The History of Silk
Long before roads and empires, there was a thread. Finer than a hair, stronger than it looks, it linked China to the rest of the world for millennia. This is its journey, from the first Chinese villages to Paris.
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6500Circa · BC
The first traces
In the tombs of Jiahu, in Henan, archaeologists have found traces of silk proteins some eight thousand five hundred years old. Long before writing, long before roads, China already knew what the cocoon could offer.
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2700Circa · BC
The legend of Leizu
Tradition tells that one day the empress Leizu, wife of the Yellow Emperor, saw a cocoon fall into her cup of tea. In the hot water, it unravelled into a long, shining thread. She is said to have learned to rear the worm, to reel the cocoon, to weave. She is still honoured as the mother of sericulture.
Behind the legend lies a simpler truth: silk was born of patient observation of the living world, and of women’s hands that passed on its secret for centuries.
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1300Circa · BC
A closely guarded secret
Under the Shang dynasty, inscriptions carved on bones and tortoise shells already name the silkworm, the mulberry tree and silk. The fabric is reserved for rites and for the powerful, and its secret does not leave China.
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138BC
Westward
Emperor Wu of Han sends his envoy Zhang Qian to the kingdoms of Central Asia. In his wake open caravan trails that will link Chang’an to Persia, then to the Mediterranean. Dazzled, the Romans call the people who make silk the Seres. It is from this name that the word sericulture comes.
These routes carry fabrics, but also languages, beliefs and motifs. Not until 1877 does a German geographer, Ferdinand von Richthofen, give them the name we know today. Our Silk Road collection carries their legacy.
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552AD
Eggs in a bamboo cane
According to the historian Procopius, two monks bring Emperor Justinian silkworm eggs hidden in hollow canes. The Chinese monopoly comes to an end. Silkworms are now reared in Byzantium, and silk gradually spreads around the whole Mediterranean.
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1138Hangzhou
Hangzhou, city of silk
The Southern Song dynasty makes Hangzhou its capital. Between West Lake and the mulberry trees of Zhejiang, the city becomes one of the great centres of Chinese silk. Under the Ming and then the Qing, it houses an imperial manufactory weaving for the court.
It is in this region that our squares are still woven and printed today.
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1536Lyon
Lyon, silk the French way
Francis I grants two merchants the privilege of establishing silk weaving in Lyon. The city draws weavers, then designers. Under Louis XIV, its fabrics dress the courts of Europe, and in 1801 Joseph Marie Jacquard’s loom transforms the weaving of patterns there. France has found its style: ornamental, precise, refined.
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1865Cévennes
The road reversed
Pébrine, a silkworm disease, decimates French silk farms. Louis Pasteur is sent to the Cévennes to understand it. Lyon’s silk merchants then turn to Asia: Chinese silk takes the road west once more, and the thread between China and France grows taut again.
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2009UNESCO
A heritage of humanity
UNESCO inscribes Chinese sericulture and silk craftsmanship on the list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. From Zhejiang to Sichuan, gestures thousands of years old are recognised as a shared heritage.
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TodayParis
A thread that connects
Silk does not belong to us. It came before us by several millennia. We have simply chosen to hold one of its threads: motifs drawn by artists, conceived in Paris, woven and printed in the Hangzhou region. From China to Paris, the journey continues.
