Smuggling Domesticated Silkworms along the Silk Roads | Curator's Corner S9 Ep8 | The Silk Princess

Today I'm going to tell you what the Silk Roads actually are about. And to do that, I'm going to have to talk about secret technologies and the domestication of worms. Hi, I'm Lu Yu-Ping. I'm a curator in the Asia Department at the British Museum. I'm also one of the co-curators of the Silk Roads exhibition that's opening today. Welcome to my corner. There are many different aspects that we can explore when we consider the Silk Roads as a history of connections, exploring the movement of people, objects, and ideas. And that's what I'd like to explore today through this remarkable object from the Silk Roads that's known as the Silk Princess painting. So what we see here is a painting on a wooden panel. It was found at a site called Dandan Oilek near Putan in the southern edge of the Taklamakan Desert in present-day northwest China. And it dates to about the 7th to 8th century, so it's about 1,300 years old. An incredibly precious object. There is a legend that circulated in the kingdom of Putan about how the kingdom started to produce silk. There's historical record written by a Tang dynasty monk called Xuanzang who visited Putan in the 7th century on his way to India. And there he came across this legend and recorded it in his travel accounts. So the story goes, Putan did not have the knowledge of sericulture or silk farming. The king of Putan wanted to develop this for his kingdom. And so he approached a kingdom nearby, a kingdom in the east, that had the knowledge of silk farming and asked for the marriage of one of the princesses, hoping that this princess would be able to bring the knowledge of sericulture to Putan. And that was what happened, according to this story. When she found out that the new kingdom that she was going to be moving to did not have the knowledge of sericulture, she thought that wouldn't do. And so she decided she would bring this by smuggling the silkworm eggs and also the seeds of the mulberry tree in her headdress. So what we see here in the center is the silk princess. And you can see how elaborately her headdress is depicted here. This elaborate headdress that she was wearing would not be searched. And that was how she managed to bring this knowledge to the kingdom of Putan. And that is the story of how Putan got its silk. So why was she hiding this silkworm eggs and also the mulberry tree seeds in her headdress? For a long time, sericulture was only found in ancient China from as early as 2700 BCE. So it was quite an exclusive product from China. And perhaps one of the reasons why it was kept a secret for so long is because it was such a luxury commodity and was so highly sought after. It must have been very lucrative. The knowledge of sericulture, that is silk farming, is a very particular kind of silk production. Because sericulture is the production of silk from domesticated silkworms. These domesticated silkworms need to be looked after constantly. They eat a huge amount of leaves from the tree of the white mulberry. And it is the white mulberry tree leaves that actually lead to the highest quality silk as well. And so the two kind of go hand in hand, which is why you have both hidden inside the headdress of the princess in here. Once you have the silkworms, they have to be looked after day and night. And this took perhaps several weeks before the silkworms started to spin the silk and make the cocoon. At that point, if we left the silk cocoons as they were, eventually the moths would come out from the silk cocoon and thus break the cocoon. And so in order to prevent the length of the silk being broken, the practice was to either boil the silk cocoon or to steam them in order to kill the pupae inside. And what results then is a silk cocoon that you can reel the silk from. And actually, they can be as long as 900 meters, one single thread of silk. So it's quite extraordinary what you can get from a single cocoon. The knowledge of silk historically in China has long been associated with women's work. The legendary founder of fairy culture is Empress Lei Zu, the wife of the legendary yellow emperor Huang Yi. And she is credited with discovering how you can domesticate the silkworm and reel the silk from the silk cocoons. In ancient China, there is this understanding that men would go out into the fields to farm the land and then women would be in the household looking after the household and weaving and also looking after the silkworms. And so this is the kind of idealized division of labor according to gender. And a princess of elite status certainly could have traveled in a company by female servants. It is entirely plausible that her female servants could have had that knowledge. And so this is also what is being depicted on this panel because you have the silk princess in the center. Then on the left side of the wooden panel, you have another female figure who is pointing very deliberately at her headdress, highlighting the importance of what is actually hidden in that headdress. We know this has something to do with the silk because of what's depicted between them. That's what's described as a basket with little round objects in it. And this has been identified as a basket of silk cocoons. On the far right of the painting, we see another female figure. And this female figure is actually seated in front of a loom. She is weaving. And in her hand, she is holding one of the tools of weaving. That is a weaver's comb. This is what's held in the hand of the woman in the far right of the panel. When you're weaving, you have horizontal threads and also vertical threads. And when you add the threads, you have to secure them against each other. And this comb, by pressing onto the threads, keeps the weave tight and secure. And you can see how fine the comb is. So it would have been quite a fine weave here. What's also quite remarkable about this object, which was found at a site not too far away from Bhutan and also probably dated to around the same period as this painted panel, is that you can see the areas of the grain on the wood that has smoothed out as a result of its use. The sign of a weaver's hand from thousands of years ago actually recorded in this object. So what we see here is the story of the silk princess who smuggled out seeds of the mulberry tree and the silkworm eggs, as well as its successful outcome. We have the production of the cocoons seen here in the basket. And then finally, the weaving of silk textiles. And all of this is then overseen by this four-armed deity, which is described as the deity of weaving or of silk. The deity of silk or weaving is kind of overseeing everything, but it's a much smaller figure. The story of the silk princess on this panel actually highlights this knowledge as very much something that was transmitted by women. All the three women actually have halos around them. And that's really interesting because it indicates to us that these women have become elevated to a kind of stately status. They are associated with some kind of local belief in the transmission of Saric culture to Khotan. And the place where the silkworms were brought to Khotan became a kind of sacred site and a monastery was actually built there. So that's another kind of religious dimension to the story. So this brings us to another aspect of how this story and this panel actually expands our understanding of the silk world. Again, it's not just about the trade of a commodity across overland routes, but it's also the movement of other cultural elements and intangible qualities such as religious beliefs. And so on the one hand, we have the elevation of these women to a kind of stately status, which seems to have been a local belief at Khotan. But this wooden panel was actually found at a Buddhist site. Dandan Oile was made up of a Buddhist monastery that had been abandoned by the 8th century. And this particular panel was found inside one of the shrines. So we have an interesting scenario here where there is a mix of the local beliefs in this legend of the silk princess coming into contact with the belief of Buddhism, which is also another belief that's spread throughout the Silk Road. According to the records from Shen Zang, the Tang Dynasty monk who wrote about this story, after this knowledge of Saric culture spread to Khotan, the princess gave a decree forbidding the killing of the silkworms. But perhaps this was because it was so precious. There were so few of them, so they had to keep them. But it's also possible that this had something to do with the Buddhist idea of trying to avoid the killing of living beings. But that meant that the making of the silk must have been slightly different than in Khotan compared to what it was in Imperial China, where you would have the complete spread of the silk in a cocoon, whereas in the Khotan, if we are following the story of Shen Zang, these cocoons would have been broken through the silk moth that came out from the cocoon. So this is an interesting example of how the transmission of technology, technical skill and knowledge can actually change as they spread and also become localized. So with this object, we see on the one hand the westward movement of the knowledge of Saric culture and moving from Imperial China, spreading to the Buddhist kingdom of Khotan. And on the other hand, the eastward spread of Buddhism, this major religion that spread towards China and also establishing itself in the kingdom of Khotan from around the first century onwards. So in a very small piece of work, we have a very rich story that has been encapsulated by the depiction of these figures. This entire legend has been summarized in the one composition. This interesting story of the Silk Roads is what we want to present to you in the British Museum Silk Roads Exhibition opening today. If you'd like to see the Silk Roads Exhibition, and I definitely think you should, you can buy a ticket here.