Vera recently wrote about the Opium Museum in the north of Thailand, which shows how the Thai Royal Family took an interest in helping provide an alternative to the opium trade and help solve the drug problem from the supply level up.
Well, that is far from the only project that the Royal Family has got going in Thailand. In Buriram for example, there is a silk weaving village, another Royal Project.
Here you can visit and learn all about the process of silk production and weaving, which is a far more interesting process than I had previously realised. Silk worms, it turns out, are entirely dependant on humans for their survival, and are one of the worlds most genetically modified animals. They’ve been bred for their silk for over 5,000 years, and dine exclusively on the leaves of the mulberry bush.
It’s not all roses being a silk worm though. After the larvae have gorged themselves silly on mulberry leaves, they turn into little cocoons, each of which consists of 300 – 900 metres of raw silk. Unfortunately for the silk worm, the majority don’t get to progress past this stage, because the hatching process destroys the silk. Instead they are boiled alive in their cocoons, and the silk pulled out of the water and turned into thread.
Around two to three thousand cocoons are required for 400 grams of silk, which is a lot of dead silkworms, although they aren’t entirely wasted, as the larvae are also edible.
We discovered this last fact during our tour of the village, which let us experience the whole process from end to end. After watching the silk worms get boiled over a wood fire, and the silk threads extracted, we were each offered a boiled silk worm larvae. Which, I can report, taste a bit like boiled potato.
The ladies of the village, who were all very kind and friendly, really let us get involved with the whole process beyond eating the silk worms – we had a go a silk spinning, tried to extract the silk threads from the water, and learnt all about what the silk could be used for. A fascinating tour, and one I can highly recommend.
Vera recently wrote about the Opium Museum in the north of Thailand, which shows how the Thai Royal Family took an interest in helping provide an alternative to the opium trade and help solve the drug problem from the supply level up.
Well, that is far from the only project that the Royal Family has got going in Thailand. In Buriram for example, there is a silk weaving village, another Royal Project.
Here you can visit and learn all about the process of silk production and weaving, which is a far more interesting process than I had previously realised. Silk worms, it turns out, are entirely dependant on humans for their survival, and are one of the worlds most genetically modified animals. They’ve been bred for their silk for over 5,000 years, and dine exclusively on the leaves of the mulberry bush.
It’s not all roses being a silk worm though. After the larvae have gorged themselves silly on mulberry leaves, they turn into little cocoons, each of which consists of 300 – 900 metres of raw silk. Unfortunately for the silk worm, the majority don’t get to progress past this stage, because the hatching process destroys the silk. Instead they are boiled alive in their cocoons, and the silk pulled out of the water and turned into thread.
Around two to three thousand cocoons are required for 400 grams of silk, which is a lot of dead silkworms, although they aren’t entirely wasted, as the larvae are also edible.
We discovered this last fact during our tour of the village, which let us experience the whole process from end to end. After watching the silk worms get boiled over a wood fire, and the silk threads extracted, we were each offered a boiled silk worm larvae. Which, I can report, taste a bit like boiled potato.
The ladies of the village, who were all very kind and friendly, really let us get involved with the whole process beyond eating the silk worms – we had a go a silk spinning, tried to extract the silk threads from the water, and learnt all about what the silk could be used for. A fascinating tour, and one I can highly recommend.
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