the coastal towns of Italy, and particularly in thirteenth-century Venice. There was a boom in farms growing mulberry trees in Veneto, Tuscany and Lombardy. However, in Italy the spring frosts prevented the cocoons of the silkworms maturing on the mulberry leaves, as they did in China and Persia. The larvae had to be reared indoors, spread out on special tables, fed with chopped mulberry leaves and kept at room temperature. The maturing of the cocoons was stimulated by particular flowers which had to be brought indoors. At the right moment, the cocoon had to be soaked in hot water, killing the larva inside it, and then unravelled. The process required the cleanliness of a lab and the exact control of temperature and timing – hardly typical conditions for peasant work.