As part of our honeymoon on the Diamond Princess cruise ship we had three stops in China, those being Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong (I’m never sure if you should include Hong Kong with China or not). At the first two of those we had excursions that included us being taken into silk factories.
They were both interesting though they were primarily used as sales pushes as a lot of these side-trips on excursions tend to be. This is not to say that we wouldn’t have bought some of the items on offer if we’d had the money because the stuff being produced was stunningly beautiful and we got to feel a quilt that was so soft we were within a whisker of making the arrangements to pay for it and have it shipped home.
Yuan Long Silk Factory, Beijing
Yuan Long is just to the north of the large parks in which the Temple of Heaven – our favourite place in Beijing – can be found.
While sales might have been the ultimate goal of the visit we still did learn a lot. The following video was taken by someone who visited the silk factory earlier in the year and you can see explanations of the worm’s eating processes, their coccoons, and witness the noise of those silk machines for yourself. I’d forgotten just how noisy it was.
Tian Hou Silk Factory, Shanghai
This more recent visit to the Tian Hou silk factory in Shanghai shows that even a decade later both tours effectively went over the same information and showed similar items for subsequent purchasing. The reason for this is because only a relatively small number of us cruising on Diamond Princess took the pre-cruise option to stay in Beijing so for most people this was their only chance to see a silk factory in China. Under the circumstances we were perfectly happy to see how silk worms produced silk and how it was turned into clothing for a second time.
I would like to make silk fabric in my own design.