A Brief History of Chinese Silk 1 Origins and Early Development (2)

Legend credits Lei Zu, the wife of the Yellow Emperor, with the invention of “raising silkworms for silk,” but the origins of silk actually involved a long process of domestication. By the late Neolithic period, people began consciously protecting mulberry trees and silkworms, establishing “communal mulberry groves” and “silkworm rooms.” Through countless generations of effort, wild silkworms were finally domesticated into the silk moth.