Reviving Cambodian silk

A cluster of stilt houses stands in a clearing in the jungle. Babies rock in tiny hammocks in the cool shade underneath the buildings, while their mothers chatter and laugh as they work. A young woman with glossy black hair pulled into a messy bun sits on the floor with a spinning wheel between her knees. Unflustered by the naked toddler pawing at her shoulder, she expertly guides sticky yellow silk through thumb and forefinger to make a strong, even yarn. Nearby, a girl with a pink flower-patterned sarong tied around her waist leans intently as she brushes threads outstretched on a giant loom to prepare them for weaving.

This the Institute for Khmer Traditional Textiles, a village set in 57 acres of natural forest in the north west of Cambodia. Here, a kimono painter from Kyoto, Japan and 150 women from all over Cambodia are reviving the ancient art of silk-making in harmony with nature. The hand-made silks are sold to collectors in a shop in the nearby town of Siem Reap and exhibited all over the world, providing some of Cambodia’s poorest women with an income and their children with a future. A dozen miles away, children from poor families spend their days at the ruins of Angkor Wat selling trinkets to the two million tourists who visit every year. The children of the silk village, deeper in the jungle, attend school instead.

The Cambodian silk tradition dates to the Khmer civilization that built the Angkor Wat and surrounding temples and palaces in the 12th century, but it was nearly killed off for good in the violence of the twentieth century. Over 30 years of war, millions of people were displaced, breaking the continuity of skills handed down through the generations. Agent Orange and napalm seared the forest on which the silk worms and natural dyes depend. Today logging, both legal and illegal, ravages the remnants of jungle that survived the war, while handicrafts compete with an influx of ever faster, cheaper goods pouring out of factories all over Asia.

The entrance to the village is a turn-off on a pitted dirt road through the jungle, marked only by a wooden board hand-painted with the words “project of wisdom from forest”. In both Khmer and English it reads: “If you don’t care for the tool, you can’t care for the work. If you don’t care for the forest, you don’t care for life.”
In fact, without the surrounding forest the silk village could not exist. Founder Morimoto Kikuo, a Japanese man with a deep tan and gray streaks in his hair, explains that half of the 57 acres are natural forest. There are trees on the other half as well but these were planted deliberately – mulberry trees to feed the silkworms and various trees to provide wood for tools and natural dyes. These include deep blue from leaves of the indigo tree, yellows and greens from the bark of the prohut trees and brilliant pinks and purple and pink from the lac insect that lives in several native trees.

Near the spinning and weaving area where the babies had swung in hammocks, there is a room where the pattern makers work with colourful dyes. Further out, near the mulberry trees, is a shed where the silkworms are raised. There is a vegetable garden to help feed the staff and a primary school for their children. Simple wooden homes are scattered throughout the forest, with some employees living on site and others cycling in from the surrounding countryside.

Everything is done by hand using traditional Khmer methods – a process that will not be rushed. It takes half a year to dye fabric with natural indigo because every day it must be plunged into the dye water and hung out to dry, until the dye is deep and colour-fast. Kikuo says the natural dyes get more vivid with each passing year, unlike artificial dyes that fade with time. Even the fibers to tie the fabric for dyeing are grown right here in the village. Many silk makers use plastic ties but here they come from home-grown cotton or banana palm leaf.

One of the stilt houses is Kikuo’s home, a simple structure but with books and art lining the walls He serves coffee on his porch and explains how a Japanese man came to be living in the backwoods of Cambodia. The thread goes back to the kimonos of Kyoto. In 1970, at 22 years of age, Kikuo started a five-year apprenticeship in ‘yuzen’, the traditional Japanese technique of painting and dyeing kimonos. He first encountered Khmer traditional textiles in a museum in Thailand in 1980 and began a lifelong love affair with the silk traditions of South-East Asia.

Kikuo moved to Thailand in 1983 to serve as a volunteer in refugee camps in the north-eastern part of the country. He became heavily involved in Thai textiles, and in 1995 was asked by UNESCO to serve as a consultant for a project on the revival of traditional silk weaving in Cambodia. This journey changed his life.

He recalls how he met old women in rural Cambodia so skilled in silk making they would be revered as ‘living national treasures’ in his native Japan. “I saw at that time old women with good experience but without the chance to show their work,” Kikuo says. “She can weave a more special one but the middle man always wants a cheaper one… I get feeling she is very sad, not so happy.”

He told UNESCO that fragments of knowledge and traditional textiles survived but in many parts of Cambodia it had been usurped by work of lesser quality. With middlemen forcing prices ever lower, cheaper artificial dyes replaced natural dyes, plastic replaced banana-fiber ties, and in some cases artificial material replaced silk.

While the UNESCO report sat gathering official dust, Kikuo found his purpose in life. He set up the Institute for Khmer Traditional Textiles in 1996. For the next four years he travelled from village to village, dodging the ongoing war and literally stepping through mine fields, to collect and spread information about silk. He found old women who still possessed silk-making expertise, and donated silkworms and mulberry trees to villages that needed them.

The institute is set up as a non-government organisation but it does not receive any outside funding. Previously Kikuo has subsidised it by taking on other jobs, but he aims to make it fully self-sufficient from the textiles. Some of the biggest pieces, such as the wall hangings, take over a year to make and replicate the quality of the fabrics in the royal collections that now hang in museums.

In the early days the project was just Kikuo and three others, including a few older women from Takeo province, one of the strongest silk provinces in Cambodia. Now there are 150 employees at the village, and another 200 people work at the workshop and shop in Siem Reap. Women come from all over Cambodia to learn about silk and eventually some leave to take the knowledge back to their own communities, helping to slowly spread the revival of traditional textiles.

Cambodia is a country where many people struggle to make a living. This is especially true for uneducated women, many of whom turn to prostitution or begging to feed their families. Working with silk gives women another option and a sense of pride, along with a steady income. Kikuo says he is constantly approached by people wanting to work for him. His usual practice is to ask them to come back in three months time. The really desperate ones come back after a month to six weeks and he tries to find them a job.

The village employs men as well, working on the mulberry farm and as carpenters, but the ratio of women to men is about four to one. The women earn over $200 a month on average, depending on their skill level, and Kikuo has recently increased wages to help them cope with rising food prices. This is a high wage for the rural sector in Cambodia, and the organisation has non-profit status, with Kikuo living simply alongside the others.

“What is important is that they are working and they get the salary,” Kikuo says. “More than half of them have never gone to school so it’s difficult to find a job. Also I accept that the woman and the kid come to work together. I understand that if a mother keeps the baby at home and comes to work with us she will always worry, whereas if she can bring the baby with her there is no need to worry and she can work freely. It’s good for her and good for me.”

Older women can often struggle to find work in Cambodia but when it comes to handicrafts, age and expertise are valued. One of the senior pattern-makers, Savy Man, says the silk village has a good atmosphere. “I like living here and I have a friend from the same village so some days when I am tired she will help me I am happy here.” Man is from the silk-making province of Takeo where she started making silk when she was 18. Now 49, she came to the institute so she could be rewarded for good work and practice her own designs, as well as share her knowledge with younger women. With a smooth face and dark hair she looks much younger but at the village she is regarded as an elder craftsperson and revered for her pattern-making skills.

The jobs in the village range from care of the silkworms to stripping banana fiber to make ties for the dyeing. At the apex are the pattern makers, who tie and dye the fabrics repeatedly over many months to produce exquisite textiles in traditional Cambodian styles. Cambodian natural silk is yellow rather than white and the traditional dyes come in the basic colours of yellow, red, green, blue and black. These colours are combined to make a whole palette from brilliant sunset colours to soft greys and purples, and the intricate, geometric patterns are created with tying and dyeing. The cloth is finely woven but the natural processing means it has a matt finish and natural feel that is soft but slightly rougher than satin.

At the institute’s workshop and store in Siem Reap, the finished silks are on sale to the public. Scarves and wall hangings retail for hundreds of dollars – prices that seem like a bargain after a glimpse of the effort that went into the creations. Not everything produced by the institute is traditional – the shop also stocks knitted work and recently began selling smaller items such as handkerchiefs. Purchases are packed in their own boxes woven out of banana fiber with a little origami crane, also made from banana fiber, inside – the perfect meeting of Cambodia and Japan. The institute only sells direct, not to wholesalers, but its work is starting to attract attention abroad. In the last two years, collections have gone on tour to France, Germany and Japan.

It is not often that you can buy an item of clothing that connects you to the world so intimately – not only meeting the person who made it for you but seeing the descendants of the silkworms that spun the yarn and the trees the dyes came from. The village is very much a part of the forest that sustains it, showing how human activity and the natural world can coexist. The “wisdom from forest” sign is more than just a logo.

This article was originally commissioned by Anyway magazine in 2008, however the magazine ceased publication before the article went to print. I did get paid for my work but I wanted the story to be shared widely and had hoped to find another outlet for publication. Sadly this was not to be, so I have decided to self-publish on my website. Copyright is held by me with all rights reserved – neither the words nor pictures may be reproduced without my prior written permission.

This is day 29 of NaBloPoMo – I am writing 30 posts in 30 days in the month of November. For other NaBloPoMo posts, click here.

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