Brief information on The No.1 Silk Factory  

Suzhou is a city with a long history of silk culture. It has a tradition of mulberry planting, silk worm raising, silk reeling and weaving. Suzhou’s silk was an imperial tribute and gained a worldwide reputation from as early as the Tang and Song dynasties(a.d.618-1279). During the rule of the Wanli Emperor of the Ming Dynasty (1573-1620), Suzhou was surrounded by mulberry fields and formed a prosperous silk market. Suzhou city also abounds in natural gifts, abundant sunshine, plentiful rainfall and rich soils, which offer a pleasant environment for rich cocoons and high qualities of silk. It has been the main producing area and the center of collecting & distributing silk raw materials in China.  

The No.1 Silk Factory was built in Suzhou in 1926. It is divided into three parts: the exhibition hall which shows the history of Suzhou silk and some ancient collections; the working spot, where you can see how the silk is made; and the product exhibition hall, exhibiting the main products of this factory, the silk wadding quilts. The factory gains a good reputation in the silk industry for its complete technical process of silkworm raising, cocoon sorting, cocoon boiling, and silk reeling, rewinding and packing. There are more than 300 workers, one cocoon sorting machine, one cocoon boiling machine, two silk rewinding machines and one silk rewinding.

In this factory you can not only see how the silk is processed from worm to the final product, but also learn some histories of silk in China.

*You can download the bilingual note to show it to a taxi driver or someone else to find your way to The No.1 Silk Factory if you plan to visit The No.1 Silk Factory and have language problems.

   

Address: No. 94, Nanmen Rd.