Page 136 - Deydier UNDERSTANDING CHINESE ARCHAIC BRONZES

The Silk Worm Motif 蠶紋
Since remote antiquity, China has been renowned throughout the
world for sericulture. According to Chinese legend, Lei Zu 嫘姐 the
consort of China’s first of the five prehistoric period rulers, the ‘Yellow
Emperor 黃帝’ (26 century B.C.), herself initiated silkworm breeding
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and mulberry growing in China. In 1926 while undertaking excavation
work at a Yangshao culture site 仰韶文化 (circa 5500 – 3500 B.C.) in
Xia County 夏縣, Shanxi 山西 province, the world’s first ethnic Chinese
archaeologist in the modern sense of the word, Beijing Qinghua
University 清華大學 Lecturer, Li Ji 李濟 unearthed a spinning wheel
and a partially fossilized remnant of a silkworm, which scientific
analysis later confirmed to be part of the cocoon of a domestically
bred silkworm. Amazingly enough, these items were discovered in the
hinterland of the Yellow River Valley 黃河, the legendary home of the
mythical Empress Lei Zu 嫘姐.

In addition to the silkworm’s economic importance in ancient China,
the silkworm itself was for the people of the Xia 夏, Shang 商, Zhou
周 and even earlier periods, a fabulous, semi-mystical and auspicious
insect, which, in its cicada-like life-cycle remained alive while seeming
to be dead to the world and gradually took on another form, a form in
which it produced silk, a fabulous commodity unequalled in strength,
beauty and fineness to any cloth produced by humans, before it
returned to ‘life’.

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Silk worm motif fang zuo gui, early or middle Zhou dynasty (circa 10 century B.C.)
Meiyintang Collection n° 101
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