Travelog - A travel guide to Vietnam

Rearing silkworms and mulberry for silk-weaving has long been a traditional occupation in Vietnam. As the legend goes, Princess Hoang Phu Thieu Hoa, daughter to King Hung (3,000 years ago) was a nice-looking, virtuous, skilful and hardworking girl. For this reason, her father sent her to Co Do village and more than 60 villages along the banks of the Red River to help the villagers rear silkworms with mulberry and weave silk.
The Co Do silk became a singular speciality as a tribute to the King. By and by, this craft spread to all corners of the land, from the coastal plains to the mid-lands, flourishing along with the cultivaof wet rice.

This craft is a marvellous combination of three components: cultivation (mulberry fanning); breeding (silkworm rearing) and handicraft (silk weaving). Formerly, it was a secondary trade of the farmers in the Red River Delta, where you could find rice paddy fields and mulberry groves everywhere as well as mulberry hedges around gardens and mulberry trees lining the sides of village paths.

In the villages, each household keeps scores of baskets of silkworms and a few silk weaving looms. The silkworm is a very dainty creature. Therefore, the fanner has to toil diligently, taking pains to attend to it day and night, particularly, in the final stage when the silkworm eats a lot of mulberry leaves. As the cocoon grows “ripe”, the silk should betaken out as quick as possible and then the worker must sit by a hot coal stove with a pot cocoons in boiling water from which the silk is extracted and spun on a rotating wheel.

The pot of boiling water to extract the silk thread from the boiled cocoon must be on a controlled fire so that the thread is thin, long and soft. The worker should be keen to select tender threads, smooth and shining, to weave into fine silk..

The weaving looms are traditionally made of good-quality wood free from all termites and wood- While weaving, a skilled weaver rarely looks at a sample since the design is embedded deep in her mind. With dexterous coordination between hands and feet, the shuttle rushing to and fro, the roll of silk grows longer and longer with designs of leaves and flowers, soaring dragons and flying phoe. nixes looming larger and larger.

In Vietnam today hundreds of silk villages are in active operation, the best-known in Ha Dong prov- such as Van Phuc, Co Do, La Khe, La Ca, La Duong, La Phu, La Pham, Van La, and Y La. Ha Dong silk has a good reputation throughout the country and was exhibited at an international fair in Paris more than half a century ago.

Over the last few years, along whith the national economic development silk-weaving has been restored and expanded dramatically. The Vietnamese mulberry and silkworm rearing sectors have reco e great achievements inbreeding high-yielding mulberry varieties and high-productivity silkworm strains by applying mechanization to all links of the chain of technology and specifying areas to specialize in mulberry and silkworm rearing.

It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of hectares will be under mulberry cultivation through- out the country by the year 2005, and export turn. over may top USD 50 million fot the silk produced.