Reference: MA, Debin. “The Great Silk Exchange: How the World ...

the Talas River (in northern Turkestan) was a major turning point for the history of the
overland silk trade. First, it enabled the continuing eastward intrusion of the Islamic sphere
of influence and led to the Tang dynasty’s loss of control over China’s western frontier.
This and the gradual internal weakening of the Tang government led to the partial closing
of the overland Silk Road to China for almost four hundred years, until the era of the
Mongol empire. 6 China’s weakened control of its Northwestern territories and subsequent
political and military turmoil were, in some way, responsible for the gradual southward
migration of its economic, agricultural, industrial and population center from the Yellow
River area towards the Yangtze River and the coastal regions. By the time of the Sung
dynasty (AD 960-1279), the most productive silk centers found their home in the lower
Yangtze River delta, far away from Xian, the starting point of the old Silk Road. This
locational shift led to the increasing use of the sea route for silk exchange Fan and Wen
1993: 58).
The other significant event, however, was that through the capture of Chinese
prisoners in the Talas river, many of whom were skilled technicians, the Arabs obtained
access to the rich technological knowledge base of China (Needham 1954: 236). The
knowledge and the cultivation of silk were widely diffused from China to Persia, Anatolia,
and regions controlled by Byzantium. In particular, the Chinese method of obtaining long
and unbroken silk threads from whole cocoons by killing the worm inside before it breaks
out was widely adopted (Liu 1995: 43). The Islamic conquest of Sassanian Persia and parts
of the Byzantine empire not only absorbed major silk producing regions, but also eased the
spread of sericulture and the silk industry to North Africa and Southern Spain.
6