12th c. image of silk production, from James Hare website.
Here we go round the Mulberry Bush, the Mulberry Bush, the Mulberry Bush Here we go round the Mulberry Bush All on a Frosty Morning…
Were they experimenting, those first enterprising Chinese textile workers who pulled the threads off a caterpillar’s cocoon and found them to be strong and fine? Did they know to dip them in water to separate them from the egg or was that an accident, like most inventions? There may be up to a mile in threads in a single cocoon, so say the advertisements, and placing the unopened cocoon in water frees them.
The Chinese discovered as far back as the Neolithic Age (the New Stone Age) that the wispy strings of the cocoon could be spun into a cloth delicate, shiny, and strong. They held the secret close for centuries, until someone smuggled the cocoons and the mulberry out, to try it on their own.
Not everyone succeeded. Historian/humorist Bill Bryson thinks that the mulberry bush song we may have sung as kids reflectsthe frustrations of the 18th and 19th century British, who tried to replicate the Chinese silk production but found their climate too inhospitable on those frosty mornings.
There are few descriptive phrases that sum up a time and place as elegantly as “The Silk Road.” It is an idea specific to geography and historical era. Others terms–World War I, Manifest Destiny, the Roman Empire, or the Enlightenment–belong to a specific country or encompass a comparatively brief span of years. Even the Renaissance, as I found out in last year’s A to Z challenge, made a heavy impression mostly on a handful of places and was fairly localized to Italy and the coastal cities of Western Europe. Or take a place like the Fertile Crescent, which may have lasted centuries in the development of human processes, but it was really a spot, that convergence of the Tigris and the Euphrates.
In comparison, the Silk Road spread across a continent, and the biggest one at that. It began a few hundred years before the Common Era (BCE is the new way of saying minus zero year) and lasted into the era of colonization. To cover 26 posts on anything requires a vast stretch of subject.
For the 2023 A to Z challenge, I picked the Silk Road, a fascinating area that spanned a continent and a century. Twenty-six posts on everything from camels to Qara Qorum, with the Chinese explorers Zhang Qian & Zheng Hethrown in for good measure. The alphabetical posts are listed below after a brief introduction.
Picture from Corbis/Getty Images
I am thrilled with this idea because there are so many options for X, Q, and J. Got to love those speakers of Arabic, Persian, and Chinese!
Most of these will be short little snippets. Lots of towns, lots of medieval trade goods. Not chronological, but if you’re interested, you’ll pick up a lot of facts and ambience. Can you smell the spices on the desert breezes? Can you hear the wind rustling over the sand and the snort of the camels as they jostle for the well water?
Get ready to journey…
A is for Asia (What, Where, and When did this road come into being?)
