Beijing, 3 Dec (Xinhua) -- On 3 December, the Xinhua Daily Telegraph published a report entitled "Searching for Silk."
One day, about 5,500 years ago, in what is now called the Central Plains, a child died in a village. According to the custom, people wrapped a layer of silk on the small body, put in a pointed clay vase, and then buckled a clay pot on it to form a small urn coffin, and then let him be buried in the ground.
The village and cemetery later became a site, unearthed in 2013 and known as the "Wanggou Site."
One day, about 3,000 years ago, in what is now called the Chengdu Plain, in a city, people dug a large pit in the southwest corner, put in gold, bronze, pottery, jade and silk, and probably put a fire and filled it in.
The city later became the site of the famous Sanxingdui, with thick ashes in some sacrificial pits.
Then one day more than 800 years ago, under the imperial rule of the southern Song Dynasty, which was later called the Southern Song Dynasty, a wooden merchant ship set sail from Quanzhou, the most prosperous port in the world at that time. It is a "Lucky Ship" made in Fujian, with a pointed bottom, narrow head, wide tail, and its hull is a multiple plate structure, divided into multiple watertight compartments, strong wind resistance, deep draft, it is said that it can hold 700,000 to 800,000 pounds of cargo. Laden with porcelain, iron and silk, it carried the fortunes of shipowners and cargo owners, but unexpectedly sank in the South China Sea between the pearl river estuary and the Leizhou Peninsula.
——The shipwreck was later included in China's "Top 100 Archaeological Discoveries in a Hundred Years" and was compiled as "Nanhai No. 1".
Ancient coffins, ancient cities, ancient ships, the same element appears in all three stories: silk. However, when the monuments reappear, year after year, day after day, the earth erosion, fire or flooding has long since vanished the silk, making it impossible to imagine the luster, suppleness and silkiness of the past. Over the years, the "silk journey" of a group of scientific and technological archaeologists is to find traces in the invisible.
Proof of silk
In June 2014, the 38th session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee was held in Doha, Qatar, as we commonly refer to as the World Heritage Conference. At this congress, China, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan jointly declared the "Silk Road: Road Network of the Chang'an-Tianshan Corridor", which was successfully declared a world cultural heritage.
However, before the final word was made, representatives of countries raised objections. Zhao Feng, director of the China Silk Museum and director of the International Center for Ancient Textile Research (CIETA), recalled: "They said that the silk in china was earlier than in China, but it was silk spit by wild silkworms (tulip silkworms, castor silkworms, etc.), not silkworms (silkworms). The globally recognized origin of the sericulture silk industry is China, such as 'sericulture' in English. Among them, 'seri' originated from the ancient Greek and Roman title of China 'Seres (Silk Country)'. And the word 'culture' requires the role of a person to be called 'culture', wild, collected, can not be counted as 'culture'. ”
It was not a matter of course, but with the interlude, it is still necessary to pay attention. After the triumph, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage asked the archaeological community to produce conclusive evidence that silk originated in China. In 2010, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage relied on the China Silk Museum to establish a key scientific research base of the State Administration of Cultural Relics for the Protection of Textile Cultural Relics. Naturally, this task also fell to the base.
On August 7, 2018, the audience visited the silk relics of the Song Dynasty. Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Sun Shan
In fact, in the 100 years since the birth of modern Chinese archaeology, field archaeology has obtained many empirical evidences that "silk originated in China":
In 1926, Li Ji, the "father of Chinese archaeology", led a team to excavate the ruins of Xiyin Village in Xia County, Shanxi, which was the first archaeological excavation in China led by a Chinese archaeologist independently. They accidentally found a black-brown object shaped like a peanut shell. After identification, it was actually the "half cocoon" left after being cut in half. "Half a cocoon" is now stored in the National Palace Museum in Taipei, its chronology is still controversial, generally believed to have a history of 6000-5500 years, is the empirical evidence of human use of silkworm cocoons.
In 1934, the scholar Shen Weizhi discovered a Neolithic cultural site in qianshanyang in his hometown of Huzhou, Zhejiang. In 1956 and 1958, the former Cultural Relics Management Committee of Zhejiang Province excavated the Qianshan Yang site and found silk pieces, ribbons and silk threads, of which the silk pieces and ribbons were identified as artificially raised domestic silk fabrics, with a history of 4400-4200 years. This is the empirical evidence of the emergence of silk in the Yangtze River Basin.
Silkworm silk pieces excavated from the Qianshan Yang site in the 1950s. Xinhua News Agency expansion pack
From 1981 to 1988, the Cultural Relics Department of Zhengzhou City conducted six excavations of the Xingyang Qingtai site, and found gray-white carbonized silk fabrics in several urn coffins, which have a history of 5500 years. This, like "half a silkworm cocoon", is also an empirical evidence of the emergence of silk in the Yellow River Basin.
And just last year, also in Xia County, Shanxi, archaeologists excavated the shicun site and found a 6,000-year-old stone carved silkworm chrysalis.
……
"Field archaeology has found empirical evidence of the origin of many silks, and the method of identification is mainly observation." Zhao Feng said that cotton, wool, hemp and silk are the four natural fibers that humans use the longest. In the prehistoric period, cotton is unlikely to have spread to China, and wool is mainly used in the frontier and not in the interior, and the difference between hemp and silk depends on the imprints they leave: when magnified with a microscope, from a longitudinal point of view, the imprints left by hemp are rough and the imprints left by silk are smooth; from the cross-section, the cross-section of hemp is scattered, the cross-section of silk is a triangle, and the cross-section of domestic silk is a blunt triangle, and the section of wild silk is an acute triangle."
However, the longer the time of the search for silk, the less likely it is that the relics will be preserved intact. Can traces of silk be found in the relics of carbonization, ashing, mudming, and mineralization? This requires the power of science and technology even more.
The wrath of man
Hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, the atoms of the four elements, according to different molecular structures, combined into 18 kinds of amino acids. The 18 amino acids are then connected into peptide chains according to a certain sequence. The peptide chain is then folded β, α spiral... Silk protein is formed, and the silk protein is coated with a layer of sericin - the essence of silk is a natural polymer protein compound, and the silkworm is like a small living bioreactor.
Silkworms, the connotation of spring, are ultimately difficult to resist the wind and frost of the world for thousands of years. Throughout the ages, countless silks have undergone a degradation process from silk proteins, peptide chains, amino acids to simpler elements. This requires researchers to find traces of the silk protein's degradation products.
"Actually, we started this work in 2009, and it was to find glue." Zhao Feng's colleague and director of the key scientific research base of the State Administration of Textile and Cultural Relics Protection Zhou Yang told the story.
Zhou Yang was in the tomb of marquis Hai Xiahou.
At that time, a batch of Northern Song Dynasty textiles were unearthed from the underground palace of Changgan Temple in Nanjing, and some of them used the process of printing gold, that is, blending gold clay with gelatin and depicting them on silk. But after 1000 years, this batch of textiles have absorbed enough water, the gum has been lost, how to prove that the silk fabric in the gold drawing process used glue?
Researchers at institutions such as the China Silk Museum have thought of too many ways. Do elemental analysis, the colloid has been lost; do mass spectrometry analysis, there are too many pollutants on the cultural relics, and the analysis of too much noise. Later, they came up with immunization. This method was used by the Getty Institute in the United States for ancient Egyptian murals, and traces of the use of egg whites in pigments by ancient Egyptians were found.
The principles of immunology occur in humans and animals every day and are effectively applied by people. Bacteria, viruses and other organic substances enter the bloodstream, causing the serum to produce antibodies. These organic substances that cause antibodies to be produced are called antigens. Detecting antibodies to infectious diseases from the blood is an important technology for doctors, and after we inject vaccines, corresponding antibodies will be produced in the body.
Through immunization, the researchers found traces of glue on this batch of Song Dynasty textiles. You can find the "traces of glue", and the same way can also find the "traces of silk". Subsequently, the China Silk Museum and other institutions began the research and development of silk micro-trace detection technology based on immunological principles. The researchers found characteristic fragments of silk proteins and used this molecular marker to prepare antibodies in rabbits. Antibodies and antigens are a key to open a lock, and the task of this antibody is to go to prehistoric sites to find antigens, that is, the molecular markers of silk.
In 2016, immunoassay technology found the signal of silk protein in a cabin of the "South China Sea One". The cabin was originally stuffed with silt, and everyone thought it was an empty cabin, but it was the discovery in this empty cabin that eliminated the confusion of "sea silk without silk" - the thousands of sails on the ancient Maritime Silk Road, of course, loaded with silk.
Archaeologists excavate artifacts from nanhai no. 1 at the Guangdong Maritime Silk Road Museum on May 15, 2014. Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Chen Yehua
In 2017, the technology detected the signal of silk protein from soil samples in two urn coffins at the Wanggou site. The researchers first used a microscope to observe the soil samples, saw the traces of textiles, and then used the soil samples for immunological testing, thus settling on the sound - this is the world's earliest silk object.
In March 2021, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage's "Archaeological China" Important Project Work Progress Conference was held in Chengdu, and the major archaeological discoveries of the Sanxingdui site were unveiled on the spot. One of them is that silk traces have been found in many sacrificial pits. On the surface of a bronze vessel, immunity found the silk that had been attached, and the microscope also saw the structure of the silk — this is the copper ion with bacteriostatic effect. In the ashes of pit four, immunoassay also found a strong silk protein signal.
After several improvements, the core component of this technology is a test strip shaped like a pregnancy test stick. Zhou Yang said that if the signal of the silk protein is too weak, they can also use electrochemical methods, that is, use electricity to amplify the signal, and the sensitivity reaches the pic level. Pique, that's 1 trillionth of a gram.
"Antibody positive", on the hospital's report sheet, such a result is good or bad. At the silk archaeological site, it represents only an exciting result: no matter how old it is, how decayed the relics, there must have been silk in between.
This is a carbonized silk fabric excavated from the Wanggou site in Xingyang City, Henan Province. Xinhua News Agency expansion pack
A key to open a lock, with today's silk protein made of antibodies, can be highly sensitive detection of 5,000 years ago corresponding antigens, that is, 5,000 years ago silk protein and the present is no different, the ancestors in 5,000 years ago raised silkworms, breeding to this day. Zhou Yang said that this is consistent with the results of previous studies on the silkworm genome by Southwest University and other units.
The Charm of Silk
In 2015, the Zhengzhou Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology and the China Silk Museum jointly applied to the State Administration of Cultural Heritage for the "Search for the Source of Chinese Silk" project, respectively, at the Yangshao cultural sites in the Yellow River Basin such as Xingyang Qingtai, Wanggou and Gongyi Shuanghuaishu. At present, the relevant research is continuing. Zhou Yang said that they hope to find the earliest silk reeling workshop and will also "look for silk" in the Yangtze River Basin.
At the end of August this year, the China Cultural Relics Protection Technology Association held an appraisal meeting in Hangzhou. Experts believe that the results of the project "Research and Application of Key Technologies for Immunological Detection of Textile (Silk and Wool) Cultural Relics at Archaeological Sites" completed by the China Silk Museum and other units have reached the world's leading level. Recently, the team of Zhou Yang and others published papers in Analytical Chemistry, a top global journal of analytical chemistry sponsored by the American Chemical Society (ACS).
Textile marks detected locally on bronze human heads excavated from Sanxingdui No. 2 "Sacrifice Pit". Xinhua News Agency (Courtesy of China Silk Museum)
"There are three levels of competition in research, the first layer is to compete who has a more complete database, the second layer is to compete who has more advanced equipment, and the third layer is to compete whose concept is better." Reviewing the research and development of immunoassay technology, Zhou Yang said that "silk seeking" is the third layer of competition she likes.
However, this is not the whole driving force behind their "silk search". The most authentic driving force may be seen in another of her questions: "Have we ever thought that in prehistoric times, silkworms could have been a pest?" ”
Indeed, in ancient times, the consumption of mulberry leaves by wild silkworms may lead to a decrease in mulberry production, and mulberry is still a favorite fruit that people still eat, and it can be fed in the past famine years.
"Wild silkworms are very 'high and cold' animals and like to be alone, but silkworms can be piled up. Wild silkworms will hide under the leaves when it comes to rainy days, and silkworms have no self-protection ability and rely on human protection. Wild silkworm moths can fly far to find a mate, and domestic silkworm moths have poor flight ability. Zhou Yang told reporters that the study of the silkworm genome found that compared with wild silkworms, silkworms have 354 gene loci that have changed. Why do people domesticate silkworms? Just hope that its cocoon can change from the size of peanuts to such a big and thick one now? ”
Workers sort out cocoons at the Shuanghe Silk Factory in Qianjiang District, Chongqing, on October 31, 2020. Xinhua News Agency (Photo by Yang Min)
In this regard, Zhao Feng believes that the ancestors paid attention to silkworms, domesticated silkworms, and produced silk, most likely out of primitive worship. "Silkworms make cocoons to bind themselves, and then break the cocoon into moths, so that they feel very magical, hoping that through the domestication of silkworms, they will find the power of life resurrection or soul ascension." Therefore, some Neolithic cultural sites will have silkworm-shaped vessels and moth(butterfly)-shaped vessels. They wrapped the body or heavy object in silk, hoping that the deceased would be able to come back from the dead or ascend to heaven like a silkworm breaking out of a cocoon after burial. ”
"This idea of primitive worship was maintained for a long time in ancient times, but after the Warring States, China's productive forces developed greatly, people became more rational, the practicality of silk was more recognized, and it became a symbol of clothing for different classes, and eventually formed a world-renowned Chinese silk culture." Zhao Feng said.
"Silk", in the oracle bone is the pictogram of two bundles of silk. Opening the "Modern Chinese Dictionary", the number of Chinese characters included in the "纟" section is about 200, and many words have forgotten the ancient meaning at the beginning of the creation of the word, such as "pure" is silk, "Xu" is the head of the cocoon when reeling silk, and "group" is the ancestral tablet tied with silk rope...
The meaning of these Chinese characters today, in addition to practical value, has a grand atmosphere. We praise outstanding figures for being able to describe the prosperity of the country as a unified country, call etiquette, righteousness, and shame the four dimensions of the country, and believe that the operation of society needs to have a discipline criterion... It can be said that silkworms, silk and even textiles have left a deep imprint on the way of thinking of Chinese.
"From the origin of silk, we can see that Chinese the ancient ideal of 'the unity of heaven and man', and we can also see the need for unity and cooperation of ancient farming civilizations." Zhou Yang said that "searching for silk" is a retrospective of Chinese civilization.
On December 8, 2020, Zhao Feng (first from left), Zhou Yang (first from right) and others studied the excavation of silk from Famen Temple at the Shaanxi Archaeological Research Institute. Courtesy of respondents
In the process of "searching for silk", they had found silk on the weapons excavated from the tomb of The Mao Tomb of Emperor Mao of the Han Dynasty, and Zhou Yang was very excited about it. We know that Emperor Wudi of the Han Dynasty relied on Huo Toyi, the "young god of war", to open up the Hexi Corridor and lay the foundation for the opening of the Silk Road.
"Silk is the driving force behind China's diplomacy." Zhao Feng said that the Westerners' thirst for silk knows that in the far East, there is a country that produces silk, and only then did it have the impetus for silk to spread from east to west, and eventually formed the famous "Silk Road", and the cultural elements of ancient Europe, West Asia and Central Asia will also spread eastward along the Silk Road. On the Silk Road, silk was not only a commodity, but also a hard currency, and an important carrier of human civilization.
"How do we promote the Silk Road culture today?" Talking about the Silk Road cannot be separated from silk, because silk is the driving force of the Silk Road. This is the view that Zhao Feng has held for many years.
The meaning of "searching for silk" is also here.