The Silk I Didn’t Know I Came For
Published on HivePostify by @ivan-drazic · Sat Aug 08 2026
> I arrived in Hangzhou knowing almost nothing about its most famous craft. By the time I left, silk had followed me from museums and markets all the way into my suitcase.
The old man and I had no language in common.
My Chinese was nonexistent, his English was no better, and whatever conversation we were having depended on a translation app, a calculator and the internationally recognised vocabulary of pointing at things. Somewhere in the process, however, the transaction became unexpectedly enjoyable.
He was selling ties in Hangzhou’s China Silk City, and I was buying rather more of them than I had intended.
There was bargaining, obviously. I had been through variations of this ritual in Istanbul and Ankara, where negotiations can occasionally feel as though refusing to buy a belt might trigger a minor diplomatic incident. This was different. Quieter, less aggressive, almost elegant. The old man radiated such uncomplicated good humour that I stayed at his shop, looked at another tie, and then another.
Eventually there were six.
Some could have come from a good menswear shop anywhere in Europe: beautiful silk, excellent colours, patterns I could wear with a suit without having to explain myself. Others were unmistakably Chinese. One in particular had insects as its main decorative motif and crossed decisively from distinctive into avant-garde.
I bought that one too.
The total came to roughly fifty euros.
Whether every fibre was chemically verifiable pure silk, I cannot prove. Reviews of Silk City contain the usual warnings about fakes and dubious merchandise. I inspected the material, the finish and the way the ties fell, and they looked and felt good to me. If somebody fooled me, they did a remarkably professional job of it.
More importantly, I had not bought six souvenirs destined to spend the rest of their lives in a drawer. I bought six ties to wear.
What makes the scene slightly absurd is that, a few days earlier, I had known almost nothing about Hangzhou and silk.
Six silk ties, one cheerful salesman and a reason to remember Hangzhou every time I get dressed.
Researching a city after arriving in it
The weeks before China had been hectic enough that my usual travel preparation simply did not happen. I arrived in Hangzhou and started researching Hangzhou from Hangzhou.
Not an approach I would normally recommend, but it does have one advantage: discoveries arrive without much interference from expectations. Once I began reading about what to see, one word kept appearing.
Silk.
At first I assumed this meant a famous local product polished into a convenient tourism brand. A museum, a few specialist shops, something soft to take home.
It went considerably deeper than that.
Hangzhou was not one of the famous desert stops of the overland Silk Road. It belonged to another part of the same enormous network. For centuries, this region was one of the places producing the commodity that eventually gave those routes their name. Hangzhou stood at the southern end of the Grand Canal, linked to China’s internal transport system, while the ports of the Zhejiang coast opened the region towards maritime trade. Its importance grew enormously after 1138, when Hangzhou — then Lin’an — became the capital of the Southern Song dynasty and the wealthy Jiangnan region developed into one of China’s great centres of textile and silk production.
Hangzhou was not simply somewhere silk passed through.
It helped put silk on the road.
Once I knew that, I started noticing it everywhere.
There were specialist shops, elegant boutiques and market stalls. Scarves, dresses, shirts, fabrics and ties appeared with such regularity that the connection between city and material quickly stopped feeling like something invented by a tourism office.
I bought silk scarves at a night market.
Clothing proved more complicated.
There were pieces I genuinely would have worn, until Chinese sizing introduced itself. Apparently a Chinese XXXXL and the European XXL I normally wear occupy different regions of the mathematical universe. The labels suggested optimism. The mirror supplied peer review.
Ties, fortunately, are much more inclusive.
Before buying them, however, I wanted to understand why silk mattered here in the first place.
That meant another taxi.
A silk museum without much of the silk museum
I travelled through Hangzhou almost exclusively by taxi. Distances were substantial, the schedule was full and taxis were cheap and convenient enough that there seemed little reason to pretend otherwise.
The China National Silk Museum kept appearing among the city’s essential sights, so on the morning of 17 May I went there expecting the obvious: silkworms, looms, ancient fabrics and a reasonably linear history of how China turned a caterpillar’s cocoon into one of the most desirable commodities on earth.
The China National Silk Museum: not one museum building, but a surprisingly extensive complex set into the landscape near West Lake.
There was one problem.
Much of precisely that part of the museum was closed.
Renovation had begun earlier in 2025, taking several galleries devoted to sericulture, weaving and the Silk Roads out of circulation. My timing was impressively unfortunate.
Initially, this looked like a fairly serious flaw in my new method of researching attractions only after reaching the destination.
Then I walked into the Fashion Gallery.
And stopped caring.
Four hundred years of looking into someone else’s wardrobe
I expected Chinese clothing.
I did not expect such a substantial history of Western fashion.
The permanent exhibition From Rural to Urban: 400 Years of Western Fashion treats European and later Western dress as a serious subject in its own right rather than as a few foreign curiosities placed beside a Chinese collection.
Western fashion gets far more than a token appearance here: the museum follows centuries of changing silhouettes, fabrics and ideas of elegance.
Room after room moved through silhouettes, fabrics and changing ideas of what a human body should apparently look like once society had finished interfering with it. Historical European clothing gradually gave way to modern fashion. Some pieces were beautiful, some strange, some surprisingly familiar.
Then came the Chinese side.
An Evolution of Fashion: Chinese Costume from the 1920s to the 2010s followed almost a century of enormous change: the development of the qipao, the arrival and adaptation of Western suits and dresses, the radically different clothing culture after 1949 and the renewed internationalisation of Chinese fashion from the 1980s onward.
The most interesting part was not choosing between Chinese and Western fashion, but watching the boundary between them gradually become harder to define.
This was the part someone had really thought through.
Tags: #silk#hangzhou#china#fashion#traveladvice