The word commercial espionage comes from modern times, but commercial espionage has existed since ancient times.
Since humans have had commerce, commercial spies have also emerged, but they are not so professional.
Ancient Chinese craftsmen had their own rules when passing on the inheritance, passing on men and not women, teaching apprentices, and starving masters.
These traditions have only one basic purpose, and that is to ensure that technology is not leaked.
Of course, it is also because of this tradition that countless excellent skills in Chinese history have disappeared, and even if these ancient industries have been valued by the public over the years, some have been protected, but the skills of these people are far from being comparable to those of the past.
In the history of the continent, there have been many major technical leaks. For example, the leakage of compass technology opened a new era in the West, the leakage of papermaking technology and printing technology, the opening of the Western Renaissance, and even the leakage of gunpowder technology, opening the era of human heat weapons.
The other thing to talk about today, we rarely know about the technical leak, as we all know, ancient China in the trade with the West, the most popular goods are three kinds, silk, tea and porcelain.
The love of silk in the West was very fanatical, but because silk was transported from the East to the West at that time, the distance was too far, resulting in an increase in the price of silk.
So this commodity has always been preserved in the upstream aristocratic society, but Westerners love silk too much, and they wonder, why can this good thing only exist in China? They wanted to find out what silk was made of.
The Roman emperor at the time was also an avid fan of silk, and he sent a team of spies to China to find out the craft of silk. This group of people came to China dressed as missionaries and merchants, and the imperial court also knew the importance of silk, so it ordered that silkworms should not flow out.
In order to get these silkworms, these people specially made a few bamboo sticks to put such small things, and later these people successfully brought the silkworms back to Rome.
In this way, the Roman Empire also began to manufacture silk fabrics, after a period of development, the products they created are not inferior to China, and the silk fabrics produced by the Eastern Romans are also widely sold in the entire Western countries, resulting in a serious blow to China's silk products market, and the export output has dropped sharply.
This time the technology leak has cost China at least hundreds of billions of dollars in hundreds of years. This lesson is cruel and tells us how important technical secrecy is. Especially between countries.