Lotus silk - an expensive fabric

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I need to thank myLotter, Dr Souvik Chatterji (@sathviksouvik), for the inspiration for this discussion. Dr Chatterji mentioned lotus silk in a post and I’d never heard of it before. Lotus silk is produced from the delicate lotus stem fibres. It is sometimes called a water-lily but the lotus used for weaving comes from the species Nelumbo nucifera. Myanmar was the first country to produce lotus silk when an ethnic Intha woman presented a Buddhist monastic robe to the abbot of a local monastery. Nowadays, the silk is produced in Vietnam and India as well as Myanmar. It takes 100 tons of lotus stem to make 25 kg of silk, making lotus silk supposedly the most expensive fabric in the world. An Etsy site quoted a yard of the fabric as costing just under $A100 a yard. So that's roughly $US70 or 52 British pounds. The photo is mine of water-lilies taken in Monet’s garden in France. These are not the type that produce lotus silk.