In celebration of the ten-year anniversary of Paul Salopek's first steps on his Out of Eden Walk journey, this dispatch is now available for educational use in fifth- and eighth-grade reading levels. The original text is available as the default reading level, as well as on the Out of Eden Walk website.
This article is part of a collection called Out of Eden 10th Anniversary: Culture. It is also included in the idea set, Exploring Culture With the Out of Eden Walk.
By Paul Salopek
MARGILAN, UZBEKISTAN (12/21/2016)
Walking to the last silk-making town in Uzbekistan
“You know how silk got discovered, right?”
It is Aziz Khalmuradov.
Khalmuradov is my walking guide on the Silk Roads through Central Asia. He is a sturdy and sad-eyed man of immense folkloric knowledge. We have trekked together for many months, Aziz and I. Side by side, we have paced off more than a thousand miles of Uzbekistan, across the windswept steppes of the Ustyurt Plateau, through the terrible Red Desert (which is actually a delicate sunburned-skin hue of pink), and atop endless river tracks that sashay like dancers along the winding banks of the Amu Darya river. Now we walk a paved highway into the Fergana Valley. Into Margilan: the last center of traditional silk makers in Uzbekistan.
A long time ago—the story goes—the Chinese Princess Lei Zu, age 14, was sipping tea in her royal garden when a cocoon dropped from a tree into her teacup. Annoyed, she fished it out. But the hot tea had begun to unravel a fiber from the cocoon. Lei Zu peered at the loose filament. She pinched between her damp fingers a thread that would change the world: silk.
The story is legend. Princess Lei Zu never existed. Silk cultivation indeed was invented, however, in China more than 5,000 years ago. And the process was somehow kept an industry secret for about 3,000 of those years. This was in order to preserve a monopoly on one of the most coveted luxury items of the ancient world. For millennia, the real origins of the beautiful, lustrous fabric that eventually clothed Roman emperors and that lent its name to the most famous global trade route on the planet was an utter mystery to non-Chinese. The fourth-century Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus believed silk was manufactured from certain soils in the Far East. Other scholars suspected that it was woven from tree leaves. Who could have known the truth? That it was squirted from the salivary glands of a moth?
Bombyx mori is the most common silk-making species.
It is a domesticated insect, like the honeybee. Selectively bred by Chinese silk masters for millennia, the moth is sightless, flightless, hairy—and the dim, smoke-colored hue of light from a quarter moon. Bombyx mori lays about 500 eggs and, its job done, soon dies. Its voracious worms, fed hand-chopped mulberry tree leaves by silk workers, swell to 10,000 times their original weight. (The sound of the insects’ munching, when the worms are piled by the thousands inside dark worm nurseries, resembles the loud hiss of rain on a tin roof.) Sufficiently fattened, the worms start to pupate. They work tirelessly. They spin a small, tough, egg-like shell about themselves. Each of their cocoons holds roughly half a mile of silk filament that is about .00059 inches in diameter.
“We must find the loose ends and unravel them,” says Inoyatkhan Okhunova, a silk maker who has worked for more than 30 years at the Yodgorlik silk mill, in Margilan. “It is best not to break them. This takes practice.”
To do this, Okhunova boils the cocoons in large, dented tin basins of soapy water. The individual silk fibers shine in the steamy workshop light like spider webbing. A colleague spins them—in braids of five, seven, ten—onto a bobbin. This is the primordial thread.
This is just the beginning.
The process of making a finished silk fabric is complex, laborious, mathematical. Seen firsthand, it is easy to understand how silk-weaving remained a secret for centuries: a rumor of magic, an unearthly technology. Much of the silk in Margilan is still dyed the old-fashioned way, using natural colorants known 2,000 years ago: onion skins (yellow), pomegranate (brown), indigo (blue), walnut hulls (rusty red). A single hank of hand-made Margilan silk can take a month of careful labor to prepare. It passes through many nimble hands. It is manufacturing as meditation. At one station in the Yodgorlik mill, a man operates a weaving swift, coiling long threads into sized loops in a ritual that seems like pure thought made visible: a gathering of randomness into order, working at a frequency of action dating to the Big Bang, an endless and circular prayer.
“The art was almost lost in Soviet times,” says Rosuljon Mirzaakhmedov, a ninth-generation silk weaver. “The government controlled the market. They only made silk industrially. They did not permit private weaving.”
Mirzaakhmedov’s father was imprisoned for five years in the 1980s for owning a loom. Today Mirzaakhmedov runs a bustling co-op of silk-weaving families in Margilan.
We walk on toward China, Aziz and I. Into the maw of winter. We follow a ghostly strand of silk that once bound East to West.
It is hard.
The Fergana sky is waxy, overcast and cold. The sun hangs dully in it, a pale cocoon. On the frozen road ahead strides Tolik Bekniyazov, our lanky donkey driver. A taciturn nomad. At some old trailside camp he must have noticed me squinting, with book-ruined eyes, toiling to spear a licked thread—the cheapest nylon, not silk—through the eye of a needle, perhaps mending my coat. Soon we will part ways at a new border. And I will discover many days later, shaking my head in wonder, that he has threaded and knotted every needle in my sewing kit.
We are all weavers.
View the original dispatch to see a short video of the silk weaving swift in action.
