"My family might never have become silk farmers if it hadn't been for the Emperor Justinian, who, according to Procopius, persuaded two missionaries to risk it. In 550 AD, the missionaries snuck silkworm eggs out of China in the swallowed condom of the time: a hollow staff. They also brought the seeds of the mulberry tree. As a result, Byzantium became a center of sericulture. Mulberry trees flourished on Turkish hill sides. Silkworms are the leaves, Fourteen hundred years later, the descendants of those stolen eggs filled my grandmother’s silkworm box in Guilin."