Silk
China learns to unwind the cocoon of a moth into a thread a kilometre long.
- When
- Known to
- ± 300 years
- Era
- Bronze Age, Holocene
Sericulture involves rearing Bombyx mori on mulberry, killing the pupa before it breaks the cocoon, and unreeling a single continuous filament. Silk fragments and looms appear in China from the third millennium BCE. The process was kept secret for millennia under penalty of death, and silk became China's principal export and eventually the name of the routes carrying it — a technology whose monopoly shaped Eurasian trade for two thousand years.