Lei Zu and the Silkworm

The people who lived in Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, thought they lived at the very center of the world. They called India the East, because they had to sail east to reach it.

But there was a country that seemed even stranger and was more distant than India: China. To the Assyrians and the Babylonians, China was the “Far East.” It was all the way on the edge of the world!

The people of China and the people of the Fertile Crescent didn’t know very much about each other. But even though they lived far away, the Chinese people chose to live near a river, just like the Egyptians and Babylonians and Assyrians did. Ancient people needed rivers to survive.

The people of China first lived between two rivers called the Yellow River and the Yangtze River. The area between the rivers was called the Yellow River Valley. The earliest people of China settled between these rivers, in the Yellow River Valley, and grew crops—especially rice, because it grows well in wet ground.

At first, the Chinese lived in separate villages, just like the people of Mesopotamia. But eventually a great leader united the different villages of the Yellow River Valley into one kingdom. The leader who united the Chinese villages was named Huang Di. He lived so long ago that we really don’t know very much about him—but there are plenty of stories about his rule. Legends say that Huang Di first discovered medicine, and taught the Chinese people how to cure illnesses. His wife, the empress Lei Zu, discovered that silkworms make their cocoons out of silk threads.

ne day the empress Lei Zu sat in her garden beneath the mulberry trees.

“Min Lai!” she called to her maid. “Bring my lunch out here. I will eat in the garden today!”

Soon Min Lai brought out the empress’s favorite meal—turtle meat with garlic and ginger, candied fruit, rice, and a pot of steaming, fragrant tea. Lei Zu breathed in the rich smell of tea as she poured it into her cup. She lifted the cup to her mouth. Something splashed into it, right in front of her nose.

She looked down into her cup. There, floating in the hot water, was something small and round and white. She glanced up into the branches of the mulberry tree. Hundreds of little white cocoons were dangling just over her head—the cocoons of the silkworm. Inside the cocoons, the silkworms were changing into moths. Soon they would chew through the cocoons and fly away.

“Look, Min Lai,” she said. “A silkworm cocoon fell right into my tea!”

“Let me get you a fresh cup, Empress Lei Zu,” the maid offered.

“Wait,” Lei Zu said. She carefully lifted the cocoon out of her cup. It seemed to be made from a thin, bright thread, wrapped a hundred thousand times around the silkworm within. The hot water had begun to unravel it. Lei Zu pulled gently at the end of the thread and drew it out, longer and longer and longer. She rose from her seat and walked through the garden, trailing the thread behind her. It was so long that she circled the garden with it a dozen times. The thread was so light that it floated on the wind, and it shone in the sun like melting silver.

“If only I could weave this into cloth!” Lei Zu marveled. “What a robe I could make for my husband, the emperor!”

“But it is too thin to weave!” Min Lai said.

“Pick me another cocoon, Min Lai,” the Empress said.

All afternoon, the Empress and her maid unraveled the fine, shining threads from the silkworm cocoons. They twisted the threads together until they were as thick as a thread of cotton. And then the Empress called her dressmaker. “Can you weave a cloth from these threads?” she asked.

“I have never seen threads like these!” the dressmaker exclaimed. “They are as fine as hairs, but as soft as the petal of a flower.” She took the threads away and wove them into a cloth that shone like water in the sunshine, and from that cloth Lei Zu made a robe for her husband, the emperor. When he saw it, he gasped with wonder.

“From now on,” he said, “we will call this silk. The secret of making this wonderful cloth must never leave the palace. Only the royal family can know this treasure was yielded by the silkworm cocoons!”

So from then on, Lei Zu and her court made the wonderful cloth called silk. They fed the silkworms on trays of mulberry leaves, waited until the worms wove their cocoons, and then carefully unraveled the cocoons for their precious threads of silk. Soon China became famous for its silk—the cloth that no one else in the world knew how to make.