More Silk Quilts, Fewer Silk Farmers
Foodthink Says
In 1924, Fei Dasheng, along with teachers and students from the Jiangsu Provincial Women’s Sericulture School, arrived in Kaixiangong Village, Wujiang County, to found the Silk Improvement Society. Nearly a century has passed since then. Later, his younger brother, Fei Xiaotong, wove the society’s experiences into his doctoral dissertation, which would eventually be published as the seminal work *Peasant Life in China*. This text also provided the narrative backdrop for Fei Xiaotong’s novel, *The Cocoon*.
This May, at a reading session on *Peasant Life in China* and *The Cocoon* hosted by Foodthink, we welcomed Yu Jiangang from Zhuangzhenghebang, a silk-producing village in Jiaxing. He guided readers through the silk industry reforms in Kaixiangong Village and outlined the evolving stages of sericulture across the modern and contemporary periods. He also shared what prompted him to return to his roots in the twenty-first century, an age when sericulture traditions are dwindling, to dedicate himself to crafting high-quality silk quilts and passing on the traditional skills.
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China is the birthplace of silk, and history is replete with writings on the subject. Yet, I am most drawn to a passage from *Mencius, Duke Hui of Liang, Book I*: “On a homestead of five mu planted with mulberry, those who have reached fifty may wear silk.” I cherish it for its profound humanistic resonance.
Over the ensuing centuries, silk became one of China’s most vital export commodities, giving rise to the renowned Silk Road. In the modern era, the livelihoods of countless sericulturists across the Jiangnan region have been inextricably tied to it.
By the 1920s, traditional family-run silk production faced a severe challenge from the rise of large-scale mechanised industry, forcing the sector into a crisis-driven struggle for survival. Over the past century, China’s silk industry has followed a varied trajectory of development. I believe this historical period can be divided into three distinct phases.
I. Learning from Rivals
To revive the domestic silk industry and advance the cause of national independence, China repeatedly dispatched students to Japan to study new silk-making techniques. Fei Daseng, elder sister of the sociologist Fei Xiaotong, was among them. In 1924, Fei Daseng and Zheng Bijiang, a pioneering educator in modern sericulture, launched a fourteen-year rural reconstruction initiative centred on silk in Kaixiangong Village, Wujiang County, Jiangsu Province. This endeavour is widely regarded as a pioneering experiment in humanitarian economics.
Throughout the 1920s, amid a sharp decline in silk prices, they introduced a suite of reforms designed to raise silkworm farmers’ incomes and foster greater autonomy. These measures included trialling hybrid silkworm breeds, training villagers in the scientific prevention of silkworm diseases, and teaching them how to manage temperature and humidity. The introduction of ‘communal rearing of young silkworms’ helped boost Kaixiangu Village’s cocoon yield by at least 40 per cent over traditional rearing methods.
To enhance the evenness and consistency of hand-reeled silk fibres, the sericulture school also introduced an improved wooden reeling machine to replace the older models, whilst providing technical training to the farmers. Consequently, even as households continued to reel silk independently, product quality could be standardised to a meaningful degree.
With little alternative, and determined to safeguard the livelihoods of sericulture farmers, the silk-led rural development initiative in Kaixiangong Village embarked on the path of factory-based silk reeling.
II. From Household Handicrafts to Rural Industry
Guided by this conviction, Kaixiangong Village founded a cooperative factory in 1929, acquiring steam-powered equipment for silk reeling. Both the raw materials and the labour force were drawn exclusively from the cooperative’s members.
The introduction of mechanical power undoubtedly enhanced the suitability of raw silk for industrial weaving, while fundamentally transforming Kaijiaqiao Village’s traditional household handicraft production structure.
Chapter 12 of Peasant Life in China cites these figures: during the era of manual silk reeling, at least 350 women in the village were engaged in household-based reeling. Once mechanical power was introduced, production efficiency rose dramatically. The cooperative factory needed only 70 female workers to handle all the reeling, which left the vast majority of women as surplus labour and consequently cost them a share of their earnings.
As a result, some sericulturists opted to sell two-thirds of their cocoons to the factory, retaining the remaining third for household manual reeling. Although traditional hand-reeled silk was less suited to an industrialised market than machine-reeled silk, the reeling process itself generated greater added value, ultimately yielding higher returns than selling raw cocoons alone.
According to Fei Xiaotong’s records, thirty-two young women aged sixteen to twenty-five from Jiangcun left for silk factories in Wuxi in 1935 and lived outside the village, while another group of women moved to major cities for work. The sericulture-focused rural reconstruction movement of that time did indeed keep industry within rural areas, yet it could not stop the outflow of the rural population.
III. The Separation of Agriculture and Industry: How Sericulture Farmers Exited the Value Chain
Sericulture is inherently a labour-intensive industry. Capitalising on the demographic advantage of a populous nation, China swiftly regained its position as the world’s leading silk producer, consistently accounting for well over half of global silk output.
Throughout this phase, sericulture remained centred in the Jiangnan region. Unlike the cooperative factory arrangement in Kaixianggong Village, farmers during this period no longer reeled silk by hand at home. Instead, they sold their harvested cocoons outright, entrusting subsequent processing stages—such as the production of raw silk—to state-owned reeling factories. This achieved a complete separation of agriculture and industry; in fact, an intermediary “cocoon collection station” was even introduced between the farmers and the reeling mills.
In the 1950s, numerous state-owned cocoon stations were established across the Jiangnan region. They were primarily tasked with collecting cocoons from sericulture farmers, processing them through drying and other stages, and eventually supplying them to silk mills.
This drew criticism from Fei Xiaotong: ‘To take cocoons as an example, handing over the drying process to commercial operators has yielded decidedly poor results.’ Fei Xiaotong maintained that the policy undermined the economic interests of sericulture farmers. By inserting an additional intermediary between the farmers and the silk mills, it would stifle their supplementary income and hamper the development of rural industries.
It is clear, therefore, that as the silk industry became fully industrialised, the role of sericulture farmers within the industry’s value chain gradually diminished.
IV. The Disappearance of Sericulture Farmers
During the 1990s, rapid economic expansion in eastern China led to increasingly scarce land and rising labour costs. Compounded by the heavy encroachment of foreign trade and industrial sectors into the interests of sericulturists, this triggered the infamous “Cocoon War,” pushing mulberry silkworm rearing into further decline.
Concurrently, the country began implementing the “East-to-West Mulberry Relocation” policy, shifting primary sericulture zones from the eastern coast to central and western regions. This carried significant weight for boosting farmers’ incomes and regional economic development.
Yet, as this westward shift unfolded, a paradox emerged: “those raising silkworms no longer know how to raise them.”
Traditional mulberry silkworm rearing in the Jiangnan region involves a highly intricate, labour- and skill-intensive sequence: preparing rearing equipment, adjusting egg incubation, collecting newly hatched larvae, first instar, first dormancy, post-moult feeding, third instar, emergence from moulting fever, major dormancy, branch-mulberry rearing, selecting breeding pairs, mounting for spinning, cocoon formation, and harvesting. The entire spring rearing season stretches from late April through late May.
I have visited regions that have adopted industrialised sericulture and found that the local farmers there no longer command the full suite of traditional rearing techniques. Through their partnerships with factories, they are left to manage only two stages: cultivating mulberry trees and rearing the larger silkworms from their fourth instar onwards.
Unlike the younger larvae, which demand meticulous attention, raising the mature worms requires considerably less skill. Cocoons can be harvested in roughly ten days and are then sold straight to the factory. In effect, under industrialised sericulture, the independent sericulturist is reduced to a wage labourer. A shift of a single character, yet it marks a world of difference.
We are currently in the early phases of this transition. Already, a number of factories are pioneering fully industrialised models, implementing a system based on formulated feed, workshop production, and year-round rearing. It calls for neither traditional sericulturists nor fresh mulberry foliage.
The factory-based rearing of silkworms strips cultivators of their technical knowledge and steadily renders their traditional labour obsolete. This is exactly what I refer to as the ‘disappearance of the sericulturist’.
For the traditional silk-producing regions of Jiangnan, however, the east-to-west shift in sericulture also represents a severance between culture and the local economy.
It is widely acknowledged that, since the Southern Song dynasty, Jiangnan has served as the primary heartland for silk production, safeguarding a wealth of time-honoured sericultural traditions. Yet in recent years, both the number of households engaged in rearing and overall cocoon yields have declined markedly. Taking my own village as an example, all sixty households once participated in the trade; today, only six persist.
Although intangible cultural heritage initiatives celebrating mulberry cultivation and silk weaving are flourishing, they are largely symbolic performances divorced from their practical roots. The authentic, living culture they claim to uphold is, in reality, in serious jeopardy.
V. Silk-Based Rural Development Rooted in Cultural Identity
Initially, we worked in the Beijing suburbs, Guangxi, and Qiandongnan, focusing on ecological farming, volunteer teaching, and the preservation of ethnic minority cultures. By late 2011, we returned to Zhenghebang, our hometown on the Hang-Jia-Hu Plain.
Zhenhebang lies just an hour’s drive from Jiangcun (Kaixianqiong Village). Since returning home, I have visited Jiangcun several times. It was at the Fei Xiaotong Jiangcun Memorial Hall there that I first encountered the story of Fei Dasen. To my surprise, the sericulture industry so vividly documented in *Jiangcun Economy* had long since vanished from the village.
Much like Jiangcun in the 1920s, Zhenhebang is a quintessential Jiangnan silk village that has maintained the tradition of silkworm rearing. Consequently, our rural reconstruction work evolved from the initial, somewhat vague ambition of ‘establishing an ecological farm’ into a focused effort to revive the culture of sericulture, beginning with the production of traditionally handmade silk quilts.
Unlike the vast majority of commercial branded silk quilts, traditionally handmade quilts are produced in limited quantities (Mei and Yu craft roughly a thousand a year). Yet the craft is highly distinctive, and it serves as an effective means of sustaining small-scale producers and artisans. Though an increasingly fading practice, we are committed to walking alongside this cultural tradition for as long as it continues.
Many might assume that buying handmade items is simply ‘paying for nostalgia’. In reality, traditional handmade silk quilts are no more expensive than their commercial branded counterparts. Most mass-produced branded quilts rely on silk fibres reclaimed as by-products or waste from the industrial silk-reeling process, which rarely matches a high standard. Stripped of marketing premiums, traditional handmade silk quilts are genuinely competitive in the market on both quality and price.
From the outset, our return to the countryside was an inward journey, aimed at strengthening our sense of identity and cultural belonging to the land. It was not merely about economic rural revitalisation, but about cultural revitalisation.
Unlike the singular focus of industrial thinking, the production and daily lives of traditional farmers are deeply intertwined. Sericulturists are not merely instruments for silk production; behind it lies a complete system of livelihood and culture, which I prefer to call a “sustainable sericulture-agriculture cultural system”.
Rice, for instance, is also part of this sericulture culture. Since ancient times, grain and silk have been closely linked in Jiangnan. That is why, in 2020, we tried making traditional Jiaxing-style zongzi using eco-friendly rice we grew ourselves. We also intercropped pickled mustard stems with the mulberry trees, letting them share the same soil. This reflects the intensive, meticulous nature of Jiangnan farming—a smallholder’s care and respect for every patch of earth.
Beyond material culture, local beliefs—such as those devoted to the Silk God and Ma Mingwang—maintain a profound connection between people, nature, and tradition. The late Fei Xiaotong once reflected that his sociological study, *Peasant Life in China*, lacked a cultural dimension, yet I believe this may well be the very essence of rural life.
We hope that rural reconstruction, as a more humane and alternative approach to economic development, remains meaningfully engaged with local culture, rather than treating it merely as a static symbol.
In those days, Zheng Pijiang and Fei Dasheng left the city for Jiang Village to advance sericulture. Their work progressed from introducing scientific methods for rearing silkworms and improving manual reeling machines, to cautiously establishing local reeling factories, all with the aim of keeping industry within the countryside.
Nearly a century later, we have returned from Beijing to Zhenghebang, an hour’s drive from Jiang Village, to produce finely crafted silk quilts and pass on the craft, safeguarding a sericultural heritage that is on the verge of disappearing.
The approaches of promoting mechanised reeling and reviving the silk-quilt craft may appear diametrically opposed, yet I believe their core purpose is identical. Though our efforts are modest, our fundamental aim remains the same: to foster positive rural development by restoring silk production, enabling villages to retain both their people and their cultural roots, and ultimately realising the ancient aspiration that “those who have reached fifty may wear silk”.
Text compiled by: Shan Wei
Edited by: Ze En