The History of Sericulture: From 2700 BCE to Europe

Three Thousand Years of Monopoly

Silk production has roots in China dating to roughly 2700 BCE, and China held a near-total global monopoly on it for close to three thousand years. Not on the fabric — that was traded widely — but on the knowledge of how it was made.

Recent archaeology has complicated the tidy version: evidence has been reported of silkworm cultivation in southern Central Asia around 2000 BCE, well before the Silk Road existed as a route. The picture is older and less centralised than the story usually told.

Selling the Cloth, Keeping the Secret

By around 140 BC the Han dynasty authorised direct trade with the West, and the Roman Empire proved an eager market. Rome bought silk in quantity for centuries without knowing what produced it — theories circulated that it grew on trees.

That gap between owning a product and understanding it is the entire economic logic of the monopoly. Exporting cloth was profitable. Exporting eggs would have ended the business.

552 CE: the Monks

The traditional account has the monopoly broken in 552 CE, when monks carried silkworm eggs from China to Constantinople and delivered them to the emperor Justinian I. Whatever the truth of the details, the Byzantine Empire did establish its own sericulture from around this point — and a state that had been buying silk became a state that produced it.

Japan and Western Europe

Sericulture reached Japan by the fourth century CE, attested by silkworm remains and early chronicles. Western Europe came remarkably late: the thirteenth century, when Greek silk masters were moved from Constantinople to Italy, seeding the Italian industry that dominated European silk for centuries.

What Was Actually Being Moved

Worth being precise about the thing itself. Smuggling silk technology did not mean stealing a machine. It meant moving a living animal that cannot survive without people, together with the knowledge of how to keep it and a supply of the only tree it will eat.

That is why the secret held as long as it did. See the wild ancestor for how the animal became that dependent.

Related: the silkworm's wild ancestor · what silk is made of