Abstract:

As a precious textile fiber, the cashmere produced by China Cashmere Goats was the best one around the world. And China Cashmere Goats have become the firstclass genetic resources protected. In order to effectively protect the genetic resources, it must be done as a kind of basic work to study and evaluate the main feature of cashmere. Therefore, to detect and

study the qualitative traits of cashmere was the major task of protecting China Cashmere Goats. According to the results of the research project “the research on genetic diversity of Chinese Cashmere Goats and fiber traits of the cashmere produced by them”, this paper described the general characteristic of fiber traits of cashmere produced by the ewes from the 10 different provinces (different breeds) around the country. The digital information in the results indicated that the fiber average diameter of cashmere produced by China Cashmere Goats distributed among 15.0～16.0μm and the convergent phenomena of fiber average diameter among the different breeds were founded. The main reasons of the convergent phenomena were the genetic correlation between fiber diameter and fiber length or down production and pursuing greedily down production or ignoring the selection of fiber diameter. Finally, this paper suggested that the fiber traits of cashmere must be as the major objects protected of China Cashmere Goat and fixing price according to quality of cashmere could ensure fiber diameter not to increase. This was the basic work of establishing the effective mechanism of protecting genetic resources of cashmere goats in China. 
〖WT5”HZ

Key words: China cashmere goats; cashmere quality; fiber average diameter; convergent phenomena; genetic resources protection 