Secrets along the Silk Route
By Manohar Malgonkar

TRADE secrets are guarded just as securely as state secrets. Every big-name company wants to know what its rivals are up to. What are Pepsi’s plans for its franchise for Tanzania — and will they put up their own bottling plant there too? What kind of new compact disk is Sony said to have developed? Is Honda really going in for the all-plastic truck engine — or is that some sort of false trial to camouflage their real plans to be the first in the race for putting a five-passenger car on the road which will do 100 km on one litre of petrol?

There are those who will pay good money to find out the answers to these questions, the Big Brothers of the Business world, except that there is nothing brotherly in the world of Big business. It is every man for himself, and few holds are barred.

The formula for making Coca-Cola is guarded like the Crown Jewels of England. They say it is kept in some bank vault to which only two people in a vast worldwide organisation are permitted access. But then that, too somehow seems in proportion. Coca-Cola must be worth about a hundred times the value of the Crown Jewels. Something like a billion bottles of the dark, fizzy, sweet drink are sold every day, and yet nobody knows exactly what goes into that bottle.

Or what ingredients go into a perfume invented by Coco Channel and to which she gave her own name, Channel No 5. It soon became an indispensable accessory for glamorous women all over the world and their millions of imitators. Ms Channel once sued her American associates for breaking into her monopoly of its marketing. And only three years ago, there was this typical case of a top executive in one of America’s gigantic corporations, General Motors, quitting his job and joining Volkswagen in Germany. God, what a rumpus that created! G.M. actually went to court alleging that their officer had taken away G.M.’s design plans to pass them on to a rival manufacturer.

But then that is big business — a battlefield. What is more, it is nothing new. It was tooth-and-claw even in ancient times.

Edward Gibbon in his monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire slips in facts about the lavish lifestyles of the Romans. There are allusions to the fondness of rich women for silk gowns and how once the Emperor rose from "his silken couch;" that Emperor being Claudius who reigned in the third century A.D.

Silk? Surely no one made silk in Europe in those days! Only the Chinese made silk. That was what we were taught at school.

Indeed yes! It was made-in-China silk that those lovely , ravishing queens and concubines of third century Europe loved to deck themselves in and with which Emperor Claudius himself covered his royal throne. It had to be brought from halfway across the world over the legendary ‘Silk Route’.

The Silk Route. Incredibly romantic, incredibly hazardous. It entailed risks and hardships that are difficult to imagine: vast, waterless deserts, narrow mule-paths that snaked through dark forests and along the cliffs of mountains overlooking deep gorges, over snowbound passes of that roof of the world, the pamirs, to Tashkent, Samarkand and finally, skirting the southern shores of the Caspian sea, into Iran. How many rivers did they have to cross? How did they contend with bandits and warlords? And how much of what they had set out to sell actually got to its destination?

And yet the Silk Route was in regular use by these trade caravans because the profits from the trade with the orient were stupendous.

From India and China they took carved ivory and sandalwood articles, and also gems and, unbelievably, pearls’ China specialised in Silk, India in black pepper from Malabar. That black pepper from India was the first zesty spice that the people of Europe began to spice their food with many still do. In the days of King Claudius, it was sold for its weight in silver. And as to the silk from China, I quote an extract from that household book of reference the Pears’ Cyclopaedia:

"It was highly prized by the ancients, being, at one time paid for, weight for weight, with gold."

This wildly profitable trade over the Silk Route was the monopoly of Iranian traders from the third century A.D. to well into the seventh, at a time when its rulers were Zoroastrians, the descendants of king Ardeshir. It is tempting to make the connection between these earliest Parsis who were the remote ancestors of the Parsis who came to India and, during British Raj, become its merchant princes: The Wadias, the Petits, the Tatas.

To be sure, the Romans resented the fact that they had to pay for their silk route, whatever these Iranian traders chose to demand, but there was little that they could do about it till well into the sixth century, when a particularly energetic emperor began his rule, Justinian. At this time adventurous Christian missionaries had already set up their command posts in India and China. Two of these missionaries who were from Iran were obviously enterprising businessmen, too. They went back to Europe and sought an interview with Emperor Justinian. Would the emperor back a business venture they were about to start? They had been studying how silk was manufactured, and if the emperor would provide the finance, they proposed to manufacture it in Europe itself.

Justinian is famous in history as a military genius. But he was obviously a man of vision too. He enthusiastically backed the proposal of the two missionaries and even offered them handsome rewards. Between them they also decided as to where to locate the silkworm breeding industry, in a region which had approximately the same climate as that of Nanking" The Peloponese mountains in Southern Greece.

So the two holy men went back to their mission-post in Nanking and got busy mastering the secrets of silk-making. They packed the colonies of silkworms in hollow bamboo segments and also took with them in tubs live plants of the Mulberry bushes on which the worms flourish. Luckily for them, both the worms and their food-plants seemed to thrive in their new environment. So a year or to later, they took the silkworms and the Mulberry trees to Cicily, which has a similar climate.

And thus laid the foundations of the Italian silk industry. Over the centuries Italy became famous for the quality of its silk and remains so to this day, reflected in its dominance of the world’s fashion industry and with names to conjure with such as Gucci, Armani, Versace.

To be sure there have been other missionaries too, who have been responsible for business ventures. The Benedictine monks, who originated the brandy which bears their name; or again our own Swiss Mission in Mangalore whose handloomed towels and sheets were by far the best of their kind in the world, but have had to bow out in the face of machine-age competition. Even to the name of the Basil mission, will live on till well into the twentyfirst century as being the producers of the best Mangalore tiles with which the Bungalow of the Raj were roofed.

But of course, these other missionary ventures are but pale fires compared to the shift in history caused by the enterprise of the two Nanking missionaries, who took the secrets of silk-making from Asia to Europe, and, in the process choked off that moveable adventure, the Silk Route. It soon fell into disuse and today no one even remembers its precise alignment.