China. According to legend, Princess Hsi-ling-shih, concubine of Emperor Huang-ti, discovered that she could spin a thin, delicate silk thread from the cocoon of an insect that had fallen into her tea. This silk thread is the small gray larva of the Bombyx mori moth, which feeds on the leaves of the mulberry tree (Morus alba). It lays 500 eggs in five days and then dies. One gram of these eggs produces a thousand silkworms, which consume 36 kilograms of mulberry leaves, producing 200 grams of raw silk. Silk became one of China’s main exports, along with porcelain. Despite countless Western attempts to imitate and copy both silk and porcelain, the Chinese managed to keep the secret for millennia, in the case of silk, and for centuries (perhaps dating back to at least 202 BC).
