CHINA BANS WORM SPIT, WORLD BUMMED

Imagine this shitshow. It’s sometime in the glorious Zhou dynasty—don’t ask me the specific year, the records are all written in what looks like bird-scratch apologetics—and some pimply emperor is enjoying a perfectly adequate Tuesday. Suddenly, the sky goes dark. Solar eclipse. Standard stuff, right? Wrong. The chief imperial diviner, a dude named Master Wang Chung whose prophetic abilities were fueled by a truly heroic quantity of fermented sorghum wine, totally loses his shit. He stumbles out of his yurt, points a shaky finger at the sky-hole, and screams that the Celestial Dragon is *pissed*. And the specific source of its divine indigestion? Fucking. *Silkworms*. Apparently, the Great Sky Lizard looked down upon humanity unspooling the anal extrusions of a billion bugs to make fancy shirts and said, “Nah, I’m out.”

So the emperor—a man whose testicular fortitude could be measured in negative numbers—panics. Instead of telling Master Wang to maybe switch to water for a while, he issues an imperial edict. Edict #69, probably. From this day forth, SERICULTURE IS FORBIDDEN. All looms, destroyed. All mulberry groves, torched. Every last silkworm, catapulted over the Great Wall (which wasn’t even really great yet, but you get the idea). The economic equivalent of shitting in your own hands and clapping. The nobility, who had just spent a fortune on the latest silken dick-slings and nipple-tassels, were apoplectic. There were riots in the streets, mostly by traumatized aristocrats forced to wear—and I shudder to even type it—*cotton*. The horror.

Of course, this sent a goddamn earthquake through the global economy nobody knew they were in yet. The so-called “Silk Road” became the “Slightly Disappointing Hemp & Pottery Route.” Roman senators, who had just gotten a taste for those whisper-light tunics that showed off the outline of their perfectly sculpted junk, were suddenly forced back into itchy, unforgiving wool. Imagine Cicero trying to deliver a fiery oration while his balls are chafed raw. You think he was pissed about Catiline? That’s nothing compared to the fury of a patrician with a terminal case of Swamp Ass. One apocryphal text from the era (a bit of graffiti on a Pompeii bathhouse wall, allegedly) just reads: “BRING BACK THE WORM-PANTS, YOU BASTARDS.”

Without the obscene profits from their silk monopoly, the Zhou and subsequent dynasties had to find another hustle. They got *really* into bronze-casting, making bells so enormous that a single dong-ing could cause a city-wide migraine. Instead of a Great Wall of China, they built a Great Carillon of China. European fashion, meanwhile, evolved into a desperate arms race for any fabric that didn’t feel like you were being exfoliated by a swarm of angry crabs. They perfected linen, made some truly regrettable advances in leather fetish-wear, and some mad Albigensian monk in Toulouse eventually invented a crude form of polyester in the 12th century by trying to deep-fry a goat. It was a darker, scratchier, and far less sexy world.