Chapter 1
Introduction
The people of China have created great works of art and craft that have been a source of wonderment by the people of all other nations across the world. Four of these - Silk, Tea, Porcelain and Jade have been transformed into items of high intrinsic value that have required great skills. Two of these, Silk and Tea have a biological but different origin and are able to be produced in limitless quantities forever. Porcelain and Jade have a mineral origin and are thus fixed in quantity in the earth's crust; both are used by artisans to craft unique unrelated ware.
Sericulture, the cultivation of mulberry trees, tending to the silk worms and gathering the threads from the cocoons and weaving silk, has been found in archaeological evidence in China in 3600 BCE. The legend of the discovery of Silk is dated at 2696 BCE and attributed to Empress Hsi-Ling-Shih (also as Lei ZU). One day Empress Hsi-Ling-Shih sent her maids to gwt some fresh fruit from a grove of Mulberry trees. Theyt cam back with some tiny white fruits. While sampling them for taste they were found to be too tough and so the boiled them. As the fruits were bein g stirred with a stick they saw it was wrapped in long, fine, lustrous fibres. The Empress looked around the Mulberry grove and found the tiny fruits were cocoons spun by the silk worms. She then taught the local women how to breed silk worms and make clothes from the silk. In Chinese history books she has been described as the "Goddess of Silk" of the "Silk Worm Mother". Sericulture and the Silk cloth industry transformed the life on millions of people in the Chinese countryside as the cultivation of Mulberry trees spread and the production of silk fibre and the craft of weaving the cloth was disseminated.
