The lustrous textile produced from silkworm cocoons — China's most consequential technological secret, the commodity that named the most important trade route in pre-modern history, and a material whose production, trade, and political symbolism reorganized economies and societies from East Asia to the Mediterranean for three thousand years.
For a thousand years, China executed anyone who revealed the secret of silk production. It was the most protected industrial secret in history. Eventually the secret escaped — through Byzantium, through monks smuggling silkworm eggs, through the Islamic world — and the technology spread. But by then, silk had already reorganized the world.