More Silk Duvets, Fewer Silkworm Rearers
Foodthink Says
In 1924, Fei Dasheng and the teachers and students of the Jiangsu Provincial Women’s Sericulture School arrived in Kaixiangong Village in Wujiang County and established the Silk Improvement Society — nearly a century ago now. Later, the cooperative’s experience was woven into the doctoral dissertation of Fei Dasheng’s younger brother, Fei Xiaotong, which became the renowned Peasant Life in China. It also served as the narrative basis for Fei Xiaotong’s novella “The Cocoon”.
This past May, at a reading group organised by Foodthink on Peasant Life in China and “The Cocoon”, we invited Yu Jiangang from the silk village of Zhenghebang in Jiaxing to walk readers through the silk industry reforms in Kaixiangong Village and the different stages of development in the modern and contemporary silk trade. He shared why, in a twenty-first century marked by the waning of sericulture culture, he chose to return to the village to take up the production of artisan silk duvets and the passing on of the craft.
– Read on –
China is the motherland of silk, and the historical record is rich with writings about it. Yet the line I cherish most comes from Mencius, Book 1A: “Plant mulberry trees around a five-acre homestead, and those aged fifty may wear silk garments.” There is a deeply humane thread in those words.
Over the millennia that followed, silk became one of China’s most important export commodities, giving rise to the famed Silk Road. In the modern era, the livelihoods of countless silkworm rearers in the Jiangnan region depended upon it.
In the 1920s, traditional household handicraft silk production came under enormous pressure from large-scale machine industry, and in that crisis began a process of self-preservation. Over the past century, China’s silk industry has passed through varying stages of development. I would divide this history into the following three phases.
I. Learning from the Enemy Nation
To revive the domestic silk industry and strive for national independence, China sent students to Japan time and again to learn new silk-making techniques. Fei Dasheng, Fei Xiaotong’s elder sister, was among them. In 1924, she and the modern sericulture educator Zheng Pijiang began a fourteen-year programme of silk rural reconstruction in Kaixiangong Village in Wujiang County, Jiangsu — an attempt that might be called an experiment in humanitarian economics.
During the 1920s, when silk prices were plummeting, they introduced a series of reforms to raise both the income and the autonomy of silkworm farmers. Experimental crossbreeding was used to improve silkworm eggs; villagers were trained in the scientific methods of preventing silkworm disease and controlling temperature and humidity; and practices such as the communal rearing of young silkworms were adopted. As a result, cocoon yields in Kaixiangong Village increased by at least 40% over traditional rearing methods.
To improve the evenness and uniformity of hand-reeled silk, the sericulture school also introduced an improved wooden machine to replace the old-style equipment, while providing technical training for silkworm farmers. This way, even though the farmers continued to reel silk in their own homes, product quality could be standardised to a degree.
Left with little choice, and to safeguard the livelihoods of the silkworm farmers, the silk rural reconstruction in Kaixiangong Village turned to factory-scale silk production.
II. From Household Handicraft to Village Industry
With such expectations in mind, Kaixiangong Village opened a cooperative factory in 1929, purchasing steam-powered silk-reeling machines. Both the raw materials and the labour force came from the cooperative’s members.
The introduction of mechanical power did indeed improve the industrial weavability of raw silk, and in the process it fundamentally reshaped Kaixiangong Village’s existing structure of household handicraft production.
Chapter 12 of Peasant Life in China records the following figures: in the age of hand reeling, at least 350 women in the village were engaged in household silk reeling. Once mechanical power was introduced, productivity rose so sharply that the cooperative factory needed to employ only 70 women to complete all the reeling work, leaving more than half of the women idle and, with them, a portion of their income lost.
Consequently, some silkworm farmers chose to sell two-thirds of their silkworm cocoons to the factory and keep the remaining third for household hand reeling. Although hand-reeled silk was less suited than machine-reeled silk to the market demands of an industrialised age, the reeling process itself added greater value, yielding more income than simply selling raw cocoons.
According to Fei Xiaotong’s statistics, by 1935, 32 young women aged 16 to 25 from Jiangcun had gone to work in the silk factories of Wuxi, living outside the village, while some other women had moved to the cities for employment. The silk rural reconstruction of that era had indeed kept industry in the countryside, but it could not stem the outflow of rural population.
III. The Separation of Agriculture and Industry: How Silkworm Farmers Were Pushed Out of the Value Chain
Sericulture is a labour-intensive industry. Drawing on the advantage of a vast population, China swiftly regained its position as the world’s top silk producer, and for many years accounted for more than half of global silk output.
During this stage, sericulture remained concentrated in the Jiangnan region. Compared with the cooperative factory in Kaixiangong Village, silkworm farmers in this period no longer reeled silk by hand at home. After producing silkworm cocoons they sold them in full, leaving the subsequent processing — the manufacture of raw silk and beyond — to state-owned silk-reeling mills. Agriculture and industry were fully separated. Between the silkworm farmer and the reeling mill, there was even an additional intermediary: a “cocoon procurement station”.
In the 1950s, many state-owned cocoon procurement stations were built across the Jiangnan region. Their main task was to collect silkworm cocoons from farmers, carry out drying and other processing, and sell the finished cocoons on to silk-reeling mills.
This drew criticism from Fei Xiaotong: “Take the silkworm cocoons — even the drying process was transferred to the commercial department. The results, in truth, were not very good.” In his view, this policy undermined the economic interests of silkworm farmers. An extra link had been inserted between the farmer and the reeling mill, which led to a regression in farmers’ supplementary income and hindered the development of rural industry.
What becomes clear, then, is that as the silk industry became fully industrialised, the role of the silkworm farmer in the value chain was steadily marginalised.
IV. The Disappearance of Silkworm Rearers
In the 1990s, the eastern regions saw rapid economic growth. Land grew increasingly scarce, labour costs rose, and the foreign trade and industrial sectors encroached too heavily on silkworm farmers’ interests, sparking the well-known “Cocoon War”. Sericulture declined further still.
At the same time, China began implementing the “East-to-West Mulberry Transfer” policy, shifting the main sericulture-producing areas from the east to the central and western regions — an initiative of great significance for boosting farm incomes and economic development in those regions.
Yet in the course of the East-to-West transfer, a curious phenomenon emerged: “silkworm rearers who cannot rear silkworms”.
The traditional method of rearing mulberry silkworms in Jiangnan encompasses a whole complex of labour- and knowledge-intensive procedures: preparing silkworm-rearing equipment, supplemental egg incubation, collecting the hatched larvae, the first instar, the first moult, post-moult feeding, the third instar, post-second-moult feeding, the final moult, strip-leaf rearing, setting up rearing racks, moving larvae to the mounting boards, cocoon formation and cocoon harvesting. The entire spring silkworm crop stretches from late April through to the end of May.
I have visited regions where silkworm rearing has been industrialised, and found that the farmers there do not command this whole body of rearing knowledge. In their dealings with the factory, they are responsible for only two tasks: growing mulberry trees, and rearing mature silkworms after the fourth instar.
Unlike the young silkworms that require careful tending, mature silkworms call for far less skill. Cocoons can be harvested after just ten days or so, after which the farmer simply sells them to the factory. In other words, under factory-style rearing, the silkworm rearer has become nothing more than a silkworm worker. One word apart, yet a world of difference.
We are still in the early stages of industrialised rearing, but many factories are already experimenting with fully mechanised operations, realising a rearing model that is feed-based, factory-floor, and year-round — needing neither a silkworm rearer nor a single mulberry leaf.
Factory-style rearing of the mulberry silkworm strips the farmer of any grip on the craft and gradually displaces their labour. This is what I mean by “the disappearance of silkworm rearers”.
For the traditional silk-producing regions of Jiangnan, the East-to-West Mulberry Transfer also meant a divorce between culture and economy.
As is well known, since the Southern Song dynasty the Jiangnan region has been the principal home of silk production, nurturing a sericulture culture of great antiquity. Yet in recent years both the number of silkworm-rearing households and cocoon output have fallen sharply. In our village alone, sixty households once each kept silkworms; now only six households carry on the tradition.
Intangible Cultural Heritage activities surrounding sericulture and silk weaving may be flourishing, but most amount to little more than symbolic performances stripped of their substance. The real, living culture teeters on the edge of extinction.
V. Silk Rural Reconstruction Rooted in Cultural Identity
In the beginning, we took part in ecological agriculture, volunteer teaching and ethnic-minority cultural preservation in the outskirts of Beijing, in Guangxi, in Qiandongnan and elsewhere. By the end of 2011, we had returned to our home village of Zhenghebang, on the Hangjiahu Plain.
Zhenghebang lies barely an hour’s drive from Jiangcun (Kaixiangong Village). After returning home, I visited Jiangcun many times, and it was there, at the Fei Xiaotong Jiangcun Memorial Hall, that I first learned of Fei Dasheng’s story. To my surprise, the sericulture so vividly described in Peasant Life in China had long since vanished from Jiangcun.
Much like 1920s Jiangcun, Zhenghebang too is a typical Jiangnan silk village, still holding on to its tradition of silkworm rearing. So our homecoming practice, which had begun as a vague notion of “building an ecological farm”, gradually narrowed its focus to reviving sericulture culture — starting with the making of traditionally handcrafted silk duvets.
Compared with the vast majority of branded silk duvets on the market, traditionally handcrafted silk duvets are produced in limited quantities (Mei He Yu makes roughly a thousand a year). Yet the craftsmanship is entirely distinctive, and it also does a great deal to protect small-scale producers and artisans. Though we are growing older, we are willing to walk alongside this culture for as long as it endures.
Many people wonder whether handicrafts are simply a premium you pay for nostalgia. In reality, traditionally handcrafted silk duvets cost no more than branded ones on the market. The silk filling in most branded silk duvets is sourced from reeling waste, and the quality is far from premium. Setting aside advertising appeal alone, traditionally handcrafted silk duvets are competitive in both quality and price.
From the very beginning, our homecoming has been a journey inward — a deepening of our sense of identity rooted in the land and in its culture. This is not merely rural revitalisation in economic terms; it is cultural.
Unlike the single-minded logic of industry, the production and daily life of traditional farmers are intertwined. A silkworm rearer is no mere instrument for producing silk. Behind silk production lies an entire system of living and livelihood — one I am happy to call a “sustainable farming-and-sericulture cultural system”.
Rice, for instance, is also part of sericulture culture. Since time immemorial, the rice and silk of Jiangnan have been closely entwined. So in 2020, we experimented with making traditional Jiaxing zongzi using our own ecological rice. We intercrop pickled mustard tubers among the mulberry trees, letting the two share the same stretch of land. This reflects the intensive cultivation that has always characterised Jiangnan farming — a smallholder farmer’s care and respect for every inch of soil.
Beyond material culture, there are also local beliefs — the Silkworm Goddess, Maming Wang and others — which sustain a deeper bond between people and the natural world, and between people and tradition. Mr Fei Xiaotong once reflected that Peasant Life in China, written from a sociological perspective, lacked a discussion of the cultural dimension. I believe that is perhaps the more fundamental aspect of the rural question.
We hope that rural reconstruction — as a more humane, alternative practice of economic development — should maintain a genuine connection with rural culture, rather than treating it as nothing more than a static symbol.
Back then, Zheng Pijiang and Fei Dasheng came from the city to Jiangcun to advance sericulture — from introducing scientific knowledge of silkworm rearing, to improving hand-reeling machines, and then to establishing a local silk-reeling factory with great care, in the hope of keeping industry in the countryside.
Nearly a century later, we left Beijing and returned to Zhenghebang — barely an hour’s drive from Jiangcun — to produce artisan silk duvets and pass on the craft, safeguarding a sericulture culture on the verge of disappearing.
The logic behind mechanised silk reeling and the logic behind reviving silk duvet craftsmanship appear diametrically opposed, yet I believe they share the same essence. Though our strength is small, our fundamental aim is the same: to use the revival of silk production to drive positive development in the countryside — to keep people rooted there, keep the cultural roots alive, and in the end, fulfil the promise that “those aged fifty may wear silk garments”.
Compiled by: Shan Wei
Edited by: Ze’en