The Monks Who Broke China's Silk Monopoly

For nearly three thousand years, China held the world's most valuable trade secret. The penalty for revealing it, for smuggling out a single silkworm egg or mulberry seed, was death. The entire Byzantine Empire, the most powerful state in the western world, was hemorrhaging its treasury paying Persian middlemen just to keep its court and army in silk, a fabric so prized that a single bolt could buy a small farm.

Then, sometime around 552 AD, two monks walked out of Central Asia carrying hollow bamboo canes sealed with beeswax. Inside: silkworm eggs. To get home they would have to cross the Pamir Mountains, some of the most brutal terrain on earth, with elevations pushing nearly 15,000 feet and a mountain climate notorious for its punishment, then skirt the edge of the Persian Empire, traverse the Caucasus, and follow the Black Sea coast to Constantinople. The journey would take the better part of two years. The eggs had to survive all of it. If the seals cracked, if the temperature shifted at the wrong moment, if anyone looked too closely, it was over. 

This is the story of history's most consequential act of industrial espionage.