Product Description: English summary: The mulberry tree gave birth to silk and sericulture, and thus became an intimate part of Chinese society and culture. The author provides an ethnobotanical and cultural anthropological study of the mulberry tree in ancient imperial China as a natural, social, and cultural total, onto which were fixed a style of cultivation and exploitation, a means of organizing belief for religion and ritual, a means of explication for the creation of myths and legends, and a means of thought harmonizing natural and social cosmologies...read more