Silk

It came from the spit of a worm. It rewrote the map of the world.

Five thousand years ago, in the hills of China, a woman dropped a cocoon into hot water and pulled out a single thread half a mile long. China would guard the secret of how she did it for the next three thousand years, and kill to keep it. When the thread finally escaped, it dragged armies, religions, and empires along the road it had built.

Silk: Nine Stories of the Fiber That Made the World Small tells the sweeping story of the most valuable thread in human history.

From a Chinese silk farm to the Senate of Rome, from a Byzantine emperor's smuggling plot to a Pittsburgh department store in 1946, this narrative history brings the story of silk to life through the people who chased it. Behind the shimmer were spies and smugglers, monks and mutinous weavers, treasure galleons, and the loom whose punch-cards would one day teach a machine to count.

Inside, you'll discover:

• How China kept the secret of silk for three thousand years
• Why Rome nearly bankrupted itself buying a cloth it could not make
• How two monks smuggled the silkworm out of the East inside a hollow cane
• Why silk carried both Buddhism and the Black Death along the same roads
• How a weaver's loom became the ancestor of the modern computer
• Why Greek weavers were marched off in chains to make silk for a king
• How a treasure fleet crossed the Pacific with its hold packed with silk
• Why twenty thousand French weavers came down off a hill behind a black banner • How the fiber that made the world small was finally replaced by nylon

This was not simply the story of a cloth. It was the story of the first thing that pulled human beings across continents to find each other, and of everything that traveled the road once it was open.

Silk built roads, cities, and empires. It also drained treasuries, started wars, and cost the lives of the people who made it.

Step onto the Silk Road, into the workshops and throne rooms and trading ports where its history was written, and meet the emperors, spies, and weavers who chased a thread no thicker than a hair.