Suleiman, an Arab traveler in the 9th century, recorded in his Travels of Suleiman that seeing cotton in China was regarded as a "flower" in the garden. "Biography of Liang Shu Gaochang" records that "the grass is as real as a cocoon, and the silk in the cocoon is as thin as a row, which is called a white pile." The earliest cotton textile relic seen in the Central Plains is a cotton blanket found in an ancient tomb in the Southern Song Dynasty. At the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty, the court took cotton cloth as the first summer tax (cloth, silk, silk and cotton), and set up a kapok lifting department to collect cotton goods from the people. According to records, cotton cloth has become the main textile material every year. The Ming Dynasty also tried to collect cotton cloth, published books on cotton planting techniques, and advised people to grow cotton. According to Tian Gong Kai Wu in the Ming Dynasty and Song Dynasty, "Every inch of cotton cloth can be obtained" and "there must be ten looms", it can be known that cotton planting and cotton textiles were all over the country at that time.

In the late Qing Dynasty, China introduced improved varieties of upland cotton from the United States, replacing African cotton and Asian cotton with poor quality and low yield.