How the silkworm came into being

As there is little doubt that silk originated in China, a legend was told that a Chinese girl was turned into a silkworm in time immemorial.

Once upon a time, there lived a single-parent family somewhere in China. The father was conscripted and sent to a remote border town to do guard duties. He had only one daughter, who was in her low teens.

The father was away from home for years serving in the border garrison, separate from his beloved daughter who could only cry all alone for her misfortune of not being able to seeing her parent again. Her only comfort was a horse her father kept at home. So her daily routine was to talk to the horse. She knew the horse did not understand what she said, but she talked to the equine anyway to make herself feel better. The horse was her best and only friend.

Years passed but the girl heard nothing of her father at the faraway frontier. She got so lonely one day that she went to a small stable to tell the horse she would marry him, if he could bring her father back to her. “I surely couldn't bear to live my lonely and sad life any more,” she said. “I'll marry you if you can bring my father back to me,” she begged.

Thereupon, the horse made a long neigh, as if he understood what was told. He jumped out of the stable and disappeared in no time. Of course, the shocked girl did not know where her horse had gone.

A week later, the horse found his master in the garrison. The father of the girl told himself that something must be wrong with his daughter. Otherwise, he reasoned, the horse wouldn't come all the way from their home. “I've got to go home to see what happened to my little girl,” the father said to himself.

So the father mounted the horse that started galloping back to where he had come.It was a great surprise to the lonely girl when she saw her father on horseback at the door of their house. As a matter of fact, she was so happy to see her father as to have forgotten what she had begged of the horse. The father jumped down from the horseback. While he and his daughter were oblivious of the presence of the horse, talking animatedly and blithely to each other, the animal trotted back to his old familiar stable.The father finally had time to ask his daughter what was all about. “What did you made the horse to come seek me out and get me back home for?” he questioned her.

The question reminded the daughter what she had promised the animal. She was worried, with her eyebrows knitted together. That worried her father, of course. “What's all about?” he repeated the question. “Why aren't you happy seeing me again? What are you worried?”All she had to do was to tell him of her promise to marry the horse if he was brought back home in one piece.

“How dare you do that!” an irate father shouted. “Now that the wrong has been done,” he declared, “the only thing I can do is to kill the animal.”

The horse was slaughtered. The father skinned the animal. The hide was left in the yard of the little cottage house where the father and daughter lived. He wanted the hide to be sun-dried.

One day after the horse had been killed and skinned, the father left home for the nearby village on business. The daughter went out to the yard for the first time after the killing had taken place. She wanted to see the horsehide.

“You were killed,” she said, with her eyes riveted on the pelt, “because you thought you could marry a woman while you were alive. I think you understand.”

Thereupon, the hide placed flat on the ground started taking the shape of a horse that embraced the girl. Then both disappeared into the thin air.

A few hours later, her father returned home only to find his daughter and the horsehide gone. He then rushed out to search for them. Finally he was able to track them down.

He sighted something like a horsehide hanging high up on a treetop faraway from his home. He went near the tree and found a larva wrapped up in the horsehide. That larva was his daughter.

The larva continued to grow. It spun a large amount of strong protein fiber for a cocoon. The larva then became a pupa within the cocoon. Then it metamorphosed into a moth. The daughter was the first silkworm in China.

Japan has a similar story.

Once upon a time, so the story goes, there lived a king, who had a very beautiful princess and a very beautiful chestnut steed. The horse, however, fell in love with the princess. The king became so angry that he had the animal killed. And the princess cried herself to death in unbearable sorrow. On the second day of their death, their souls that had gone all the way up to Heaven came down to dwell atop a huge mulberry tree. They continued to live on as silkworms feeding on mulberry leaves. But the fact is that silkworms were smuggled into Japan from China around the seventh century. Silk became one top item of export from Japan after the country was opened to the West by Commodore Matthew Perry, who led a U.S. Asiatic fleet to the Bay of Tokyo in 1854.