The Silk Road’s long period of high activity spanned the second century BC and the fifteenth century AD, but its name wasn’t coined until more than 400 years after that. Scholars have argued it practically ever since, given that the referent wasn’t just one road but a vast and ever-changing network of them, and that silk was hardly the only commodity carried by its traders. Yet the name persists, and not only due to Marco Polo-type romanticism. Silk may not have been the highest-volume item on its eponymous road — more business was surely done in everyday textiles, to say nothing of spices, grains, or dyes — but it was perhaps the most visible, and surely the most glamorous. From the perspective of Chinese civilization, it can also look like the most important.
In the new Primal Space video above, you can hear the story of “the machine that made China rich”: the pattern loom, that is, a model of which was unearthed in 2017 during subway construction in the city of Chengdu. At somewhere between 2,100 and 2,200 years old, they represent the earliest known evidence of pattern loom technology, of which China made highly productive use during the time of its three-millennium monopoly on silk.
As far away as the Roman Empire, those who had the means couldn’t get enough of the stuff, especially when it came in designs never before seen in human history. Hence the high priority China placed on keeping knowledge of its harvesting and weaving proprietary — at least until a couple of Roman monks managed to smuggle silkworm larvae back to Europe in the middle of the sixth century.
Yet even having lost its status as the only land capable of producing silk, China retained a great advantage in the form of its sheer manufacturing capacity. (This story rings somewhat familiar about a millennium and a half later, when none of us can dispute which country holds the title of “the world’s factory.”) Its silk industry could achieve that scale thanks to the relative ease of use of the pattern loom, which required no special skills to operate. The most complex aspect would have been “programming” the patterns to be formed by the strands, which, though an entirely analog process, has its basic similarities with the digital computer programming we know today. China’s trade networks have greatly multiplied since the days of Marco Polo, and the technology it uses has developed to a previously unimaginable degree. Yet somehow, the “Electric Vehicle Road” doesn’t have quite the same ring, does it?
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
