Silk was discovered in China at least 4500 years ago. A Chinese legend has it that the emperor Huang Di (the yellow emperor) accidentally dropped a silkworm cocoon in his tea, and observed its shining fiber as it began to unwind.
The silkworm is the caterpillar of the moth Bombyx mori. It is a completely domesticated insect. There are no wild silkworms and silkworms can't live without human care.
The silkworm caterpillar grows to about three inches long on a diet of nothing but white mulberry leaves. Then it spins a cocoon about itself and metamorphoses into an adult moth. The adults mate, lay eggs and die in just a few days.
The silk is a continuous thread, as much as half a mile long, which makes up the cocoon. The silkworm has a pair of glands which produce a liquid form of the protein fibroin. Fibroin emerges from a silk gland as a continuous fiber coated with the other silk protein, a sticky substance called sericin. The two glands form two fibers which are then spun together by a specialized organ, the spinneret.
The collected cocoons are put into very hot water, which, of course kills the silkworm. A single thread is prized loose from the wet cocoon and unrolled. The best quality silk is unrolled by hand. When the whole cocoon has been unrolled, the little cooked silkworm provides a snack for the worker.
Silkworms played a big part in medical history. The Chinese had had a monopoly on silk production for millennia, but in the nineteenth century, French producers got a few cocoons and established a local silk industry. Soon, however, the silkworms began dying of an unknown disease. The silk raisers turned for help to Louis Pasteur, who was able to discover that the disease was caused by bacteria, and prescribe the sanitary procedures that saved the French silk industry. That convinced Pasteur that many diseases were caused by bacteria. It marked the beginning of the modern age of medicine.
It was another scientist studying silkworm diseases, Dr. Ishiwata Shigetane, who first identified the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, which is the source of Cry protein, the Bt toxin which is now made by many insect resistant transgenic plants.
Japanese scientists have given silkworms a gene for luminescence. They produce silk that glows in the dark. Although this might be a useful product, the scientists' real goal is to be able to replace the luminescence gene with any useful other gene they choose. If a transgenic silkworm doesn't produce light, the new gene must have successfully replaced the luminescence gene.
The Silk Road brought the actual fabric—made in China—all around Asia for centuries before it found its way to Europe at least as early as the 1st or 2nd centuries. It was not until around 550 AD that two missionaries finally managed to smuggle to Europe (using a hollow staff) the essentials for cultivating silk: the eggs of the silkworm and the seeds of a mulberry tree. Very quickly thereafter silk became the fabric of choice for nobility and the clergy in Europe, and the Moors became deft silk cultivators and weavers carrying the fabric around Europe and northern Africa.
No one knows for sure when the cultivation of silk began in Thailand, but it probably came around 1,000 years ago when Thai people began their migration to modern day Thailand from Southern China. Historically, the culture and weaving of Thai silk was a traditional folk craft of Thai women. It was intensive work that often combined threads from as many as 8,000 cocoons to make a single dress. But the results were so remarkable that, as in Europe, silk clothing was commissioned by the Thai royalty (they even had special colors and patterns only royals were allowed to wear). When Europeans first came to Thailand, they were so dazzled by the superiority of silk garments the Thai village women made that Thai silk became a sensation in the West.
When cheaper mass production of silk began in the 19th century in Japan, China, and Europe, Thailand saw a sharp decline in the demand for its silk. The fall was so precipitous that the millennium-old industry nearly vanished before it was revived by the American Jim Thompson following World War II.
After being discharged from his Bangkok post of the old American intelligence services in 1946, Thompson chose to stay in Thailand. By 1947, when his interest in Thai Silk had grown, he could find only one village in the entire country, Ban Krua, which still had even a part-time community of silk weavers—and it is there that he started his enterprise. When Thompson landed in New York with samples from Ban Krua in 1947, it was an instant hit. He went on to form the Thai Silk Company in 1948 and today Thai Silk, with its unique and highly varied colors, has regained its status as one of the most exquisite fabrics in the world.
Thompson himself oversaw this revival in Thai silk until 1967 when, on a vacation in Malaysia’s Cameron Highlands, he walked out of his cottage one day and was never seen again. Due to his old connections with secret services and clandestine operations, speculation on his fate still swirls, forever linking Thai Silk with this international man of mystery.
Though Thompson disappeared, his legacy lived on as Thai Silk continued its growth with its bright and unique colors driving its popularity. Today, most Thai silk worms are cultivated in Thailand’s northeast on the Korat Plateau, while most production is centered in the northern capital, Chiang Mai. Though Jim Thompson is one of the most famous brand of Thai Silk, the industry is quite diversified with hundreds of manufacturers, large and small, providing high quality silks. | 
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