China is the hometown of silk. Silk is one of the important characteristics of Chinese civilization. It has many connections with China's etiquette system, culture and art, customs, and science and technology. The emperor used silk to show his authority, and hundreds of officials used silk to mark their ranks; literati wrote poems praising silk, and painters splashed ink on the silk made of silk; the common people worshiped the silkworm gods and prayed for a rich silk, while the court did Give a class to persuade the sericulture, and use this to evaluate the performance of the local officials. Two of the four great inventions are directly related to silk. The original meaning of "paper" is the accumulation of velvet silk in the process of making silk floss. The invention of printing is directly related to letterpress printing on silk. The printed silk fabrics unearthed from the Han tomb of Mawangdui have been overprinted in large areas and are nearly a thousand years earlier than the official Tang Dynasty engraving prints. Therefore, it can be said that the relief printing on silk is the originator of engraving printing. In addition, the development of the Maritime Silk Road directly promoted the practice and improvement of the compass.
Silk is not only a simple and expensive raw material for clothing, it has also played an important currency function for a long time in history. For China, “silk” is not only a commodity, but the currency itself. It can be used not only to pay the salaries of soldiers, but also to pay for the purchase of horses and other commodities. China uses silk to buy animal products from grassland tribes, while grassland people sell the silk to the west along the Silk Road. It was in this process that silk realized the transformation from currency to commodity, and it also explained why Roman and Byzantine gold coins were often found at the eastern end of the "Silk Road", while Chinese copper coins were rarely unearthed in the West, because silk It is the currency of the Silk Road.
