Long long ago, there lived in Hangzhou a girl called Aqiao. When Aqiao was nine years old, her mother died. Her father remarried and the stepmother was cruel to Aqiao and her brother.

One winter morning,　 the stepmother told Aqiao to go out and cut some grass for the sheep. The poor girl,　 with a basket on her back, searched all day from the riverside to the foot of the mountain. But where could she find any green grass in winter? She was tired, cold and hungry, but she was afraid to go home and face her stepmother.

As she walked along, she noticed an old pine tree ahead at the entrance to a valley. Aqiao pushed the branches aside. She saw a brook with red flowers and green grass on both sides. She bent down immediately to cut the grass. She went on cutting and cutting until she came to the end of the brook. She stood up to wipe the sweat off her face. Suddenly she saw a lady all in white standing in front of her. The lady was smiling.

"Little girl, how nice to see you! Won't you come and stay with us for a while?"

Aqiao looked around. To her surprise, she found herself in a different world. There were rows of white houses with trees in front of them. The leaves on the trees were green and large. And there were many other ladies in white, who　 were singing and picking the leaves from the trees.

Aqiao liked what she saw and decided to stay.

After that she worked together with the ladies in white. They picked leaves from the trees, and fed them to some little white worms. Slowly, the little worms would grow up and spit out silk to form cocoons. The lady in white told Aqiao how to reel the shining silk from these cocoons and how to dye the silk different colors.

Time passed quickly and three months went by before Aqiao knew it.

One day, Aqiao thought of her brother:"Why not ask my brother to come here too?"

Early next morning, without telling the lady in white, she hurried back home. When left, Aqiao took some silkworm eggs and a bag of mulberry seeds with her. As she walked, she dropped the seeds along the road so that she would know the way back.

When Aqiao reached home, she found that her father had grown old and her brother had become a young man. The cruel stepmother had died.

It had been fifteen years since she left!

"Aqiao! Why didn't you come home all these years? Where have you been?"

Aqiao told her father all that had happened. Her father thought that she must have met a fairy.

The next day Aqiao decided to go back to the valley with her brother. But when she opened the door, she found things had changed. The road was lined with mulberry trees. All the seeds she had dropped had grown into trees. She walked along the trail of mulberry trees until she came to the valley. The old pine tree still stood there like an umbrella covering the entrance, but she could no longer find a way to get into the valley. So all she could do was to go back home.

It was said that that was how the Chinese first raised silkworms. The lady in white whom Aqiao met in the valley was Lady Silkworm, the fairy in charge of the harvesting of silk.