China!/China_284_12282007.JPG

Previous | Home | Next

Downstairs there is a silk factory. They like to combine factories and stuff with restaurants and then make our tour group go to these places so that before or after eating they can force us to go to these places and then potentially but things. I think our tour guides who arranged things get a percentage of the profits or something. In all we went to like 3 or 4 restaurants at least that had a little "catch" where they also sold stuff. Kind of lame, but kind of cool. One of the first was the pearl factory, you saw the open clam from that. Anyway, silk is made basically by murdering little silk worms, if I understand correctly. The silk worms wrap themselves in a cocoon made of their silky stuff and then these people and machines take the cocoons and unravel them, gathering up the silk from the cocoons onto those reels you see. A pretty interesting process.