I highly recommend the China National Silk Museum in Hangzhou, which was the center of the imperial silk industry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_National_Silk_Museum

https://web.archive.org/web/20170907005855/http://en.chinasi...

It has complete royal robes ~1,000 years old, and a few damaged garments more than 2,000 years old IIRC.

> Silk residues were successfully detected, which confirmed the early use of silk as a material carrier to communicate between Heaven and Earth

That last bit seemed to jump out of nowhere. Maybe I'm missing some implications of the grid-like oval bronze thing? Very mysterious.

I found it odd that the article seemed to imply that silk was used in human sacrifice ("sacrificial clothing"), but it never explicitly stated this--perhaps too unpleasant to admit outright? It wouldn't be surprising since the Shang practiced human sacrifice on a massive scale (comparable to the Aztecs).

Studied ancient Chinese history but not a silk expert, here's my 2c.

Critical background is that silk takes a lot of labour to prepare. First you must have the right kind of insects (various species of moth in the larval stage are commonly known as "silkworm"), then you must have the right kind of trees to feed them (commonly mulberries), then you add a lot of labour for capture, harvesting, spinning, dyeing, weaving. In modern times I have only really seen it prepared commercial scale in Jiangsu province (near Xuzhou). If you head too far north the insects probably suffer from the cold, and if you head too far south any artificial farming monoculture is probably readily outcompeted by other flowering plants and predatory insects which are more suited to the tropics (on account of higher moisture, food availability and temperature).

Relative to existing fabrics such as hemp, silk has at least in other contexts been of value militarily because of its relative strength to weight ratio and dense weave when applied to important tasks such as resisting arrows, although I'm uncertain if this use had emerged yet. Any military use would tend to reinforce a cultural link between life and death owing to its spatiotemporal proximity to mortality events.

The fact that it is soft and labour-intensive (expensive / in short supply) means it was probably reserved for the wealthier or higher ranking figures.

Although the paper doesn't state it clearly, it actually deals with the archaeological findings of a non-Han Chinese civilization in the area of Sichuan which was illiterate and was based around what appeared to be a bird and tree cult (the Shu kingdom of the Sichuan basin[1]). It is therefore possible that a kind of soft, reflective-refractive, feather-like, readily dyed textile with a fine weave may have contributed to some sort of ritual purpose in line with these beliefs. Later this civilization was destroyed by the Han Chinese.

The wicking properties of silk are fair (I was unable to find a quantitative reference) as was the major early textile of hemp (which is also tough and therefore long-lasting) which is significant as we know that Sichuan in the Shu kingdom period was a vast, tropical inland basin criss-crossed by regularly flooding rivers descending from the Himalayas, thickly forested and with crocodiles, elephants, rhinos, giant cats, colourful birds, etc. Both silk and hemp textiles would help to cool anyone wearing them, relative to other options (animal skins, etc.). Furthermore, in the absence of modern medicine, fine-weave capable wicking fabrics would assist with resisting potentially lethal bacterial and fungal infections in the tropical environment and may therefore have been used as wound dressings or undergarments.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shu_(kingdom)

Even early piratical man - ranging from the seafaring Athenians to Han Chinese - who developed extensive seafaring capabilities utilized these materials in peace and in war. Thus, the Chinese idiom "turning war into jade and silk" is a means of communication with the gates of heaven.