We often see foreign technology blockades against China now, but just as the so-called "thirty years of Hedong, thirty years of Hexi", we have also carried out technical blockades on foreign countries for thousands of years, until the last foreigner stole a bamboo pole from China and evaded the inspection of the checkpoint, breaking this technical blockade, and finally letting China lose hundreds of billions.
Legend has it that four or five thousand years ago, the ancestors of our descendants of Yan Huang, that is, the Yellow Emperor, his wife Changzu invented the method of raising silkworm weaving, so at this time there was a saying that "the Yellow Emperor draped his clothes and ruled the world", from this time on, the silk clothes with fluttering clothes became the unique image representative of our Chinese, so the history books recorded: "The beauty of the crown is called hua, and the etiquette is the summer."
Although the Ancient Chinese did not have a "patent consciousness" in China, they had a strong sense of patent between countries, and they knew that such an advanced technology as silk could not be passed on to foreigners casually, so they saved it as a technology patent. Even if the princess and princess were thousands of miles away at that time, the emperor did not allow them to bring silkworms, and it didn't matter how much silk they took, but they were not allowed to bring silkworms.
So this caused a high degree of mystery of silk abroad, and there were many foreigners at that time who even believed that silk grew from a mysterious tree, and there were all kinds of mysterious speculations about silk that were extremely brainy. But no matter what, the color and texture of silk are among the best among all textiles in the world, and whoever sees silk will fall in love with this soft, smooth and gorgeous beauty.
In the "Interpretation of the Name", the ancient interpretation of jin, that is, silk, is as follows: "Jin, jin, is made with great effort, and its price is like gold, so its characters are made from shu and jinye." That is to say, because the value of silk is close to that of gold, it is named after the sound of "gold", called "nishiki". In fact, this was also the case in ancient China, and in ancient China, silk was sometimes used as currency to pay salaries to officials. Officials also love such "hard currency."
Not only Chinese have a unique love for silk, foreigners love silk even more, because of China's technical blockade, so foreigners have few opportunities to get silk, and occasionally get one piece as a rare treasure. For example, when Indian Buddhists get a piece of silk, they will treat it as their own unique family property and then pass it on to their disciples, which is called "mantle inheritance" and the earliest source of chinese Buddhism."
The Roman Empire's pursuit of silk has reached an incomparable human point, the Roman head of State Caesar, once wore a Piece of Chinese silk at a banquet, which immediately caused the screams of all the samurai and noblewomen present, such luxurious and noble clothes, the otherworldly entrusted by Caesar, amazing.
After the meeting, everyone ran over to ask where Caesar's silk was bought from, "high-end goods", and after repeated inquiries, everyone finally knew that silk came from China, which caused a frenzy of nobles buying silk from Chinese merchants. In the 2nd century AD, silk was purchased by their frenzy to reach a sky-high price of 12 ounces and 1 pound of Chinese silk, equivalent to 454 yuan of silk needing 360 grams of gold to be able to buy, and Rome even spent millions of taels of gold every year to purchase Chinese silk.
The Roman government even introduced laws to suppress the price of silk in order to balance the financial balance. However, the price of silk, which was very rare in Europe at that time, was controlled by law, while privately it was speculated to a sky-high price by the black market, and there was no market, and the Roman emperor could not do anything about it.
They wanted to wear silk and to spend less money, so the Romans had a crooked idea, they sent people to China to steal Chinese silk technology, and after much inquiry, they learned that silk was actually spit out of a small bug called a silkworm, so they decided to secretly bring this little bug back. But they also know that China is very secretive about this technology, and it is very difficult for them to sneak through customs.
So they picked up a piece of bamboo as their own crutches, and secretly put silkworms and some mulberry leaves into the bamboo, and the customs officers at that time carefully examined all parts of their bodies, but did not look at their dirty-looking bamboo, who would have thought that friends who came from thousands of miles would have such a careful thought? So they successfully brought silkworm and silk technology back to China, and obtained the silk technology they had longed for.
In this way, the Europeans took the silk production technology from China, but due to the difference between the geographical environment in Europe and China, the silk produced there is of course not as authentic as produced in China, but it is also a very good work of art, with its own "cottage" silk, Europeans no longer have to spend millions of dollars of gold every year to purchase Chinese silk, which is equivalent to losing tens of billions of foreign exchange to China every year!