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30th March, 2001

Silk Produced At Wuxi: Clatter Of Machinery In Workshop; Thread Spun In Continuos Process; Packing White Silk Skeins In Containers

August, 1987
The silk produced by silkworms has to be spun to be woven. When we first entered the workshops to watch this process the clatter of machinery was in sharp contrast to the quiet lobby and perhaps some of the cocoons should have been handed out for use as earplugs ! There were baskets of cocoons stacked on tables ready for processing and we were told that about a thousand perfect cocoons were needed to make one silk shirt. Any cocoon showing signs of holes or stains was rejected.

Silk unwoven from best cocoons, others discarded.The imperfect cocoons having been removed by the nimble fingered worker, the rest go through a further process, which I will leave to your imagination, before the silk on the cocoons is ready to be unravelled. It is still a mystery to me how the workers were able to find the beginning of the thread of the cocoons to be able to feed them into the spinning machines, but even so, it seemed to be a continuos process.

No Trade Union in this workshop.The cocoons were floating in hot water at the base of the machines, to be wound into skeins at the top, the white silk displaying all its lustre in the dimly lit workshop.A young bare footed worker nearby was packing skeins of glistening white thread into a container and I should have liked to have asked her where she was taking them and how many cocoons had been used for one skein, but there was the inevitable barrier of different languages, so I just gave her a smile and took her photograph. I doubt whether she remembers the strange foreign fellow after all these years !





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