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Videoclip 16: Susan Whitfield: Silk Princess story
"So, Silk Road, you probably all think that silk was the main thing traded on the Silk Road, well, that's true in a way, it was, but there were...everything. You think of everything that is traded, you go into a shopping mall today, and what can you buy? Hundreds upon hundreds of things, and if you look at the back of them, half of them say 'Made in China', or 'Made in India', or something else, that's what the Silk Road was like, everything that everybody ever wanted was traded, from luxuries like silk and very expensive jewellery, to things like sheep and goats, and all the way down to, just the fun things of life, toys, and cosmetics, and clothes, and other things that people wanted.
So from the third, well from about 5000 years ago, China knew how to make silk. It isn't obvious, because you think, silk worms make themselves into little cocoons, these little insects that make themselves into cocoons, and to get silk, you have to boil the cocoons and unwind the silk from them. Nobody knew about this secret of silk until about 3, 2000 years ago, China kept it very secret, and it made sure that all its border guards searched everybody who left China so they didn't take out any secrets about how to make silk, because they had a monopoly of trade, they made lots and lots of money from selling silk, and they didn't want anybody else to be able to buy it.
So in about 500 AD, the story goes, there was a princess, a Chinese princess, who was sent to marry a king of Khotan, this is Khotan, now in western China. This often happened, princesses and princes were often sent to marry foreign princes and princesses to form diplomatic alliances. She wasn't the first, but the king wrote to her and he said, you know, he said, if you want to carry on wearing your fine silk clothes, you'll have to bring with you the secret of silk, because here in Khotan we don't know how to make silk, we just have rough felt made of camel and sheep's wool, and she was very dismayed at not being able to wear her fine clothes.
And so when she left China, she had this elaborate headdress, so the story goes, and in it, she kept little silk worms and silk worm cocoons, and mulberry leaves. The silk worms feed off the leaves of the mulberry tree, and seeds for the mulberry tree. And she hid them all in her elaborate headdress. Of course when she went out the border, the border guards didn't dare to search properly a princess, an imperial princess, a daughter of the emperor, and so she escaped with the secret of silk, and Khotan soon set up a very thriving silk industry, which started to rival China's, and then the secret of silk gradually went westward until it came all the way to Europe. That took about another 500 years before we learnt how to make silk."
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