Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China. E. N. Anderson

Huang et al. (2012) maintains that rice was domesticated in the Pearl River drainage, but their collections of wild rice (Oryza rufipogon, the known ancestor of O. sativa) were all from south China; there is so little purely wild rice in the Yangzi Valley that they apparently could not find any to sample. Genetics confirms that rice was first cultivated there and spread from there throughout China, then Korea and Southeast Asia, and finally South Asia and—in historic times—the rest of the world (Molina et al. 2011).

      From earliest times, rice was divided into japonica and indica varieties; these are different enough that they are difficult to cross. They show up as clearly different by 5000 BCE or soon after. Xuehui Huang et al. (2012) found that japonica was the original domesticate and think that indica developed by outcrossing to local varieties in Southeast and, later, South Asia. However, they may very well have been different wild types from different areas, since they are so different that it is hard to imagine them differentiating by 5000 BCE under cultivation; rice cultivation was very new at the time. Again one may suppose that the crossing took place earlier and farther north, somewhere in the Yangzi area. Others think these varieties may have been separate even before domestication. Japonica rices have shorter grains that cook up rather sticky; Japanese rice, derived from Chinese japonicas, is typical. Indica rices have longer grains that cook drier, like most Chinese and Indian rices. Some rices, also, already had the now-common genetic variant of the starch amylose that makes them cook up sticky. (This is mistakenly called glutinous in some sources; “glutinous,” in reference to grain, should be confined to grain that has actual gluten in it. Wheat has it; rice does not.)

      At Jiahu in the Huai Valley, almost in the exact center of today’s China, rice was grown abundantly by 7000–6000 BCE (Zhang Chi and Hung 2013; the village was occupied until 5800). Since this village is apparently not in the natural range of rice, the plant must have been cultivated—unless it did range there in those warmer, wetter times. Jiahu rice still looks rather wild botanically (Cohen 2011) but has some morphological indications of domestication (Zhang Chi and Hung 2013). The inhabitants ate little or no millet (as shown by lack of C₄ indications in their bones). Game and fish, plus wild foods including acorns, water caltrops (Trapa, mistakenly reported as “water chestnuts” in most English-language literature), and wild soybeans, and domestic dogs and pigs filled out the food supply. There are many similar sites in the area.

      From early Neolithic times, the Chinese were known to drink fermented beverage made of rice, honey, and grape and hawthorn fruit, as evidenced by unmistakable lees on pots from 7000–6600 BCE at Jiahu. Patrick McGovern, dean of oeno-archaeologists, has examined and analyzed these (Khamsi 2004; McGovern 2009 and pers. comm.; Zhang Juzhong and Lee 2005). This is as early as any cultivated rice in the world, if the rice was cultivated (it may well not have been). It seems that the Chinese started brewing as soon as they had domesticated grain. The drink itself has been reconstructed by McGovern in collaboration with Dogfish Head Brewery, which sells it under the name of Chateau Jiahu. It is possibly not the finest taste experience in the beer world, and thus is not widely sold, but it is at least sometimes available after almost 9,000 years (McGovern 2009 and pers. comm., plus my personal experience with a goodly amount of it).

      The people of Jiahu made flutes of crane bones; many have been recovered, some still playable (Liu and Chen 2012; Zhang Juzhong and Lee 2005). Cranes are sacred in much of East Asia to this day, and one can assume the flutes were used in shamanistic or other religious rites. These flutes are the earliest known multinote musical instruments, and indicate a complex, sensitive use of biotic resources, as well as probable reverence for cranes, much venerated in historic times.

      Dorian Fuller and collaborators (2009) looked at rice grains to see if they came from easily shattering heads as opposed to nonshattering ones. People domesticating a grain will naturally select for nonshattering heads; the shattering ones fall apart and the grain is lost, so nonshattering heads are a sign of domestication. In most of the Yangzi area, there was a slow transition from shattering to nonshattering, between about 7000 and 5000 BCE. Domesticated rice was common, widespread, and varied by 5000, or at least not long after that, though some areas lagged behind (e.g., Tianluoshan, Zheng, et al. 2010). Recent finds indicate early paddy fields by 4000 (Zheng et al. 2010).

      Rice needs a good deal of phosphorus. This nutrient is often trapped in tight chemical bonds in the warm and wet areas of the world and is thus unavailable to plants. Some rice varieties get around this problem by growing more roots with more phosphorus-absorptive capacity. A gene for such roots has been discovered by Rico Gamuyao and associates (2012) in an Indian rice variety, Kasalath. This gene could almost literally save the world. Phosphate fertilizers are getting expensive as phosphate rock mines are depleted. The world’s rice baskets—notably south and central China, Southeast Asia, much of India, and the American South—have the least available phosphorus (Kochian 2012), and this rice gene, bred into commercial rices, could help feed countless people.

      Rice agriculture spread southward beginning around 6000–4000 BCE, and a complex mosaic of farmers and foragers emerged in the center and south—to remain there for thousands of years (T. Lu 2011). The south remained rather thinly populated well into Han Dynasty times, and the coastal people were already specialized fishers, seafarers, and traders (Jiao 2013)—a lifestyle reminiscent of southern China’s boat people in historic times. Farming was widespread, but clearly “population pressure” and the spread of intensive agriculture were not driving development; trade and seafaring were (Jiao 2013:609–10). Today, there are still foragers not far away, in northern Thailand and in Luzon; the foraging adjustment is often the best way to make use of mountain forests, where agriculture often remains impractical. So a mosaic of practices is expectable. The far southeast may not have had agriculture until 3000–2000, when it spread via interior and coastal routes (Chi and Hung 2012: 12); the usual mosaic continued.

      Zhao Zhijun (2011) believes a third agricultural center might have existed in the south, based on root crops such as yams and taro. Domesticated rice made a sudden and dramatic appearance there a bit after 4000 BCE. Its rapid adoption implies that the region was agricultural already, and some rice root remains have turned up.

      Similarities in styles of houses, pottery, burials, and other cultural matters prove that the northern and central centers, at least, formed one great network (Cohen 2011; we do not know about the root-growing south). New crops and products flowed freely around that ancient core of East Asian civilization. In The Food of China I postulated river-bottom land as the ideal place for early agriculture, but Liu et al. (2009) make a convincing case for domestication in low foothill and piedmont slope areas, where easily worked soil, good drainage, and safety from floods exist. I would bet on both.

       The Later Neolithic

      The emergent cultures like Peiligang were followed by such cultures as Yangshao, made famous in the 1920s for its exquisitely beautiful, large, colorful pottery vessels. They are very early, dating back to 5000 BCE. Yangshao, with settlements up to 25 ha by its middle phase, was centered on the middle Yellow River valley, but widely distributed, and closely related to similar cultures in the Wei Valley and elsewhere (Peterson and Shelach 2010, 2012). The Yangshao people lived largely on the two types of millet but had some rice—a good deal more of it than earlier northern cultures had. The Yangshao also had vegetables and fruits, many pigs and dogs, and a few other animals. (Yangshao is divided into an early phase, 5000–4000 BCE; a middle, 4000–3500; and a late, 3500–2800. See Zhang Zhongpei 2002.) This was followed by gray-to-black pottery generally designated as the Longshan Horizon, or Tradition, in central north China. It lasted until 1900 BCE, when more urban societies entered the picture.

      The Yangshao site of Jiangzhai, near modern Xi’an, has been particularly well studied (Peterson and Shelach 2012; see photographs in Zhang Zhongpei 2002). In the early phase, a circle of houses surrounded a circular central plaza; the whole was protected by a ditch. The houses were divided into roughly five groups, each with several small houses around a larger one; this may indicate kinship groupings. Storage pits could have held enough millet to support hundreds of people. The site may have had around 400 people at any given time. Many households, however, seem to have had slender resources, possibly requiring support from others, or trading goods unseen in the record. Some of them at least probably specialized in