Mulberry connection
When people in the West first saw silk from China, they must have been amazed. Almost all material for clothing and bedding was made from linen or wool. It has a rough texture. Smooth and shiny silk was unlike any other material in the ancient world. And it had only one source - China.
Silk is made by silkworms. After the moth lays its eggs, they hatch as tiny caterpillars. The caterpillars munch on mulberry leaves until they are ready to start spinning a cocoon. A cocoon is the small silk home the caterpillar lives in while changing - or transforming - into a moth. In ancient times, mulberry trees grew only in China.
From the cocoon
To make silk, you need to get the moth out of its cocoon. In ancient China, silk makers dipped the cocoons in boiling water to kill the moths. A cocoon is spun from a single strand of silk about 1 kilometre long. That sounds like a lot. But to make one kilogram of silk, you need around 5,000-6,000 cocoons. A single kimono requires about 2,000 cocoons.
It's difficult to say when China began trading silk with the outside world. But silk found in a 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummy's hair tells us it started a long time ago. There was huge demand for Chinese silk. There was a series of trade routes to the Middle East and the Mediterranean. We call them the Silk Road today. In total they covered around 12,000 kilometres.
