Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces are prominent silkworm producers in China. In early May each year, every household begins preparing to breed silkworms when barley becomes yellow and the mulberry fields turn green.

Adust-sized silkworm ovum will grow into an ant-shaped silkworm after brooding for a month, and then grow into a long white worm after four periods of quiescence and exuviation and then, the silkworm begins spinning pure white silk and finally turns into a pupa.

 Legend of silkworms

There are many legends about the development of silkworms. One of them is a touching story, which goes as follows.

Once upon a time, there was a father and his daughter who depended on each other very much. They had a white horse, which the girl fed with mulberry leaves. Once, the father went out to do some trade and didn't come back on time. No one knew of his whereabouts. The daughter was very worried about him. One day, she prayed to marry a kind-hearted man who could help her find her father. When she had just finished asking for this, the white horse standing beside her nodded, circled around her three times and galloped away. Several days later, the white horse found the old man who had lost his way in the mountains and carried him home on his back. However, the white horse was always with the girl from then on and the father was puzzled by the matter. After he questioned her, the girl told the truth to her father. He got very angry, "It is natural that the horse looks for its owner, but how can an animal be a match for a person?" When the horse heard this, it began neighing and refused to eat anything. The father was very angry, and killed it with an arrow. He skinned the horse and dried the hide in the sunshine. After the daughter collected mulberry leaves, she returned home. Caressing the skin of the horse, she burst into tears. When her tears dropped on the horse, her body was wrapped up by the skin and flown to the sky. Later, seeing snow-white silkworms hanging on the mulberry trees, people said that theses silkworms were the girls wrapped in the horse's skin. Since the head of the silkworm is similar to that of a horse's head, Matouniang (a girl with a horse's head) became another name for silkworm. When the daughter missed her father, she spun out the long silk. This is a legend about the origin of how silkworms spin silk and become silkworm cocoons.

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