Legend has it that the concubine of Emperor Xuanyuan was the first inventor of sericulture reeling. She happened to find that silkworms were cocooning on mulberry leaves, so she took off the cocoon and spun silk, woven it into silk and put it on her body, and taught her to raise silkworms and spin silk, which was later offered as a silkworm god. This shows from one side that China was the first country to raise silkworms and invent silk weaving. There are written records of silkworms, mulberries, silks and silks in Oracle Bone Inscriptions in Shang Dynasty, which shows that sericulture and silk weaving were very common at that time. Jade silkworms have been unearthed from Shang tombs in Kongcun Village, Anyang Temple, Henan Province and Subutun, Yidu, Shandong Province. Exquisite plain silk and diamond-shaped fabrics are often found on bronzes unearthed in Yin Ruins. Before Shang Dynasty, the ancestors of China used mulberry resources grown in nature to raise silkworms and weave fabrics with silk, but the number was very small. With the progress of human civilization and the increasing demand for clothing, people try to expand the scale of sericulture by artificially cultivating mulberry to provide more clothing raw materials. During the Zhou Dynasty, sericulture was very common in the Yellow River valley. In The Book of Songs, there are poems of mulberry, silkworm and silk woven by Daya, Guifeng, Qin Feng and Feng Wei. According to the Book of Songs, Zuo Zhuan, Yili and other books, there was not only a "silkworm room" for indoor sericulture at that time, but also special sericulture tools and reeling equipment such as silkworm racks and utensils. Later, the ancients began to pay attention to the quality of mulberry leaves and improved mulberry varieties to adapt to the growth and development of silkworms. Ancient people also chose excellent silkworm eggs to improve the quality of silkworm.
Silk pieces, ribbons and silk threads unearthed from the Neolithic site in Qianshanyang, Xing Wu, Zhejiang Province are the earliest silk fabrics, and all the silks used are made in China. The warp density of the fabric is 52 per cm and the weft density is 48 per cm. Each warp and weft consists of at least 20 cocoons, and the silk thread is straight. At the same place, we also found a broom-like grass broom, which proved to be a silk reeling tool at that time. When reeling, you should first boil the cocoon with boiling water, remove sericin, spread out the silk head, and then draw it into silk thread. Because a silk thread is too thin and weak, usually several cocoons are drawn into a silk thread at the same time. Silk reeling tools have developed from the initial manual silk reeling to manual silk reeling vehicles and pedal silk reeling vehicles. There are two types of reeling carts in Wang Zhen agricultural books in Yuan Dynasty, which are scientific in structure and convenient to use.
After Zhang Qian's voyage to the West, China had cultural exchanges with the West. After the 6th century, western countries gradually learned sericulture technology.
The occurrence period of silkworm generally begins when mulberry trees germinate. When silkworm eggs occur, it is called green promotion period. It should be protected indoors with good air circulation and appropriate temperature and humidity 12- 13 days. The hatched ant silkworm is only 3 mm long and weighs 0.5 mg. After 30-40 days of rearing with mulberry leaves, the silkworm grows up to 7.5-9 cm before it matures. It weighs about 4-5g. During the whole sericulture period, it is a series of detailed procedures, such as ventilation and dehumidification, feeding leaves, removing silkworm excrement and broken leaves excreted by silkworms, and clustering silkworms for cocoon when they mature.
Silkworms made of jade were often used as funerary objects in the tombs of nobles in 16 BC to 165438 BC (Shang Dynasty), which proved that people in China attached great importance to sericulture and silk weaving 3000 years ago. It is 1953 a jade-pecking silkworm found in Yin Ruins in Anyang, Henan Province.
1950 More than 3,000 years ago, it was unearthed in Yin Ruins of Confucius Village, Anyang Temple, Henan Province, with traces of fine silk on it. This is because this piece of copper was wrapped in fine silk at that time, and the silk left traces after decay. At that time, silk reeling and silk weaving technology had reached a very high level.
BC 16-BC 165438 +0 th century (Shang Dynasty) bronze ritual vessel. This bronze Ge is a "Qu nego", with traces of plain silk and hemp on both sides, and obvious traces of thunder and flowers on the front of Goba.
In primitive society, in order to resist the cold, human beings directly covered their bodies with grass leaves and hides, and gradually learned to collect kudzu, hemp, silk and so on. And use the feathers of hunted birds and animals to knead, row, weave and weave into coarse cloth, thus developing the technology of weaving, cutting and sewing. People create performance and spinning techniques based on the experience of pinching ropes. The result is to split the plant stem bark into extremely fine fibers first, and then connect them one by one. This is a highly skilled craft, so people later called the achievement of the work "achievement".
Use a rope to connect the grass leaves. At first, the hole was drilled with an awl, and then a string was inserted. Later, needle and thread sewing technology developed. A stone cone was found in the Paleolithic site in Zhoukoudian, Beijing. Among the relics of cavemen are bone needles dating from 65438 BC+600,000 BC. Bone needle is the predecessor of weft insertion device and the most primitive knitting tool. With the use of bone needles, people in ancient China began to make sewing thread. The use of bone needle lead is an important development in textile processing. It puts the weft in the pinhole, and the weft passes through the warp at one time, which saves the tedious work of threading one by one and greatly improves the efficiency. The invention of bone needle weft insertion pioneered waist weaving.
Weaving technology has developed from making knitwear for fishing and hunting and weaving baskets for padding. The Book of Changes (II) records the legendary Fu's "netting fish". At present, the earliest known woven object is a reed fragment unearthed from Hemudu site 7,000 years ago, with a mat pattern. The decorative patterns on the bottom of pottery unearthed from Anbanpo site in Xi 'an include blue pattern, vein pattern, check pattern and back pattern.
In the late Neolithic period, people began to use knitting technology to make clothes. The book Huai Nan Zi Xun Shang said that "Apollo's clothes were weak at the beginning, and his hands hung with his fingers, which was a net", indicating that he had already made clothes with hemp at that time. Although this kind of military net clothing is simple, its appearance is a symbol of human civilization. The progress of knitting technology has created the premise for the emergence of textile technology.
Spinning pendant is the oldest spinning tool. Some are made of animal bones, and some are formed by inserting a lever in the middle of the spinning wheel. The spinning wheel is made of stone, bone, pottery and jade, and its shapes are round, spherical, conical, platform, mushroom and gear. The early spinning wheel was relatively thick and suitable for spinning thick thread. In the late Neolithic period, the spinning wheel became thin and thin, and finer yarns could be spun. The working principle of the rotating pendant is to rotate the lever with one hand and pull the fiber with the other. Due to the low spinning efficiency and uneven yarn twist, a single spindle manual spinning wheel based on the doffing principle appeared, which consists of spindle, rope pulley and handle. The use of spinning wheel improves the efficiency and quality of spinning, and yarns with different thicknesses can be spun according to the requirements of fabrics. After continuous improvement, from single spindle to multi-spindle, from manual to pedal, pedal spinning wheel is an important invention in the history of ancient textile machinery in China. In the Yuan Dynasty, a five-spindle bast spinning car appeared, which could spin two kilograms of yarn a day and a night. There is also a large spinning wheel driven by manpower, electricity storage or water power, with 32 spindles, which can spin 100 kg yarn day and night. This was the most advanced spinning machine in the world at that time. In the west, it was not until 1769 that the Englishman acle made the "water wheel spinning machine", which was several centuries later than the water wheel spinning machine in China.
Made of pottery and copper, it is an early textile tool, consisting of binding plates and binding rods. The round hole on the ceramic spinning wheel is used to insert the rod. When the spinning disc is rotated by hand, the binding itself makes a bunch of tangled fibers stretched and thinned, and the force generated when the binding disc rotates distorts the thinned fibers. In the spinning process, the force of fiber stretching and drawing is continuously transmitted upward along the direction perpendicular to the binding disk (that is, the direction of the binding rod), and the fiber is continuously stretched and drawn. When the binding disc stops rotating, the stretched yarn is wound on the binding rod, that is, "spinning".
In order to further improve labor productivity, people use their hands to install 2-3 spindles on a spinning wheel for spinning, and use their feet to operate the rotating spindles. The labor productivity of pedal spindle spinning wheel is 2-4 times higher than that of single spindle.
The original loom was a "sitting loom" sitting on the floor, also called waist loom. More than 2000 years ago, a group of female slaves were knitting on the floor under the supervision of slave owners on the cover of the textile shell container unearthed at the Shizhaishan site in Jinning, Yunnan. This waist pedal machine has no frame, one end of the cloth winding shaft is tied to the waist, and the warp beam at the other end is pedaled by both feet to tighten the cloth. The warp yarn is divided into two layers according to odd and even numbers by the warp splitter, the warp yarn is raised by the heald lifter to form a shed, the weft yarn is inserted by the bone needle and beaten by the beating-up knife. The most important achievement of waist weaving is the adoption of heald lifting rod, warp splitting rod and beating-up knife.
Jacquard technology originated from the original waist loom and was used in oblique loom and horizontal loom in Han Dynasty. Generally, pedals are used to control healds (devices for lifting warp yarns) to weave patterns. In order to weave patterns, the number of heald frames should be increased. Two heald frames can only weave plain weave, 3-4 heald frames can weave twill weave and more than 5 heald frames can weave satin weave. Therefore, in order to weave complex flowers with large pattern cycle, the warp yarns must be divided into more groups, and the multi-heald and multi-climbing jacquard loom is gradually formed. According to Xijing Miscellaneous Notes, ChenBaoGuang's wife weaves loose silk, so many healds are very complicated to weave. In the Three Kingdoms, they all changed from 60 healds to 12 healds, and adopted the method of heddle jacquard, which not only facilitated the operation but also improved the efficiency.
In the Eastern Han Dynasty, the jacquard machine with flowers as the main part appeared, also known as the greenhouse. It is the representative of the highest achievement of ancient textile technology in China. It uses a line book to store the jacquard program, and then draws the warp opening with curves. This pattern book is a set of programs for storing pattern information on jacquard machine, which is woven by foot thread representing warp yarn and ear thread representing weft yarn according to pattern requirements. When boarding the plane, the pin thread is connected with the fiber thread of the lifting warp. At this time, pulling the pin thread on one side of the ear cord can play the role of lifting the related warp thread. When weaving, two people cooperate, one is a flower puller, sitting on a three-foot high flower floor to pull flowers and lift healds, and the other is a pedal weft insertion. In Wang Yi's "On the Robot Woman" in the Eastern Han Dynasty, the scene of the cooperation between the weaver and the jacquard worker in operating the jacquard machine was described.
Jacquard machine was introduced to the west through the Silk Road, which is instructive to the invention of program control and storage technology in the development of modern electronic computers.