We were watching a David Attenborough show about silk the other day, and he mentioned Leizu.
It seems that according to Chinese legend, Leizu was sitting under a tree in about 2700 when a silk cocoon fell into her tea. She watched it unravel, and from there, a silk industry was born.
Pretty amazing, and yet, pretty familiar sounding.
The more familiar Chinese legend to my readers is that of Shen Nong, who discovered tea when wild tea leaves fell in his pot of boiling water.
What? It’s basically the same story. And given that Leizu’s husband, The Yellow Emperor, may have succeeded Shen Nong on the throne, all in the family.
It amazes me that the Chinese seem so ready to pass of their truly brilliant discoveries as happenstance. Doesn’t really happen in the West.
Sure, you might claim that an apple falling on Isaac Newton’s bonce is the same legend, but there was gravity before he earned a lump on his noggin, and afterwards. He didn’t really discover it, he just sort of noticed it, wrote the rule book and mentioned it endlessly.
I don’t think that’s ever happened in South Australia. I wonder if I could create one.
“Richard Bowyer Smith was having his elevenses in a poorly ploughed field on the Yorke Peninsula in 1876, when a stump jump plough fell in his tea.”
“Robert Torrens was sitting about in Parliament House, Adelaide in 1858, when a diagram of a new means of registering land titles fell into his tea”
Works for me.
And what did tea leaves bring you when they felt in your cup?
I wondered why the apple did not fell in his tea. Probably because he just wanted to drink it and his head became between the apple and the tea…