17 August – Hoi An Old Town with the Silk Museum (Vietnam)

The river at night

The Old Town has a number of old lanes and houses with most in their original condition. Hoi An is part of the Cham culture which encroached on the Indianized Kingdom of Champa, which covered much of what is now central Vietnam the with ties to Japanese, Chinese, Indian and Western culture. These diverse cultural influences remain visible today with colourful guildhalls founded by ethnic Chinese from Guangdong and Fujian provinces in China.

Old Buildings

Minh Huong, or Museum of Folklore, is actually in the old town and has exhibits of old tools and machinery for processing silk from the pupae to the finished article. It is housed in an old building which is interesting in itself.

Loom

A bamboo gate

A loom for narrow material

Material on the loom

A very old 'mechanised' loom

Pupae and different silk threads

The silk trade, which began during the 17th century when Hoi An was a busy trading port, now attracts local and foreign tourists. At the end of a walk round a silk making business are the shops where silk items are for sale but the only thing I bought was some raw silk. It was more than interesting to feel the hardness of silk wound straight from the pupae, then boiled once and then boiled again. The difference in the feel was remarkable, from quite hard to very soft.

Silk worms at three days old on mulberry leaves

Silk worms at nine days old

At nine days old the silkworm need to be fed every three hours requiring the old leaves to be replaced with fresh leaves. After seventeen days the worms do not sleep and only eat to get energy to make the cocoon. The cocoon is completed in 24 days and 28 days in summer and winter respectively. The worm with a dark head will produce yellow silk and the one with no mark produces white silk. The cocoons are placed on a bamboo frame for one week and then checked for holes. If a cocoon has a hole in it it is thrown away and which happens to about 15% of the cocoons. Each cocoon will have between 500 to 1000 metres of thread and for fine silk only three cocoons are spun at one time.

Pupae on the bamboo frame

Heating the pupae to 90C and spinning the threads

Heating the pupae to 90C and spinning the threads 

A mechanical loom from 1947

Using the silk