Shuye Zhang

For thousands of years, silk was treated as a luxury in the global trade, where it played a role in promoting exchange and learning between East and West in terms of production, techniques, patterns, designs and creative values. As simply the secretion from the mouth of a moth caterpillar, this natural product was so valued and appreciated that methods of production were secretly and jealously guarded, remaining unchanged for thousands of years. People still marvel at the two kilometres of silk thread drawn from just one silk cocoon.

The exporting of Chinese silk to Britain in the Victorian period has been very under-researched. Following the basic theme of ‘China in Britain’, this dissertation aims to study the exporting of Chinese silk to late Victorian Britain, to examine how Chinese silk as a material product was understood and incorporated into British Victorian social and private life. Taking Chinese sericulture and its silk manufacturing industry as a context, it will discuss the categories and characteristics of Chinese exported silk from a material perspective, to answer the question of what Chinese exported silk was in late Victorian Britain. Then it will investigate the promotion and consumption of Victorian Chinese silk, to see how meaning and value was created, and how ‘Chineseness’ in Chinese silk was established from a conceptual perspective.