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Updates to Anderson, The Food of China (Yale University Press, 1988).

This update resulted from my having the opportunity to teach a short course on Chinese food history at the Universita di Scienze Gastronomiche, Pollenza, Italy, in 2005.  What follows is simply a set of rough working notes on the literature that has come out since 1988, with several additional field observations of my own.  I claim no academic virtues for this quick-and-dirty job, but it may be useful as a reference, mainly as a reference source for interested food scholars.

E. N. Anderson

Dept. of Anthropology

Univ. of California

Riverside, CA 92521-0418, USA

gene@ucr.edu

This loosely follows the chapters of the original book, but breaks up the early dynasties more (because so much more has been discovered) and adds sections on modern times.

One important thing to note is that the book used the Wade-Giles transcription system for Chinese.  Unfortunately, although Wade-Giles is far superior, recent books almost all use the Pinyin system.  This means that:
Chou becomes Zhou (and, either way, is pronounced Jou)

Sung becomes Song (pronounced Sung)

Ch’ing becomes Qing (pronounced Ching)

T’ao Hung-ching becomes Tao Hongjing

Chia Ssu-hsieh becomes Jia Sixie

Tao becomes Dao; T’ao becomes Tao

Kao becomes Gao; K’ao becomes Kao

Pao becomes Bao; P’ao becomes Pao

Kuangtung Province becomes Guangdong Province

Fuchien (or Fukien) Province becomes Fujian Province

Chiao-tzu (dumplings) become jiaozi

And so on.  Those examples cover the main changes.

1.  Natural Environment

            Nothing much can be added here to what I wrote in the 1980s.  More earthquakes have taught us a great deal more about plate tectonics.  South China is quite stable, but North China is being shoved or squeezed northeastward, with violent quakes resulting. 

            China’s incredible biodiversity, the greatest in the temperate zones of the world, is collapsing fast; see below.

Prehistory and Archaeology

            China has been inhabited by humans for a million years or so.  During this time, cold dry glacial periods alternated with warm wet interglacials.  Primitive humans—Homo erectus and then hominids similar to Homo neanderthalis—had to cope with these violent fluctuations.  They produced quantities of stone tools, but most of their technology was evidently of wood or bamboo, because we have little evidence of it.  (Even so, their stone technology was sophisticated and diverse as early as 800,000 years ago; Gibbons 2000, Hotz 2000.)  They no doubt fed on anything they could find that would not poison them or outfight them.  As we used to say in my youth in the rural U.S., they “would eat anything that won’t eat back faster.”  However, early claims of evidence for cannibalism in “Peking man” (Homo erectus pekinensis) have turned out to be wrong.  The evidence for deliberate use of fire (Anderson 1988) has also been very strongly questioned by recent research (Weiner et al. 1998). 

            Modern humans—Homo sapiens—probably arrived well before 30,000 years ago, but we have no very good evidence.  They were evidently rare.  By 20,000 years ago, people were hunting mammals and birds and eating fruits and seeds all over what is now China, leaving many sophisticated stone points, knives, and other tools for us to find.   

            Agriculture was independently invented in at least four places (Levant area, China, Mexico, Peru) and probably more (New Guinea, northern South America, possibly elsewhere). 

The oldest known agriculture in the world is in the Near East, where it dates around 9500 BC—the first feeble efforts at cultivating wheat and barley.  Agriculture really took off in the Near East at about the time the Younger Dryas period brought a return to Ice Age conditions around 9000 BC (Syria:  Akkermans and Schwartz 2003, Hillman 2003; Jordan Valley area:  Philip Wilke and Leslie Quintero, personal communication).   Faced with colder, drier weather, people in areas that were already dry found that they had to grow plants deliberately, in warm, moist habitats, if they wanted to have their traditional grain foods.  People presumably had known about planting seeds before, and experimented some with farming, so they were able to shift rapidly to partial reliance on agriculture.  However, agriculture was still not very important for centuries.

Perhaps China developed agriculture at the same time under the same circumstances.  We still haven’t found the earliest agriculture in China.  Agriculture began by 8000 BC, possibly before 9000 BC (see e.g. Crawford and Shen 1998; Higham and Lu 1998; Liu 2004).  It would make sense for agriculture to start there under the same conditions as in the Near East—the Younger Dryas made China colder and drier, too. 

China independently discovered agriculture, domesticating rice in the warm southeast and foxtail millet (Setaria italica) and panic or broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum) in the dry northwest.  By “domestication,” we mean actual change from the wild form, such that the tame form is not like anything in the wild.  On the other hand, the earliest agriculture we have so far is well after the Younger Dryas, so quite different causative factors may be involved (Shelach and Grosman 2008)—possibly the rapid increase in rainfall and vegetation following the rebound.

Pottery, which tends to accompany agriculture in the Near East, came thousands of years earlier than agriculture in East Asia.  On present evidence, pottery was invented in east Asia; the earliest may have been in Japan (reported by 16,000 BC; Kuzmin 2008a) or the nearby Siberian mainland (13,000 BC) or even China, though the earliest pottery there appears around 11,700 BC.  By 11,300 it was well distributed over China (Jiang and Liu 2006; Kuzmin 2008a, 2008b).  It spread west through Siberia and Central Asia, reaching the Near East shortly after agriculture began.  Perhaps the Near East independently invented pottery (as the New World certainly did), but it looks to me like straightforward diffusion.  It remains interesting that pottery came long before agriculture all over east Asia, while in west Asia and the New World agriculture came first.

            Rice is first documented in the Yangzi Valley, where it was domesticated by around 8000 BC (Chang 1999:46; Jiang and Liu 2006, earliest site, Shangshan in Zhejiang; Liu 2004; Lu 2005; MacNeish and Libby 1995).  Crawford (2006) doubts this early date, finding certainty only by 6500 BC, and Kuzmin (2008a) doubts that the earliest finds are truly domesticated, and finds certainty only by 7000 BC.  Fuller et al (2009, looking at shattering vs. nonshattering heads, the latter showing domestication) traced a slow domestication process between 4900 and 4600 at Tianluoshan, which seems to have been well behind the curve—a backward area.  Domesticated rice was common, widespread, and varied by 5000 BC.

Many complex farming cultures existed by the latter date.  Dates for first rice cultivation get progressively younger as one leaves the Yangzi Valley, so presumably 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.  Reflecting this, rice vocabularies from neighboring but only dubiously related languages show great similarities all across East and Southeast Asia (Blench 2005 gives an important review).  Japan got rice cultivation only by around 1000 BC (Kuzmin 2008a) and did not get seriously into it till 400 BC.

The rice of West Africa is a different species, independently domesticated about 2000 years ago (Carney 2001).  The “wild rice” of North America is neither wild nor rice; it is Zizania, cultivated also in China under the name lu sun, a name recently used also for asparagus.  (Clear?)

At Jiahu in the Huai Valley, almost in the exact center of (today’s) China, rice was grown abundantly by 7000 BC (the village was occupied till 5800 BC).  Game and fish, plus wild foods including acorns, water chestnuts, and beans, and domestic dogs and pigs filled out the food supply.  The people made flutes of crane bones; many have been recovered, some still playable (Zhang and Lee 2005).  Cranes are sacred in much of East Asia to this day, and one assumes the flutes were used in shamanistic or other religious rites.

            Rice today is divided into long-grain and short-grain varieties.  Very early rice finds show a mix of long and short grains.  By 5000 BC, long and short varieties clearly ancestral to today’s “indica” (=long-grain) and “japonica” (=short-grain) types were already developed.  Some rices may already have had the now-common genetic variant of the starch amylose that makes them cook up sticky.  (This is mistakenly called “glutinous” in the books; “glutinous,” in reference to grain, should really be confined to grain that has actual gluten in it.  Wheat does but rice doesn’t.)  Paddy agriculture is attested clearly by 2500 BC (Crawford 2006) and must have been common before then.

Water buffaloes, so essential to rice cultivation, were possibly domesticated as early as 5000 BC (Olsen 1993; but at least some early finds claimed to be domestic were actually wild—Liu 2004:59) in the Hemudu area (lower Yangzi Valley), already a center of rice agriculture (as it still is).   Water buffaloes were certainly domesticated by the dawn of civilization. 

             Foxtail millet is one of many species of grain called “millet.”  The term refers to any small-seeded grain.  Wild foxtail millet is widespread; it was independently domesticated in ancient Mexico, but abandoned when maize came along.  (The same process is ongoing in China now—maize, which came in the 17^th century, is replacing millet.)  Foxtail millet was domesticated by 8000 BC. (Chang 1999:44-45; Liu 2004; Liu et al. 2009; Lu 2005; see Sagar et al. 2005, passim) and panic millet (Panicum spp.) by then or at least by 6000-6500 BC. (Bellwood 2005:21).  The earliest center of millet agriculture is around the Wei River Valley and its confluence area with the Yellow River (the Peiligang culture).  Millet reached Taiwan by 3000-2500 B.C.; a spectacular recent find revealed large amounts of foxtail millet (as well as rice) at Nan-kuan-li.  This and related sites probably represent the ancestors of today’s Austronesian-speaking “aborigines” of Taiwan, recently arrived from south China with seeds in hand (Tsang 2005).  Panic millet is early in Europe, common by 5500 BC in the Linearbandkeramik and other cultures (Bellwood 2005:21), and probably spread from China, though independent domestication cannot be ruled out.   

            In 1988 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. 

By 6000 BC, pigs were domesticated and being fed the millet husks and waste (Jing and Flad 2002; Liu 2004).  This is about as early as domestic pigs are found in the Near East; they were independently domesticated both places.  This is not surprising.  Pigs, like many animals, tame themselves if fed.  They are very good eating.  People all over the world keep young wild pigs (and other wild game) today, especially if hunters kill a mother and young ones are left.  The young are eaten when they grow big.  This provides a good context for domestication.  The most tranquil young may not be killed till they have bred, and thus tranquillity and “domestic”-ness is automatically selected.  

Around 5500 BC, people, pigs, and dogs in central north China noted above suddenly shift toward eating a lot more C4 plants, i.e. millets;  before that they were eating mostly C3 plants, i.e. wild foods (Barton et al 2008; Jing and Campbell 2009).  The reference is to the type of carbon-fixing metabolism.  The difference shows up in the carbon in human bones, allowing archaeologists to figure out what people ate.  The vast majority of temperate-zone plants use the C3 pathway to fix carbon into nutrients.  A few grasses use C4; these include millets and maize.  The latter, of course, was not to reach China till the 16^th or 17^th centuries AD.  Jing and Campbell (2009:101) report a very odd case of two skeletons showing a C3 diet among many others showing C4.  Were these strangers?  Hunter-gatherers from the uplands?  Migrants from rice regions to the south?

            Pigs soon became very important as a wealth item, with consumption of pork showing high status.  Domesticated pigs are now reported by 7000 BC (Lawler 2009), though, as usual with early dates from China, this date is questioned.  Heavy pork-eating and the pattern of status consumption are clear by 3000 BC (Kim 1994) and the same patterns are clear today.  However, it is interestingly much clearer in north China than in the Yangzi country.  The latter had so much game and fish that these resources remained more important than domestic livestock until quite late, perhaps 2000 BC (Yuan et al. 2008).  Fish were so important in the lower Yangzi area that people were buried with them.  Perhaps this was food for the other world, but very possibly it had richer significance.  Fish may have been sacred (as some still are in south China) or may have been totems or spirit companions.

Other early animals include chickens, domesticated apparently in what is now southern China (West and Zhou 1988), by 4000 BC or earlier (Liu 2004—yet again questioned!), almost certainly by Thai-speaking peoples.  The Thai inhabit the home area of chickens in south China and northern southeast Asia; the Chinese did not get there till relatively recent times.  The Chinese word for “chicken,” ji, Cantonese kai, is pretty obviously a loan from Thai kai.  (The Mandarin pronunciation ji is very modern.  It was still ki when Europeans came to China and evidently kai rather earlier.)  Roger Blench (2007) has evidence that the word did not stop there; it seems to have spread, progressively transforming as it went, all the way to Berber and Mande in Africa!  By then it was unrecognizably different from kai, but Blench finds plausible—if far from certain—links in the forms along the way.

Meanwhile, sheep were domesticated in the Near East.  Recent evidence suggests that domesticated sheep came from the Near East across Central Asia.  It now seems less likely that sheep were domesticated independently in China, where they may go back to 4000 BC (Anderson 1988; Liu 2004:59) but perhaps only to 2500 BC (Jing and Campbell 2009).  The sheep are of an Asian strain found all across Asia then and now (Jing and Campbell 2009).

Goats do not appear till 2800 BC (Liu 2004:59).  Cattle and other Near Eastern domesticates got to China later (cattle by 2500 BC; Jing and Campbell 2009).  Magnificent longhorns like Texas longhorns are shown on bronze sculptures from the Dian culture in early medieval Yunnan (personal observation, Yunnan Provincial Museum). 

            Dogs may have been originally domesticated in China, where they go back to 8000 BC.  They too were eating millet, and probably the Chinese were already eating them.  The Chinese dog breeds are closer to the wolf ancestor than western breeds are.  The Near East may well have domesticated the dog separately at about the same time or a bit earlier. 

Horses, domesticated in the western steppes around 3500-4000 BC, got to China early.  The date is uncertain by they are there by 1500 BC (Lawler 2009).

            Vegetables and minor grain crops are not well attested early, but many were no doubt cultivated long ago and will be documented.  Crawford (2006) reviews the minor domesticates and gives dates for East Asian appearances.

            Wild animals exploited in the early Neolithic include “sika deer, water buffalo, water deer, hare, cat, raccoon dog, tiger, and bear” (Liu 2004:59), among others.

            A dramatic new find is a 4000-year-old bowl of noodles, at Lajia in northwest China (Lu et al 2005).  They were made from millet (both panic and foxtail) and were about 20 cm. long; they were excellently preserved, in an overturned bowl that had become sealed by clay below and around it.  They look like pulled noodles (see below) but presumably were not, since millet does not have the requisite gluten for the process; they were probably extruded by being forced through holes in a plate and into boiling water—this being the traditional Chinese way of making noodles from low-gluten substances.  The history of noodles in the western world is well known; they first occur around 200-400 A.D.  Perhaps they spread from China, but very likely they were independently invented.  In any case, China has a clear and very long priority!  Noodles are not mentioned in Chinese writing till ca. 100 A. D. in the Han Dynasty.  (Yi-Li Wu on the Chinese Medicine listserve commented this “really underscores the connection of noodles with longevity.”  Chinese eat extra-long noodles at birthdays to express hope that the celebrant will live long.)

            The rise of agriculture evidently led to an expansion of ethnic groups.  The probable inhabitants of the Yangzi Valley in those times were the ancestors of the Thai and certain related groups (the “Kadai”).  They seem to have expanded southward, and, much later, secondarily re-radiated from their current area of maximum ethnic diversity in the China-Vietnam-Laos border area.  The Hmong (Miao) and Mian (Yao) may have participated in these early agricultural forays as well, since those groups—linguistically unrelated to either Thai or Chinese—expanded southward from the Yangzi River drainage (or the mountains just south of it) at some early point.  My strong sense is that the Thai-Kadai served the role on the mainland that the Austronesians did on the seas (see below):  they were the primary, though not the only, carriers of agriculture outward from its origin point.  (The Austro-Asiatic phylum, sometimes credited, actually originated in India, and expanded to the China frontier late, probably within historic times.  It had no role in East Asian agricultural expansion, though probably a great deal of importance in that regard in India.  On these matters see Bellwood and Renfrew 2002.) 

The possibility that the early millet cultivation goes with the ancestral Sino-Tibetans is much more tenuous, but intriguing.  The Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages are related at about that level—they are about as different as you would expect if they branched off from each other five to eight thousand years ago.  But very little is known of this, and matters are controversial (van Driem 1999, 2002).  Van Driem, who includes Chinese within Tibeto-Burman, thinks the stock originated in Sichuan.  Others (myself included) think it originated slightly further north.  Either way, the stock originated suspiciously close to the origin point of millet agriculture.

No longer controversial is the correlation of advanced rice agriculture with the spread of the Austronesian languages in the south.  There is clear archaeological evidence for an explosive radiation of advanced farming and pottery-making people from south China to Taiwan and thence to the Philippines and the islands south and east—the lands inhabited by Austronesian peoples today.  Peter Bellwood (1997, 2002, 2005) has repeatedly argued for this being a record of one linguistic group radiating, and all the evidence so far seems to suggest this.  (Though see Donohue and Denham 2010; but Bellwood has a very effective answer in the Commentary section of this article.  Subsequent profound changes in both language and agriculture took place when Austronesians mixed with Papuans in Melanesia—see Paz 2002—but this is a different question.) 

            Meanwhile, the Chinese fondness for strong drink was already conspicuous.  A fermented beverage made of rice, honey, and grape and/or hawthorn fruit left unmistakable lees on pots from 7000-6600 BC at Jiahu.  Patrick McGovern, dean of oeno-archaeologists, has recently examined and analyzed these (Khamsi 2004; Zhang and Lee 2005).  This is as early as any cultivated rice in the world.  It seems that the Chinese started brewing as soon as they had domesticated grain.  No one who knows modern China will be surprised.  Probably they were already writing songs to the moon and flowers while guzzling from those jars.  (The same Patrick McGovern found that King Midas, in what is now Turkey, later drank a brew of grain, grapes, and honey; this was reconstructed by an American brewer.  It sounds strange, but it proved an excellent tipple.  I have tried it. See McGovern 2003.)

            Decades of failure to find Neolithic soybeans strengthened the case that the soybean came from the North (as Chinese records say) in the Zhou Dynasty.  Finally, however, Lee and associates have found earlier domesticated soybeans.  A sequence of larger and larger soybeans—indicating deliberate breeding for size—emerged from 2500-3000 BC in the Erlitou area of North China (where an early “Xia” city rose).  Full domestication at around 1100-1000 BC occurs through North China and Korea (Crawford 2006; Lee 2007).  Ping-ti Ho’s classic case for derivation from the “Jung barbarians” (Shanrong “Mountain Rong” in today’s usage) may still be fair enough.  The northeast remains the earliest center of diversity, though centers of diversity elsewhere in China soon appeared (Lee et al 2008). 

            Archaeology has revealed a vast number of neolithic cultures.  Every part of China, as well as Korea (Nelson 1993), had a complex, sophisticated neolithic tradition by 2000-3000 BC.  These lived on grain, with many fruits, vegetables, fish, turtles, and domestic and wild animals.  China was still game-rich, and deer were important.  Even far-off New Guinea may have contributed; sugar cane (more likely, though, from India) and bananas may be New Guinea domesticates.  Bananas, a complex hybrid of two species (Musa acuminata x Musa balbisiana), come from somewhere in the Malaysia-Indonesia region, and recent studies suggest a date of 7000 years ago and a location in New Guinea (Rice 2005), where another species (Musa fehi) was also domesticated.  The classic association of more cultural complexity with a widening gap between rich and poor and between male and female, noted in my 1988 book, is confirmed by recent studies of body size.  In particular, people tend to be somewhat less healthy as the Neolithic progresses; then, in the late Zhou Dynasty, males are notably taller and females smaller than in earlier times (Pechenkina and Ma 2008). 

            Chinese civilization arose in a core area in the western parts of the North China Plain and the adjacent Wei Valley (on which see above).  Until recently, it seemed to be a civilization that began in one area and spread in neat rings outward, like the ripples from a stone cast in a pond.  This neat scenario was early questioned by Wolfram Eberhard, and I followed him in my 1988 book in casting a dubious eye on it.  Today, the early rice and other items in the Yangzi Valley show that it was as advanced as the North China Plain, if not more so, from earliest times onward.  By 2000 BC it had large towns and sophisticated art, similar to and culturally related to the proto-civilization of the North China Plain (Underhill and Habu 2007).  Sichuan is also providing dramatic new finds that show a related but distinctive early civilization there (Bagley 2001).

Moreover, the stunning finds in north and northeast China have revealed utterly unexpected cultures there.  The mysterious and controversial Hongshan culture produced many towns long before China had dynasties.  “A huge ritual complex, about 8 by 10 km², was discovered at the late Hongshan period (ca. 3500-3000 B.C.) site of Niuheliang in western Liaoning province….  It contains stone platforms interpreted as altars, stone foundations that could have been temples,” sculptures, images, jewels, shamanic figures,  “pig-dragons,” and much more (Underhill and Habu 2006:131).  No writing or other signs of advanced civilization are associated with these sites.  Though their monumental architecture is huge, the communities were small chiefly ones of only 1000 people or so. Could they be somehow part of the background of the “Rong barbarians”?  We will probably never know.

Going back to 4000 BC, this culture had intensive agriculture and large towns that evolved into real cities by about 2000 BC—as well as pig burials (Nelson 1994, 1995).  Yet it remains totally mysterious.  Its people may have spoken ancestral Chinese, ancestral Korean, or some totally lost language. 

Other high cultures with distinctive art and architecture have been discovered in Sichuan, the Yangzi Valley, northeast China, and Central Asia (see Lawler 2009 for quick overview).  They share many broad patterns with the better-known early cultures of the Yellow River plain, but are distinctive.  They show that the transition to civilization in China took place very gradually (from 3000 BC to 1500, roughly) and over a very wide area.  Urban-size sites extended from the far north to the Yangzi and inland to Chengdu by 2500-2000 BC.  So far, scholars have been very cautious about calling these “civilizations.”  This is partly because they all lack writing—it first appears with the Shang Dynasty in the Yellow River plain area, by around 1300-1500 BC.  I personally expect that earlier writing will turn up.  Signs on vessels as early as 2000 BC are suggestive, but clearly are tally marks rather than real characters; still, it is awfully hard to believe that all those cities managed without writing and that it then suddenly came into full-blown existence hundreds of years later.

The Central Asian cultures have produced many mummies, preserved by the dry, cold climate.  These show that most of the people there were of west Asian (some perhaps even European) background. (Current genetic theory holds that east Asian “Mongoloid” peoples are derived from groups that moved up very slowly from southeast Asia.  So their late radiation into Central Asia led to a meeting of quite different stocks when they encountered Caucasians.)  Many of their textiles are woollen, woven in patterns similar to European ones; some are strikingly similar to Scottish plaids (Barber 1999; Mallory and Mair 2000).  Th earliest mummies date back to 1800-1500 BC.  These people certainly include the ancestors of the Tocharians; two Tocharian languages were spoken in this area in historic times.  They are Indo-European, close enough to eastern European languages that their word for “fish” was “lox”!  (Phonetically laks, lakse, or laksi.)  And a modern Uyghur bread resembles the bagel (Robinson 1998).  Also well represented are people related to known Iranic groups, and one assumes most of the people of the ancient Tarim Basin and neighboring areas were Indo-Iranian.  Turkic and Mongol speakers probably were established at the northern fringe of Xinjiang. 

The food attested was largely wheat and barley, with sheep, goats, cattle, horses, Bactrian camels, donkeys, and probably yaks to provide variety of dairy and meat stock.  Some of the mummies, including the spectacular “Beauty of Xiaohe” from 1800-1500 BC, were buried with wheat grains; she also has a basket and winnowing fan to use in the afterlife.  A baby was buried about that time with a sheep-nipple baby bottle and a goat-horn drinking cup.  By Han times, grapes, apricots, melons, and other fruit were established, and I am sure they go back to earliest times; apricots and wild grapes are probably native to the area, and apples find their home not far off in the mountains of west central Asia.  In neolithic and Bronze Age times, the Tarim Basin was solidly West Asian in culture and genetic background.  The frontier zone of west and east was probably the divide between the Tarim and Yellow River drainages. 

            Southeast Asia has produced nothing so large so early, but advanced cultures by 1500 B.C. show that this area too was advancing almost in step with China.

In short, Chinese civilization was a diverse set of traditions from earliest times.  Different language groups are certainly represented, and surely include Thai as well as Sinitic; most scholars suspect that Miao (Hmong), Yao (Mien), Altaic, and other groups were also involved.  Austronesian speakers were almost certainly present on Taiwan by 4000 BC and probably occupied the mainland before that.  It is generally assumed now that the Austronesian language family radiated from Taiwan, where its most diverse and divergent languages survive (Bellwood 1997, 2002).

Tibet was settled by 30,000 years ago, and a major pulse of people entering around 6000 years ago indicate the coming of agriculture and presumably animal husbandry (Brantingham and Xing 2006).  There and in central Asia, once again, complex cultures flourished by 1500-2000 B.C. or earlier.

            And, last but not least, the dragon has been around for a while.  A dragon figure and a tiger figure, made of mussel shells, stuck to the floor of a tomb about 5600 years old, were discovered in Henan in 1987 (Da 1988; Chang 1999:51).  The tomb, broadly Yangshao in culture, is probably that of a shaman; his skeleton is flanked by the animals, the dragon on his right, the tiger on his left—a directionality that survives to this day.  The dragon, being yang, goes on the right; the tiger, more yin, on the left.  Presumably this find also reveals the unsurprising fact that mussels were regularly eaten.  More beautiful and even more striking is a dragon made of turquoise stones, arranged carefully in a grave at Erlitou, the city traditionally identified as the capital of the Xia Dynasty (Lawler 2009).  That dynasty is mythical, but the myth obviously has at least some basis.

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Hillman, Gordon.  2003.  “Investigating the Start of Cultivation in Western Eurasia: Studies of Plant Remains from Abu Hureyra on the Euphrates.”  In The Widening Harvest:  T he Neolithic Transition in Europe—Looking Back, Looking Forward ed. by Albert J. Ammerman and Paolo Biagi.  Boston:  American Institute of Archaeology.  Pp. 75-98.

Hotz, Robert Lee.  2000.  “Stone Axes Suggest Diversity’s Dawn.”  Los Angeles Times, March 3, p. A24.

Jiang, Leping, and Li Liu.  2006.  “New Evidence for the Origins of Sedentism and Rice Domestication in the Lower Yangzi River, China.”  Antiquity 80:355-361.

Jing, Yuan, and Rod Campbell.  2009.  “Recent Archaeometric Research on ‘the Origins of Chinese Civilisation.’”  Antiquity 83:96-109. 

Jing, Yuan, and Rowan K. Flad.  2002.  “Pig Domestication in Ancient China.”  Antiquity 76:724-732. 

Khamsi, Roxanne.  2004.  “Prehistoric Dregs Pack a Punch.”  News@nature.com (Nature online), posted 12-6-04.

Kim, Seung-Ok.  1994.  “Burials, Pigs, and Political Prestige in Noelithic China.”  Current Anthropology 35:119-141.

Kuzmin, Yaroslav.  2008a.  “Lord Avebury’s Virtual Journey Through Time.”  Review of Archaeology 28:72-83.

—  2008b.  Pottery and Agriculture in the Terminal Pleistocene-Middle Holocene of Northeast Asia;  Peculiarities of Spatial-Temporal Relationship. Paper, Society for American Archaeology, annual meeting, Vancouver, BC.

Lawler, Andrew.  2009.  “Beyond the Yellow River:  How China Became China.”  Science 325:930-943.

Lee, Gyoung-Ah.  2007.  “Crop Evolution, Human-Environment Interactions, and Politics of Food in Early East Asia.”  Talk, Feb. 27, University of Washington, Seattle.

Lee, Gyoung-Ah; Li Liu; Gary Crawford; Xingcan Chen.  2008.  Origins of Soybean in East Asia:  Comparative, Interdisciplinary Perspectives.  Paper, Society for American Archaeology, annual meeting, Vancouver, BC.

Liu, Li.  2004.  The Chinese Neolithic.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.

Liu, Xinyi; Harriet V. Hunt; Martin K. Jones.  2009.  “River Valleys and Foothills:  Changing Archaeological Perceptions of North China’s Earliest Farms.”  Antiquity 83:82-95.

Lu, Houyuan; Xiaoyan Yang; Maolin Ye; Kam-Biu Liu; Zhengkai Xia; Xiaoyan Ren; Linhai Cai; Naiqin Wu; Tung-Sheng Liu.  2005. “Millet Noodles in Late Neolithic China.”  Nature 437:967.

Lu, Tracey.  2005.  “The Origin and Dispersal of Agriculture and Human Diaspora in East Asia.”  In The Peopling of East Asia: Putting Together Archaeology, Linguistics and Genetics, edited by Laurent Sagart, Roger Blench, and Alicia Sanchez-Mazas.  London:  RoutledgeCurzon.  Pp. 51-62.

McGovern, Patrick E.  2003.  Ancient Wine:  The Search for the Origins of Viniculture.  Princeton:  Princeton University Press.

MacNeish, Richard S., and Jane G. Libby.  1995.  Origins of Rice Agriculture:  The Preliminary Report of the Sino-American Jiangxi (PRC) Project SAJOR.  El Paso:  El Paso Centennial Museum, University of Texas at El Paso.  Publications in Anthropology No. 13.

Mallory, J. P., and Victor H. Mair.  2000.  The Tarim Mummies:  Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West.  London:  Thames and Hudson.

Maugh, Thomas H., II, and Karen Kaplan.  2005.  “Neolithic Chinese Used Their Noodles.”  Los Angeles Times, Oct. 13, pp. 1, 25.

Nelson, Sarah M.  1993.  The Prehistory of Korea.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.

—  1994.  The Development of Complexity in Prehistoric North China.  Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania, Dept. of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.

—  (ed.).  1995.  The Archaeology of Northeast China:  Beyond the Great Wall.  London:  Routledge.

—  (ed.).  1998.  Ancestors for the Pigs:  Pigs in Prehistory.  Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Museum.

Olsen, Stanley J.  1993.  “Evidence of Early Domestication of the Water Buffalo in China.”  In Skeletons in Her Cupboard, ed. by Anneke Clason, Sebastian Payne and Hans-Peter Uerpmann.  Oxford:  Oxbow Monographs.  Pp. 151-156.

Oppenheimer, Stephen, and Martin Richards.  2002.  “Polynesians:  Devolved Taiwanese Rice Farmers or Wallacean Maritime Traders with Fishing, Foraging and Horticultural Skills?”  In Examing the Farming / Language Dispersal Hypothesis, ed. by Peter Bellwood and Colin Renfrew.  Cambridge:  McDonald Institute for Archaeology.  Pp. 287-297.

Paz, Victor.  2002.  “Island Southeast Asia:  Spread or Friction Zone?”  In Examing the Farming / Language Dispersal Hypothesis, ed. by Peter Bellwood and Colin Renfrew.  Cambridge:  McDonald Institute for Archaeology.  Pp. 275-285.

Pechenkina, Ekaterina, and Xiaolin Ma.  2008.  Trajectories of Health in Early Farming Communities of East Asia.  Paper, Society for American Archaeology, annual meeting, Vancouver, BC.

Peterson, Christian; Xueming Lu; Robert D. Drennan; Da Zhu.  2010.  Hongshan Chiefly Communities in Neolithic Northeastern China.  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107:5756-5761.

Rice, Patricia C.  2005.  “Recent Finds, Paleoanthropology 2005.”  General Anthropology 11:2:11-15.

Sagart, Laurent; Roger Blench; Alicia Sanchez-Mazas (eds.).  2005.  The Peopling of East Asia:  Putting Together Arcaheology, Linguistics and Genetics.  New York:  RoutledgeCurzon.

Shelach, Gideon, and Leore Grosman.  2008.  From the Younger Dryas to the Yellow River.  Paper, Society for American Archaeology, annual meeting, Vancouver, BC.

Tsang, Cheng-Hwa.  2005.  “Recent Discoveries at the Tapenkeng Culture Sites in Taiwan:  Implications for the Problem of Austronesian Origins.”  In The Peopling of East Asia: Putting Together Archaeology, Linguistics and Genetics, edited by Laurent Sagart, Roger Blench, and Alicia Sanchez-Mazas.  London:  RoutledgeCurzon.  Pp. 63-74.

Underhill, Anne P., and Junko Habu.  2006. “Early Communities in East Asia:  Economic and Sociopolitcal Organization at the Local and Regional Levels.”  In Archaeology of Asia, ed. by Miriam T. Stark.  Oxford:  Blackwell.  Pp. 121-148.

Van Driem, George.  1999.  “Neolithic Correlates of Ancient Tibeto-Burman Migrations.”  In Archaeology and Language II, ed. by Roger Blench and M. Spriggs.  London:  Routledge.  Pp. 67-102.

—  2002.  “Tibeto-Burman Phylogeny and Prehistory:  Languages, Material Culture and Genes.”  In Examing the Farming / Language Dispersal Hypothesis, ed. by Peter Bellwood and Colin Renfrew.  Cambridge:  McDonald Institute for Archaeology.  Pp. 233-249.

Weiner, Steve; Qinqi Xu; Paul Goldberg; Jinyi Liu; Ofer Bar-Yosef.  1998.  “Evidence for thte Use of Fire at Zhoukoudian, China.” Science 281:251-253.

West, B., and B.-X.-Zhou.  1988.  “Did Chickens Go North?  New Evidence for Domestication.”  Journal of Archaeological Science 15:515-534.

Yuan Jing; Rowan Flad; Luo Yunbing.  2008.  “Meat-Acquisition Patterns in the Neolithic Yangzi River Valley, China.”  Antiquity 82:351-366.

Zhang Juzhong and Lee Yun Kuen.  2005.  “The Magic Flutes.”  Natural History, Sept. 2005, 43-47.

2.  Earliest Dynasties

            Research on the Shang Dynasty has not led to any huge breakthroughs since 1988.  Much more material has accumulated, but it confirms earlier findings:  Shang was a brilliant but local civilization, centered on the great central plain of north China, depending on intensive agriculture and pig-raising.  The major new finding is that Shang’s neighbors were almost or quite as brilliant.  These included the ancestral Zhou to the west and the mysterious Hongshan and its heirs to the northeast, as well as splendid local cultures in the Yangzi Valley.  We can no longer think of Shang as “the” ancient civilization of China.

            Very few animal species were shown in Shang art; about half of them were mythical, mostly various types of dragons.  The pig, by far the most common animal in archaeological finds, was never shown.  Evidently it was too plebeian, not to say unclean, to find its way into noble art.  Pigs are shown in both Neolithic and (rarely!) Zhou Dynasty art.

            Oracle bones (Flad 2008; Keightley 2006) show, at least, lots of consumption of sheep, pigs, turtles, deer, and so on.  They remain controversial as to what they are “really” about.  If all that mattered was the forecast, it would have been easier to write it down with a brush, as indeed they did (Keightley 2006); why go to incredible effort and expense to carve it?  Evidently something about state power and authority is involved.  Showing off expensive evidences of ritual divination may have been the goal.

In Shang, the king could order farmers to work collectively in fields.  Officers supervised (Keightley 1999:279).  In one storage pit, “444 stone sickles showing wear were discovered with gold leaves, stone sculpture, bronze ritual vessels, and jade artifacts.  Such precious items would be found neither in the storage pit of an ordinary farmer nor in a stone workshop.  The implements must have been stored there by a master” (Hsu and Linduff 1988:28), evidently a noble—either an administrator or an owner of an estate.  The Shang used stone implements—bronze is impractical for farming—to conduct slash-and-burn agriculture in forests, as well as upland agriculture on grass and brush steppes.  The bottomlands especially were valued as fertile farmland.  Fertilizers as such were unknown, but ash and vegetable debris restored soil fertility (Hsu and Linduff 1988:29). 

By Shang, there was a Many Dogs Officer to take care of the hunting hounds.  There was also a Many Horses Officer (Keightley 1999:280).           

The early Zhou Dynasty subsisted especially on millets.  The founder of the dynasty was Lord Millet (Hou Ji; ji was some kind of millet, apparently foxtail millet).  Wheat and rice were also important, but wheat is rarely mentioned in Shang and early Zhou, while hundreds of mentions of millet occur (Hsu and Linduff 1988:346).  Archaeology confirms the implication about their relative abundances.  Beans and hemp seeds added to the pot.  The hemp was grown for fibre for cloth, but no one was going to waste the edible seeds.  The value of the resin for drug uses was no doubt known, as it certainly was later (see below).  

            Ceramic and bronze vessels of enormous size, beauty, and technical complexity abounded.  The Shang Dynasty already had a spectacular material culture, including what many consider the most beautiful bronze vessels of all time.  Zhou produced ones even larger (if less beautiful to modern taste).  Residue analysis confirms that these held meat, alcoholic beverages, and grains.  This analysis confirms at least some of the traditional Chinese claims about which type of vessel held which food.  Vessels were used in banqueting (von Falkenhausen 1999), and some at least saw long use before being buried with their lordly user; residues attest this. 

            A recent review book gives pictures of early Chinese civilization materials (Allen 2005).

Allen, Sarah (ed.).  2005.  The Formation of Chinese Civilization.  New Haven: Yale University Press.

Von Falkenhausen, Lothar.  1999.  “The Waning of the Bronze Age.”  In The Cambridge History of Ancient China, ed. by Michael Loewe and Edward Shaughnessy.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.  Pp. 450-544.

Flad, Rowan K.  2008.  “Divination and Power:  A Multiregional View of the Development of Oracle Bone Divination in Early China.”  Current Anthropology 49:403-437.

Hsu, Cho-yun, and Kathryn Linduff.  1988.  Western Chou Civilization.  New Haven:  Yale University Press.

Keightley, David.  1999.  “The Shang:  China’s First Historical Dynasty.”  In The Cambridge History of Ancient China, ed. by Michael Loewe and Edward Shaughnessy.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.  Pp. 232-291.

—  2006.  “Marks and Labels:  Early Writing in Neolithic and Shang China.”  In Archaeology of Asia, ed. by Miriam Stark.  Oxford:  Blackwell.  Pp. 177-201.

3.  Later Zhou and the Warring States

            Archaeology has been more productive in regard to later Zhou, though one finds no huge modifications in earlier conclusions about food.  China  became more populous, grain became more basic to life, and game gradually moved out of the reach of ordinary people.  By the rise of Han, only the elite and the remote mountain-dwellers had much chance at anything bigger than a rabbit.  Farming was basically in the hands of yeoman farmers, as it remained throughout history—by government policy established in Warring States times.  Huge estates worked by serfs and/or slaves were, however, all too well known.  The Warring States period was a time of high feudalism, and the continuum from slave and serf to freeman was apparently as complex as it was in feudal Europe a few centuries later. 

            The Warring States period, like China’s subsequent period of disunion from 220 to 581 AD, resulted from a situation in which the normal heartland of conquest—the Wei River Valley—simply could not marshall enough resources to defeat big, rich states south and east.  When it could (with the rise of Qin in the Warring States period and of Sui later on) it immediately conquered outward and subdued all China.  (Similarly, Liao and Jin could not quite marshall enough power to defeat Southern Sung in the 11^th and 12^th centuries, in spite of their control over the north and northwest; it took the Mongols to do that.)

            Thousands of Zhou and Warring States tombs have been excavated in the last 20 years.  These fill out knowledge of local traditions and of sacrifice rites. 

Recent work on the Zhou Li—theoretically the government manual of the Zhou Dynasty, actually a later reconstruction (if not outright fabrication)—promises to add to our understanding of food and nutrition.  It was the Zhou Li that first established nutritiion as the highest branch of medicine.  The Zhou Li claims that the court had—along with shamans, dream interpreters, and so on—special officers in charge of aromatic plants, wines, chickens, and other food items.  In fact, it holds that the ideal court (the idealized Zhou court, that is) should have two court nutritionists overseeing all—the most important medical officials in Zhou—and also 152 feastmasters, supervising some 70 butchers, 128 cooks for the inner court, 128 more for the outer offices and functions, 62 assistant cooks, 335 masters of the royal domain who (among other things) oversaw collecting the foodstuffs, 62 game-hunters, 24 turtle-catchers, 28 meat-driers, 110 butlers, 340 winemakers, 170 other beverage makers, 94 icehouse attendants, 31 people to manage serving-baskets, 61 meat picklers,62 other picklers, and 62 salt makers—some 2263, or 55% of the 4133 officers of the royal household (Knechtges 1986:49).  Of course, it is highly doubtful if the Zhou ever had so many.

With Zhou, we first find occasion to refer to the superb and encyclopedic history of Chinese food technology by H. T. Huang, one of the greatest food historians (Huang 2000).  This book, the life work of Dr. Huang, sets a new standard for Chinese food research.  While beginning with the Neolithic, it really comes into its own with Zhou food.  Among other things, Huang identifies the ritual vessels, and shows some of the superb archaeological relics.

Also, a recent book edited by Roel Sterckx (2005) and dealing with food and religion in China has focused largely on Zhou and the Warring States period, though it ranges on down through Chinese history.  Written largely by religious studies scholars, it has one article by Vivienne Lo (2005), expert on Chinese medicine and food; this is by far the best article in the book, especially to a food historian.  It ranges over all of China’s history and is most valuable for the medieval period, but it and the rest of the book might as well be cited here, at the start of the long historical period covered by the various articles. 

Further research on conservation of resources in ancient Chinese thought has turned up a great deal (Anderson 2001). 

Also, poems help us interpret the data.  The Book of Songs is well known.  Also, a major collection of songs from the state of Chu, or at least from what was once the state of Chu, contains several laments for the dead in which the mourners attempt to call a man’s soul back.  (Sometimes a man or woman was simply in a coma, and revived—hence the attempts.  This practice continues, and I have seen it.)  The mourners lure the soul with promises of good living, including food.  I quote from Arthur Waley’s translation, more free than accurate, but giving the “flavor” of the poem:

“Where pies are cooked of millet and water-grain,

Guests watch the steaming bowls

And sniff the pungency of peppered herbs.

The cunning cook adds slices of bird-flesh,

Pigeon and yellow-heron and black-crane.

They taste the badger-stew.

O Soul come back to feed on foods you love!

Next are brought

Fresh turtle, and sweet chicken cooked in cheese

Pressed by men of Ch’u.

And pickled suckling-pig

And flesh of whelps floating in liver-sauce

With salad of minced radishes in brine;

All served with the hot spice of southernwood

The land of Wu supplies…”  (Waley 1946:37-38; compare the different translations in Chang 1977:32-33, Knechtges 1986:54-57, and Huang 2000:94-95).

Interesting in this poem (but you have to run down all the translations to get it) is the use not only of Chinese “pepper” (Zanthoxylum spp., flower or brown pepper, actual a citrus relative) but also smartweed (Polygonum spp.) and wormwood (Artemisia spp.) as flavorings.  These were common in China before chile peppers replaced them in the last 400 years.  They have now almost disappeared from Chinese cuisine, but smartweed survives as a spice in Vietnam (rau ram, Polygonum odoratum) and Artemisia, either fresh or dried and powdered, survives as a common flavoring in Korea.

Anderson, E. N.  2001.  “Flowering Apricot:  Environmental Practice, Folk Religion, and Daoism.”  In: N. J. Girardot, James Miller, and Liu Xiaogan (eds.):  Daoism and Ecology:  Ways within Cosmic Landscapes.  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University, Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School.  Pp. 157-184.

Chang, Kwang-chih.  1977.  “Ancient China.”  In Food in Chinese Culture, ed. K.-C. Chang.  New Haven:  Yale University Press.  Pp. 23-52.

Knechtges, David R.  1986.  “A Literary Feast:  Food in Early Chinese Literature.”  Journal of the American Oriental Society 106:49-63.

Lo, Vivienne.  2005.  “Pleasure, Prohibition, and Pain:  Food and Medicine in Traditional China.”  Sterckx 2005:163-185.

Sterckx, Roel (ed.).  2005.  Of Tripod and Palate:  Food, Politics, and Religion in Traditional China.  New York:  Palgrave MacMillan.

Waley, Arthur.  1946.  Chinese Poems.  London:  G. Allen and Unwin.

4.  The Blinding White Light of Han

            Chinese food suddenly comes out of the shadows in the Han Dynasty.  Archaeology and textual research give us a very good idea of Chinese food at the time.  Apparently this was a time of major innovation, with everything from European grape varieties to the wok entering China (Anderson 1988).  Fermentation technology seems to have taken off, and even distillation seems evidenced in Han, though it did not become common or well-known till Tang (Huang 2000). 

Conservation of resources had become scientific by Han times, if not by late Warring States.  For example, the Li Ji (another Han reconstruction of a supposedly Zhou text), the early Daoist texts (Yates 1997:163), and the Huai Nan Zi (Ames 1994, esp. pp. 163, 201) specifically counsel the conservation and management of plants, game animals, agricultural land and resources, and other renewable resources.  For instance, they forbid taking of pregnant game animals, setting fishnets in spawning season, burning of forests for driving game, and even burning off of fields before (beneficial) insects have gone into hibernation (Ames 1994:163, 201).  The rules sound completely modern, and—with some change of rhetorical style—would not seem out of place in a modern resource management textbook. 

It will be recalled that Han saw the perfection of the “ever-normal granary” system (Li 2007:167), borrowed by the United States in the 1930s and developing there into the agricultural subsidy system.

From Han comes the obsessive classification of everything in Chinese civilization into fives.  The correlation of the five directions and five flavors is of interest to us here, because it seems to refer to regional cooking styles.  The center correlated with sweet, and central-eastern Chinese cooking is still notably sweeter than other areas’.  North goes with salt, and the north does have salt lakes and a salty cuisine.  South goes with bitter, and southern Chinese food does make relatively more use of bitter greens and other vegetables.  East goes with sour, and China’s best vinegar comes from the central east; other correlations (especially when the center is left out) correlate east with sweet, which may make more sense.  West goes with pungent, and anyone who has had real Sichuan food knows where that ascription comes from! 

            Spectacular tomb finds, especially at Mawangdui, have revolutionized the study of Han food.  The Mawangdui tombs date from around 163 BC.  Careful embalming and subsequent burial in an anaerobic bog environment led to extremely good preservation not only of bodies and vessels (see the superb lacquerware illustrated in Huang 2000:101) but even of texts and individual food items.  Many of the texts were medical.  Donal Harper (1998) has prepared an extremely valuable edition of these.  There is now a  considerable scholarly literature on them (notably relevant to food is Lo 2001).  Along with general principles, sexual hygeine, exercises ancestral to tai ji and qi gong, these medical texts provide much information about diet therapy and plant drugs.  Many of the actual medicines are buried along with the texts—a dream come true for those of us who long agonized over what the old drug names “really meant” in botanical terms.  

            Almost as dramatic was the discovery of two sets of distilling vessels, dating from around 100 AD (give or take a few decades; see Huang 2000:209-215).  This predates by centuries the earliest previously-known stills (which are also from China).  Apparently the Chinese invented distillation.  Distilled liquor becomes common in Tang.

            Another oft-claimed Han innovation is bean curd.  Soy sauces were long known, and liquid soy sauce as we know it may have come in with Han or just before (though there are no clear references till Ming!).  However, bean curd (tofu) seems not to have been common till much later.  Thus, in 1988 I dismissed the Han invention story as legend.  However, archaeology has revolutionized the picture yet again; a tomb from Han shows a quite clear representation of making bean curd or something very similar (Huang 2000:305-333).  Still, one wonders why references to bean curd remain totally nonexistent till the end of Tang.  If bean curd was indeed a Han invention, it stayed amazingly obscure.  One would think that such indefatigable chroniclers of foodways as Jia Sixie and Tao Hongjing could not possibly have missed it.  Huang (2000:333) is probably right in speculating that the process was “still undergoing development.”  The perfection of bean curd must have waited till Tang.

            Yet another new product seems to have been tea.  Tea is native to what is now far southwest China, but that area was not part of the Han empire.  Tea was an import.  It is thinly and dubiously referred to in Han, but becomes known in subsequent centuries, and was common and well-known by mid-Tang (see Huang 2000:503 ff for the best history).

            Han armies preserved meat—even rats—by drying, grain by parching or boiling and then grinding for meal (see Sinoda 1977:486), and food in general by chilling.  Fish could be preserved by fermenting with rice, which contained sugars that decomposed into lactic acid that preserved the fish (Sinoda 1977:487).

            Literary sources provide diverse descriptions of food (Knechtes 1986).  Other sources preserve less favorable impressions of minority foodways.  Women married off to “barbarians,” i.e. steppe nomads, complained of  “rancid mutton that to me was completely revolting” and “raw meat and koumiss” (Cai Yan [attrib.], cited  Idema and Grant 2004:122-123).  Chances are that the mutton was neither particularly rancid nor particularly raw, but obviously the fine court styles of Han were unknown on the frontier.

            One qualification to the blinding white light is that scholarship has established that the great Han medical texts—the Yellow Emperor’s Classic, the Shang Han Lun, and so on—were constantly revised, and our modern versions of them date from as much as a thousand years later.  They are as different from the originals as current editions of Gray’s Anatomy are from the original, early-19^th-century version.  So we are not sure that the possible derivation of the Yellow Emperor’s term huoluan from the Greek word cholera is as early as Han; it would constitute a uniquely early borrowing, if so.  Similarly, the Shang Han Lun’s very accurate and useful descriptions of beriberi (and its cure), oral rehydration therapy for diarrhea, and the like (Anderson 1988) might be from well after Han times.  They probably are not Han.  However, references to what seems to be beriberi occur early, with a strikingly good clinical description in 610 (Huang 2000:580-581; this probably is not a more recent updating, since it is preserved as a long quote, not as a part of an updated textbook.)

            Han conquered Central Asia, thus bringing this previously “Western”-looking region into the Chinese orbit.  Settlement and administration followed (Mallory and Mair 2000; see Chapter 1).  Wheat and barley remained the foods there, with millet a very minor player, used for porridge.  The wheat and barley were ground for flour—remember that relatively advanced milling came to China from the west at this period—and some fancy pastries were baked.  The Silk Road exhibition of 2010-2011 included a flour-and-water pastry that looks like a modern florist’s chrysanthemum flower.  (It probably is intended otherwise, though, since said flower had probably not been developed by Han times.)  A group of short spaghetti-like noodles, twisted together and deep-fried, was found in a Han site; I have eaten similar items in northwest China. 

Ames, Roger.  1994.  The Art of Rulership:  A Study of Ancient Chinese political Thought.  Albany:  SUNY Press.

Harper, Donald.  1998.  Early Chinese Medical Literature:  The Mawangdui Manuscripts.

London:  Kegan Paul International.

Idema, Wilt, and Beata Grant.  2004.  The Red Brush.  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press.

Lo, Vivienne.  2001.  “The Influence of nurturing Life Culture on the Development of Western Han Acumoxa Therapy.”  In Hsu 2001 (see reference in Section 14 below), pp. 19-50.

Sinoda, Osamu.  1977.  “The History of Chinese Food and Diet.”  Progress in Food and Nutritional Science 2:483-497.

Yates, Robin.  1997.  Five Lost Classics.  New York:  Ballantine.

5.  Foods from the West:  Medieval China

            We have become more aware of the importance of Wei and other regimes for introducing western and Central Asian ideas to China.  Starting in 316, Central Asian states began serious conquests in China, leading eventually to dominance of the north by the Toba (Tabghach) Turks who ruled as the Wei Dyansty.  Wei engaged in constant trade and diplomacy with Central Asian nomadic groups.  In 520, they gave one nomad group “one thousand bushes of newly cooked rice, eighty bushels of fried [sic.; evidently shao, here meaning parched] wheat, fifty bushels of fried [roasted] nuts, …two girl slaves…and two hundred thousand bushels of grain” (Jagchid and Simons 1989:171, translating a Wei court document).  In return, Wei got horses, livestock, furs, and the like.  (Contrary to Jagchid and Simons’ wider point here, the nomads did not truly depend on Chinese foodstuffs; trade was important and brought valuable commodities, but they could hold their own if they had to; Di Cosmo 1994.)  Ongoing trade linked China and Central Asia throughout history, but was never more important than in the 400s and 500s, when Central Asian dynasties ruled North China.   By Tang, Persians were selling breads on the street, and restaurants had waitresses with white skins and blue eyes (Sinoda 1977:488; see also Schafer 1963).  What is now Xinjiang was dominated by this time by Turkic peoples, notably the Uighurs, as well as Iranic groups; the two Tocharian languages were also widely spoken. 

            Food there was still overwhelmingly bread and other baked products made from wheat and barley.  Millet was only about 15% of the grain used, and beer was its main use.  It was eaten as porridge.  Both naked and hull barley was grown, the former being classed with wheat, evidently because of milling (hull barley needs an extra step to get the hulls off).  Wheat was soaked before milling, the mills being still inefficient.  (Tang used a vertical stone turning in the vertical plane to crush the grain on an anvil slab.  Stone mills in the west used, and still use, two horizontal wheels, the upper one roughened with tangential grooves, to slash up the grain as well as grinding it.  This provides finer flour and better bran separation, and is still the preferred way to mill wheat—far superior to the cheaper steel rollers of industrial grinding.)  White bread was made in large quantities for the elite and professional classes, by bolting the flour.  Hard workers had to depend on whole grain bread, bran and all.  (This paragraph depends on the superb analysis by Trombert 2009). 

One assumes that Central Asia ate as remote parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan did within living memory: Bread was overwhelmingly the staple food, with dairy products, fruit, meat, and vegetables coming next in descending order (apparently).  Remains in cemeteries and Buddhist temples show a varied, cosmopolitan, high-quality diet for the well-to-do, and bran bread with some dairy and fruit for the rest.  The basic diet had not changed since the days of the Beauty of Xiaohe, but the elite had a far greater range.  Rice, now a staple of the region, seems to have still been lacking.  It is commonly mentioned in the Mongol Empire, but the relevant sources come from Beijing, not the old Central Asian core. 

            Probable Central Asian influence appears in the many forms of wheat cakes and dumplings described by Shu Xi (ca. 264-304) in his “Rhapsody on bing” (Knechtges 1986:58-63).  Bing now means “cake,” but then it meant just about any prepared wheat food.  Many of these have relatives all over Asia, and probably came from westward; Shu remarks on how recent they are, tracing them back no farther than Han.  Filled dumplings—what would now be called bao and jiao—are included, and described in mouthwatering detail.  Large filled dumplings were called mantou, a word folk-etymologized to “barbarian heads” and said to come from a conquest in which these dumplings were substituted for real heads in a sacrificial feast (Knechtges 1986:60).  This is a typical bit of Chinese fantastical folk-etymology; more significant than the story is its supposed date, the 3^rd century AD, just before Shu was writing.  Mantou is in fact the Chinese reflex of a word known all over Asia (from Korean mandu to Greek mantu or manti); it is probably not a Chinese word, and the food itself probably came from central Asia (Anderson 1988).  The point here is that meat-filled dumplings were all over Asia by this time; they were rather new in China; and they are almost certainly intrusive there.  A mummified dough jiaozi has been found in Xinjiang, along with a mummified spring roll that looks exactly like a modern one (personal observation, Silk Road exhibition, Bowers Museum, Santa Ana, CA, 2010). 

            Over time, mantou became a term for unfilled loaves of steamed bread, bing became restricted to baked or steamed wheat cakes, and the filled dumplings became, as noted, bao if thick-skinned,  jiao if thin-skinned.  Elsewhere, including in Xijiang (see below), the cognates of mantou still refer to filled dumplings, usually with meat fillings.  Mian, previously a word for flour, became the word for noodles (Coe 2009:90; he notes egg noodles were not invented till around 1500). 

            From Central Asia and India, Buddhist missionaries and influences poured into China during this period, and some Chinese went to India to seek out more Buddhist knowledge.  With this came vegetarianism, avoidance of alcohol and onions and garlic, and other Buddhist food rules (see the Sterckx volume cited above).

            A new historical survey of milk and milk products, by Luo Feng (2008), adds to our knowledge of them in this era.

            In China itself, medicine continued to develop.  Robert Campany (2002) has provided a valuable translation of Ge Hong’s fourth-century work on immortals—a major influence on medical books later, being quoted in e.g. the Yinshan Zhengyao (see below).  The sixth century AD proved a major watershed, at least in regard to production of books.  The incredible work of Jia Sixie, the Qi Min Yao Shu (ca. 540 AD), was described earlier (Anderson 1988), but it has now received serious attention from Françoise Sabban, the unquestioned leader in the field of Chinese food history.  The epochal work of Tao Hongjing (456-536) on chemistry, alchemy, nutrition, Daoism, and medicine remains to be seriously monographed in western languages, but research is underway.  Earlier works are preserved, at least in part, in these efforts. 

Early medical works and cookbooks followed, from 600 on, but are known only in fragments (see review in Huang 2000:125-126).  Books on medicinal and culinary uses of food began to appear, including Sun Simiao’s medical work “Prescriptions Worth a Thousand Gold” (2007; Chinese original 654), one of the earliest books of prescriptions and one of the first to blend herbs and food into a comprehensive materia medica (see Engelhardt 2001).  It consists largely of directions deduced from the “five phases” theory rather than empirical or verifiable medicine.  Much of it is downright magical thinking, with no basis in fact and little in theory.  It is not a very original work, being heavily based on Tao Hongjing’s writings, but it has new ideas and emphases.

Meanwhile, in the south, food was very different (see Anderson 1988).  One area reported wildrice (Zizania aquatica), barnyard millet, crab eggs, nutmeg, betel nut (already!), and water plants (Sinoda 1977:488).  Tea spread rapidly from the southwest.

In Tang and Song, monks and religious devotees took to consuming tea and medicinal soups on a regular basis, as an aid to longevity, purification, self-cultivation, sophistication, and general religious virtue (Liu 2006).  This was a pattern that was to persist.  Readers of the Qing Dynasty novel The Story of the Stone will recognize it as a key part of the lifestyle of the nun Adamantina.  More recently, it was still a very widespread pattern in the 20^th century, as I (among many) can attest from personal experience.  It spread to Japan and continues there as well.

            Tang fell at a time of worldwide drought (Zhang et al. 2008), the same drought that brought down the Classic Maya and weakened the Khmer state centered on Angkor.

Campany, Robert.  2002.  To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth:  A Translation and Study of Ge Hong’s Traditions of Divine Transcendents.  Berkeley:  University of California Press.

Di Cosmo, Nicola.  1994.  “Ancient Inner Asian Nomads:  Their Economic Basis and Its Significance in Chinese History.”  Journal of Asian Studies 53:1092-1126.

Engelhardt, Ute.  2001.  “Dietetics in Tang China and the First Extant Works of Materia dietetica.”  In Innovation in Chinese Medicine, ed. by Elisabeth Hsu.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.  Pp. 173-191.

Jagchid, Sechin, and Van Jay Simons.   1989.  Peace, War, and Trade along the Great Wall:  Nomadic-Chinese Interaction through Two Millennia.  Bloomington, IN:  Indiana University Press.

Liu, Shu-fen.  2006.  “Between Self-cultivation and the Monastic Code:  Tea and Medicinal Soup in Tang and Song Monastic Life.”  Bulletin of the Instituite of History and Philology, Academia Sinica (Taiwan), Sept.

Luo Feng.  2008.  “A History of the Production and Consumption of Milk Products in the North of China:  an Archaeological and Ethnological Enquiry.”  Journal of Chinese Dietary Culture 4:115-178.

Sun Simiao.  2007.  Recipes Worth a Thousand Gold.  Translated by Sumei Yi.  Ms.

Trombert, Eric.  2009.  “Between Harvesting and Cooking:  Grain Processing in Dunhuang, a Qualitative and Quantitative Survey.”  In Regionalism and Globalism in Chinese Culinary Culture, David Holm, ed.  Taiwan:  Foundation of Chinese Dietary Culture.  Pp. 147-179.

West, Stephen H.  1987.  “Cilia, Scale and Bristle:  The Consumption of Fish and Shellfish in the Eastern Capital of the Northern Song.”  Harvard Journal of Asian Studies 47:595-634.

Zhang, Pingszhong; Hai Cheng; R. Lawrence Edwards; Fahu Chen; Yongjin Wang; Xulin Yang; Jian Liu; Ming Tan; Xianfeng Wang; Jinghua Liu; Chunlei An; Zhibo Dai; Jing Zhou; Dezhong Zhang; Jihong Jia; Liya Jin; Kathleen R. Johnson.  2008.  “A Test of Climate, Sun, and Culture Relationships from an 1810-Year Chinese Cave Record.”  Science 322:940-942.

6.  Definitive Shaping of the Food System:  Song and the Conquest Dynasties

            The importance of Song (founded by Zhao Guangyin—whose name was misprinted in the book) and its agricultural progress has been continually reemphasized.  Rice yields doubled or tripled (ultimately, at least, but not in Song or Yuan) after the Champa fast-ripening varieties and other novelties.  The Champa rice reached the lower Yangzi from Fujian in the early 11th century (the classic date is 1012).  It had come at some uncertain (but probably not much earlier) point from Champa, now southern Vietnam.  It was rather poor quality and cooked up dry, thus hurting its appeal; its only advantage was its quick ripening (plus some resistance to drought).  Thus it was slow to make its way, coming into its own in later dynasties when cooler and drier interior uplands were settled.

            A recent and very good popular summary of Chinese food history, by Joanna Waley-Cohen (2007), belongs here, because she focuses overwhelmingly on the Song, Ming and Qing Dynasties, and specifically on the type of food and gourmetship that evolved in the Song Dynasty. 

            Li Bozhong (2003), however, argues that the full benefits of the Song introductions was not felt till Ming, and that the new rices did not have as revolutionary an effect even then as Elvin and others had argued.  However, he has to admit that the Song crops and cropping systems had a powerful effect in the Yangzi Delta area, the economic powerhouse of the country—and one which, as he points out, did not suffer as much as other regions from the violence of the subsequent conquests.  Thus, the issue is really one of what constitutes a “revolution”—the beginning and locking in of a basic change, or its final fruition.  The latter was not even completed in Ming; Qing saw it finalized, even in the Delta.  In fact, the marginal parts of the south did not get their full “revolution” until the 20^th century.  It seems logical to see Song as revolutionary, then, even if the full benefits were not reaped (literally!) until later. 

            Certainly, the Delta was doing well.  Richard von Glahn (2003; see also Li 2003) translates one Fang Hui (1227-1307) as noting that families there had about 30 mu (a bit under 5 acres) of land.  For a family of five, this meant a bit under an acre per person.  The yields per mu were up to two shi, or dan, of rice.  (The shi is a measure of weight, now 133 lb., but then a bit more, around 145 lb; see Li 2003:170.  Shi of rice are counted in dan, the way grain yields in the US used to be counted in “bushels.”  Thus an amount of rice that weighs 100 shi is counted as “100 dan rice.”  In older literature the shi was referred to by its Malay name, pikul.)  Tenants sharecropped on a 50-50 basis, leaving them 30 dan.  Fang Hui calculated a family of five would need 18 dan per year, leaving 12 for sale.  Recall this was often superior rice that would command a premium price.  Assuming the family of five was two parents and three children, 18 dan would give about 4.5 dan per adult and 3 per child, or better than 600 lb of rice per adult, certainly a liberal ration.  Of course many a farm returned only half that yield per acre (Li 2003, see esp. p. 170), and outside the Delta the norm was probably lower still. 

            Northern Song coincided with a strong monsoon, with reliable rainfall and good growing conditions all over China (Zhang et al. 2008).

Trade also flourished; Kaifeng, the Northern Song capital, was full of all kinds of fish, though it is in a dry area and had to bring most of them from afar (West 1987).  Printing also flourished as never before (Chia 1996), allowing cookbooks, tea books, and very modern-seeming restaurant and food and wine guidebooks to multiply inordinately. 

            Sugar developed as a major crop, and the Song found ways to keep it a smallholder crop, rather than becoming a plantation product as it was in the western world (Mazumdar 1998).  Mazumdar’s book, one of the greatest works in all agricultural history, continues the story by showing the successful integration of sugar into China’s smallholder production system through imperial times.  China was thus spared the horrors of slavery, indentured servitude, and colonial displacement of grain by sugar (Geertz 1963; Mintz 1985).  Sugar never paid well, so it provided no escape for the trapped peasants.  Even so, it is the most striking case of China’s ability to adapt anything to the freeholder economy.  Thanks to Warring States political philosophy, written into imperial policy by Qin and Han, China’s farmers were rarely “peasants” in the European sense.  They did not form a lower class, subject to legal discrimination and bound to the landlords.  They were proud freeholders—as many of them told me in the 1960s!  At some times and in many places serfhood and slavery did exist, but these were never the norm.

            Song foodways were greatly elaborated, as we have long known.  I noted in the book that tea had become a staple by late Song.  Smith (1991:51-62) has more recently detailed the taxation of tea in Sichuan in the Song.  An insight into the cuisine of Song is the cookbook by the great Song artist Ni Tsan (Anderson, Wang and Mair 2005).  Ni provides highly refined recipes for a delicate, artfully simple cuisine. He also provides brewing directions (alas, garbled in transmission somehow) that indicate complex and highly flavored wines were home-brewed at the time; another book of the time, Zhu Gong’s work on wine brewing Beishan Jiujing, has accurate recipes.  Flour was stirred with water and probably a starter to cause lactic acid fermentation.  Then glutinous rice was cooked and added.  This was fermented and strained (see Sinoda 1977:491).

Another scholar’s cookbook was that of Lin Hong (13^th century), who developed a highly refined cuisine (Sabban 1997).  Based on delicate vegetables, this cuisine could accommodate delicate meats and fish, but—except for an odd stew of wildcat—few more robust meats, though mutton and venison did make it in.  Delicacy can go no further than infusions, congee, and stuffings flavored with flowering-apricot blossoms; they have a carnation or clove scent.  (They were used to flavor tea in the Qing Dynasty; they give a slight carnation fragrance to it.)  Recipes include dishes of lotus, orange, wild mushrooms, hare, and various light-flavored greens.  Like other scholars then and since, he warns against eating certain foods at the same meal, including crab and persimmon (this combination is still avoided, though no one has ever come up with a valid reason for it; Lin speaks of a mysterious “wind worm”; Sabban 1997:42).  Many, perhaps most, of Lin’s recipes contain literary allusions.  Influenced by Daoism, he still cannot give up grains or meats, but he minimizes them, and includes various vegetarian-“meat” recipes such as vegetarian duck.  The book contains an early use of “won ton” (huntun) to mean a broth; it is, here, a medicinal one, using cedrela root (Cedrela sinensis=Toona sinensis)  to treat diarrhea.  (Many of the recipes are medicinal, and probably all were considered to have medicinal value.)  He is devising a cuisine for scholars who have retired to the mountains—a cuisine simple and natural, but still refined and tasteful (not to say expensive).

By this time, Buddhism was strictly vegetarian, some sects of Daoism encouraged vegetarianism, and some Chinese scholars were simply too merciful to take animal lives—or so they claimed.  Vegetarianism probably came in with Buddhism before Tang.  By Song it was more widespread, and remains a part of the Chinese scene today.   (On meat and the rise of substitutes for it, see Huang 2000; Sabban 1993.)

Conversely, raw foods were still popular, as they had been in Tang.  Not only fish, but pork, mutton, duck, goose, sparrows, and other foods were eaten raw (Sinoda 1977:490).  This habit declined steadily from Song onward, disappearing in the 20^th century as the health hazards became widely known.

Many other cookbooks and food books are known from this period (Huang 2000:126-128).  There are also other observations on food, including many sour comments by exiles on the foods of remote regions.  The south was infamous for its “yams and taro,” rats and bats, raw fish, and so on (Rosner 1999; Schafer 1967).  The great poet Su Shi complained of this, and his wife died after eating snake without knowing what it was; he attributed her death to the shock of finding out (Sabban 1999:5).  The gap between conservative, meat-eating north and eclectic, eat-everything south was well known, of course, since much earlier.  The north’s dairy products and the south’s fish, frogs and snakes were stereotypic by the 6^th century (see also Rosner 1999; Sabban 1999).

            North China fell into foreign hands during the Liao, Jin, and early Mongol periods, and then all China fell to the Mongols in 1279.  Little is known about food in north China during the earlier periods.  Population declined; by early Ming, the North China Plain may have had as few as 7,000,000 inhabitants, comparable to Shang Dynasty levels. 

            The Liao emperors were embalmed carefully; among other things, their bodies were stuffed with “fragrant herbs, salt and alum,” and drained of body fluids, resulting in a dried mummy that an irreverent Chinese observer called “emperor jerky” (Steinhardt 1998:226).  Some corpses have lasted long enough to be excavated by modern archaeologists such as Steinhardt (1998).  Copper wire suits and gold and silver face masks decorated the bodies, as the Liao court records had said.  Food offerings were made, but seem not to have survived.

            The subsequent Jin Dynasty is known, among other things, for introducing the word “shaman” to the world (Tao 1976:12-13; see also Tillman and West 1995, esp. Jin 1995:217-220).  The Jin were Tungus-speaking, and “shaman” is a word from that language.  More to our point here are the surprisingly complex Central Asian recipes they prepared at court (Buell, Anderson and Perry 2000).  One odd bit of foodlore dating to those troubled times is the Cantonese term “oil-fried devils” for the fried breads known elsewhere simply as yutiao, “dough strips.”  The Cantonese commemorate the minister Qin Gui (1090-1155) and his wife, who, according to received histories at least, convinced the Song Emperor Gaozong to cashier and then execute the great general Yue Fei (1103-1142), who had stood off Jin.  The result was transient peace for Song and eternal hatred in south China for Qin.

            Population crashed in each conquest episode.  Apparently “a population of 108 milion in 1210 fell to 75 million in 1292, rose to 87 milion in 1351, and fell again to 67 million in 1381” (Smith 2003:9, citing several authorities).  Of course these figures are highly tentative.  Li Bozhong (2003:138) correctly dismisses the claims of bubonic plague episodes contemporary with or earlier than Europe’s great 1346-8 epidemic.  There is absolutely no evidence for a Chinese equivalent of this.  For many reasons (some addressed memorably in Benedict 1996) bubonic plague is endemic, not epidemic, in China.  It seems never to have been a major killer, judging from the lack of descriptions of this unmistakable disease in the records we have.

            The Mongol Empire and its foods and agriculture are now well known (Allsen 2001; Anderson 2005; Buell, Anderson and Perry 2000; Ratchnevsky 1991; Rossabi 1988).  The striking findings are that the Mongol Empire was very far from being a brief irruption of nomads who settled down to become just another Chinese dynasty.  The Yuan in the early 1300s controlled the Yellow River for the first and last time in China’s dynastic history.  Other water control projects flourished (Li Bozhong 2003).

The Mongols brought ideas and people from all over Asia.  The Mongol court’s official book of food, nutrition and dietetics, assembled in 1330 by court nutritionist Hu Sihui (Buell, Anderson and Perry 2000), is a stunning work of synthesis.  It provides a large number of recipes with their nutritional values as perceived by Chinese medicine of that time.  The recipes come from as far afield as Baghdad, Kashmir, and eastern Europe.  Most of them are Central Asian:  Turkic, Mongol, or Iranic.  Many are Chinese, but the Chinese recipes are definitely in the minority, although the book was compiled in Peking.  Many recipes are examples of fusion cuisine:  Chinese ingredients in Central Asian recipes, or outright blends of the two traditions.  An interesting observation, given what is said about distilling above, is that Hu gives directions on making arak—using the Arab word (a-la-ji in transcription).  If distillation spread from China to the west, it was now spreading back again, or at least a type of distilled liquor was. 

It is hard to escape the conclusion that the Mongols and others at their court wished to demonstrate their sophistication by eating foods from all over the world.  They also loved to impress visitors by providing them with the foods of their homelands.  They also were famous for assembling skilled people and skilled knowledge from any and all places, as part of their insatiable thirst for anything that would help them conquer and hold the world.  But, beyond this, I believe that the Mongols were deliberately and openly showing off their power.  The message of their feasts was:  See, we can command foods and recipes from the entire known world; we not only conquered these lands, we really own them, and we can take their people, their cultural ways, their skills, their expertise.  All is ours.

By contrast, ordinary Chinese seemed rather unaffected; Sinoda (1977:491) has noted that the contemporary novel Shui Hu Quan mentions only standard Chinese foods.

Scholars once believed that pasta came from China to Europe; it went the other way.  Invented in the east Mediterranean in Roman Empire times, it spread to China, probably with steppe nomads in the period just before Tang.  The Chinese, however, added new tricks that eventually spread back to Europe.  (See the classic history of pasta by Serventy and Sabban 2002).

Allsen, Thomas.  2001.  Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press. 

Anderson, E. N.  2005.  “Lamb, Rice, and Hegemonic Decline:  The Mongol Empire in the Fourteenth Century.”  In Christopher Chase-Dunn and E. N. Anderson (eds.)., The Historical Evolution of World-Systems.  New York:  Palgrave MacMillan.  Pp. 113-121.

Anderson, E. N.; Teresa Wang; Victor Mair.  2005.  “Ni Zan, Cloud Forest Hall Collection of Rules for Drinking and Eating.”  In Victor Mair, Nancy Steinhardt and Paul R. Goldin (eds.), Hawai’i Reader in Traditional Chinese Culture.  Honolulu, HI:  University of Hawaii Press.  Pp. 444-455.

Benedict, Carol.  1996.  Bubonic Plague in Nineteenth-Century China.  Stanford UP.  See under China.

Buell, Paul D.; Eugene N. Anderson; Charles Perry.  2000.  A Soup for the Qan.  London:  Kegan Paul International.

Chia, Lucille.  1996.  “The Development of the Jianyang Book Trade, Song-Yuan.”  Late Imperial China 17:10-48.

Jin Qicong.  1995.  “Jurchen Literature under the Chin.”  In China Under Jurchen Rule:  Essays on Chin Intellectual and Cultural History.  Albany:  SUNY Press.  Pp. 216-238.

Li Bozhong.  2003.  “Was There a ‘Fourteenth-Century Turning Point?’”  In The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition inChinese History, Paul Jakov Smith and Richard von Glahn, eds.  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Asia Center.  Pp. 135-175.

Ratchnevsky, Paul.  1991.  Genghis Khan:  His Life and Legacy.  Oxford:  Blackwell.

Rossabi, Morris.  1988.  Khubilai Khan:  His Life and Times.  Berkeley:  University of California Press.

Rosner, Erhard.  1999.  “Regional Food Cultures in China.”  Paper, Sixth Symposium on Chinese Dietary Culture, Fuzhou.

Sabban, Françoise.  1993.  “La viande en Chine:  Imaginaire et usages culinaires.”  Anthropozoologica 18:79-90.

—  1997.  “La diète parfaite d’un lettré retiré sous les Song du Sud.”  Études chinoises XVI:7-57.

—  1999.  “Chinese Regional Cuisine:  The Genesis of a Concept.”  Paper, Sixth Symposium on Chinese Dietary Culture, Fuzhou.

Schafer, Edward.  1967.  The Vermilion Bird.  Berkeley:  University of California Press.

Serventi, Silvano, and Françoise Sabban.  2002.  Pasta:  The Story of a Universal Food.  New York:  Columbia University Press.

Smith, Paul Jakov.  1991.  Taxing Heaven’s Storehouse.  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press.

—  2003.  “Introduction:  Problematizing the Song-Yuan-Ming Transition.”  In The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition inChinese History, Paul Jakov Smith and Richard von Glahn, eds.  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Asia Center.  Pp. 1-34.

Steinhardt, Nancy Shatzman.  1998.  “Liao Archaeology:  Tombs and Ideology along the Northern Frontier of China.”  Asian Perspectives 37:224-244.

Tao, Jing-Shen.  1976.  The Jurchen in Twelfth-Century China.  Seattle:  University of Washington Press.

Tillman, Hoyt, and Stephen H. West (eds.).  1995.  China Under Jurchen Rule:  Essays on Chin Intellectual and Cultural History.  Albany:  SUNY Press.

Von Glahn, Richard.  2003.  “Towns and Temples:  Urban Growth and Decline in the Yngzi Delta, 1100-1400.”  In The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition inChinese History, Paul Jakov Smith and Richard von Glahn, eds.  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Asia Center.  Pp. 176-211.

Waley-Cohen, Joanna.  2007.  “The Quest for Perfect Balance.”  In Freedman, Paul (ed.),    Food:  The History of Taste.  Berkeley:  University of California Press.  Pp. 99-134.

Zhang, Pingzhong; Hai Cheng; R. Lawrence Edwards; Fahu Chen; Yongjin Wang; Xulin Yang; Jian Liu; Ming Tan; Xianfeng Wang; Jinghua Liu; Chunlei An; Zhibo Dai; Jing Zhou; Dezhong Zhang; Jihong Jia; Liya Jin; Kathleen R. Johnson.  2008.  “A Test of Climate, Sun, and Culture Relationships from an 1810-Year Chinese Cave Record.”  Science 322:940-942.

7.  Involution:  Ming and Qing

            Agriculture continued to develop, slowly but surely, in Ming and Qing.  The great drama was the steady growth of population—interrupted by the enormous crash in the Ming-Qing transition, when population fell by at least 25% and possibly far more.  Qing population then grew from 100-150 million to 400 million, putting unprecedented stress on the production system.  Supporting so many took a level of skill, innovativeness, and hard work that has not been adequately appreciated.  Most of the literature (e.g. Elvin 2004; Elvin and Liu 1998) stresses the grim Malthusian crisis, with deforestation, unsustainable conversion of wetlands, desertification, “retreat of the elephants” (Elvin 2004), and so on the inevitable toll.  All these and more did indeed occur and were horrific, and conditions by the early 20^th century were beyond modern imagination (Li 2007), but the real news was that somehow those 400 million managed to eat.  

Research has shown that China’s agricultural regions were similar to those described by Buck in the early 20^th century, although maize was not important until Qing, probably late Qing (Myers and Wang 2002:581).  Sorghum and millet prevailed in areas where maize was central by Buck’s time.  Maize, sweet potatoes, peanuts, chiles, and other New World crops made a huge and dramatic difference in the end, but were slow in coming and in spreading.  New scholarship shows that maize may have come first through southwest China and Tibet, as often suggested in earlier decades, and spread rapidly, while sweet potatoes were widespread by the 1730s; maize remained commoner in central China, sweet potatoes in the southeast (Vermeer 1998:266).  They allowed more activity in the mountains of the center and south, where they grow well but rice does not.  This in turn led to further deforestation (Vermeer 1998:267).

Will and Wong (1990) and others (see Myers and Wang 2002; Rowe 2002) have showed that the Qing Dynasty’s famine relief system was pervasive and effective, probably the best in the world in the 17^th and 18^th centuries.  Beijing’s food security, for instance, was guarded effectively by a range of institutions (Li and Dray-Novey 1999).  Few countries at that time were so well organized as China in making sure that people had some access to food.

Through the 19^th and 20^th centuries, the western world was almost unanimous in taking a supercilious, patronizing attitude toward China’s traditional food sector.  Only those who had intimate acquaintance with it, such as F. H. King (1911; and see many others quoted in The Food of China), recognized what an accomplishment mere survival was, under the circumstances.  Now that the United States has as dense a population as Qing China had, and now that the world food system is tottering toward collapse, we may be able to take a more properly humble attitude.

            Still, the hard times of Ming and Qing are undeniable, and would have been less severe if government officials had been less corrupt and slothful.  Encroachment on lakes and wetlands continued (e.g. Osborne 1998), though it was far less serious than what is going on today.  More serious, and perhaps the worst environmental problem of Qing, was the massive deforestation (Vermeer 1998).  Reduction of minorities was often the cause (Vermeer 1998:246 describes this for the Miao).  Their forests were plundered.  Sometimes this was done on the excuse that “bandits and rebels” (Vermeer 1998:247), many of whom were actually desperate resistance fighters, were taking refuge therein.  Other forests were cut by desperate poverty-stricken people who invaded them in spite of rules and restrictions.  Vermeer quotes a number of contemporary sources, some pro-forest, some pro-deforestation.  Awareness of the devastating effects of deforestation was widespread, but not adequate to stop the combination of official fear and grassroots desperation.  Agroforestry was practiced widely (see e.g. Vermeer 1998:251).  Tree plantations were, however, vulnerable to poaching and government takeover.  These acted as disincentives.  Government reserves fell apart and were given over to cultivation, continuing a trend established as early as the Han Dynasty.

            Population grew, but the idea that China “always” had a huge, fast-growing population is a myth.  China’s population, and its increase rate, remained comparable to Europe’s through most of this period (Lavely and Wong 1998; Pomerantz 2000; etc.).  Only when China’s 18^th century brought peace, and Europe’s birth rate declined (and declined more in the 19^th and 20^th centuries), did China forge well ahead.  Thus, population pressure is not a valid explanation for differences.  It caused ecological degradation in China (Elvin 2004; Marks 1998), but so did it in Europe.  The Chinese were fully aware of the environmental problems (Myers and Wang 2002:640), and did a great deal to prevent them—planting trees, maintaining forests, keeping dykes maintained and when possible keeping them low and letting the rivers run.  True remedies were, however, beyond China’s technological power.

Famines took place constantly and were horrific (Li 2007; Mallory 1926; Wu 1996, 1997—with comments on the fears of cannibalism).  They were worse in China than in most of the world, incluiding Europe (Li 2007).  However, the rest of the world had no shortage of famines in those times.  For the vast majority of humanity, freedom from want became a real possibility only with the rise of modern bulk transport of grain and perishable commodities, by rail and ship, in the late 19^th century.

After decades of neglect of this vitally important topic, food and famine in Qing has finally received serious attention.  Pierre-Étienne Will and Bin Wong (Will and Wong 1991) carried out major studies of famine relief, amazingly effective in much of Qing.  Stockpiles of grain for famine relief could be huge, overflowing granaries and rotting because there was simply not enough storage capacity (Li 2007:169).  Famines persisted, however, because the population was so dense and so fast-growing that a government with only premodern transportation methods at its disposal was handicapped.   Lillian Li’s book Fighting Famine in North China:  State, Market, and Environmenbtal Decline, 1690s-1990s (2007) investigates the problems of Beijing and the areas around it.  Beijing grew from 660,000 to over a million in Qing (p.a 146) and the region grew even more. 

Like other observers, Li describes a diet of wheat, millets, sorghum, and—increasingly—the New World crops, maize, peanuts (an oil crop; see p. 99), and sweet potatoes.  Many varieties of soybeans were grown; the black one was for horses or for the starving.  Cotton competed for land with food.  Rice was grown but never did well in that cold climate, and there was little water for it in many years.  Rice from the south tended to be old and probably bug-eaten.  The land was productive (far more so than comparable parts of Europe, if later statistics hold true for Qing).  However, the climate was changeable and official policies and practices were too.  The climate could produce droughts or floods; the region has a very high amplitude of variation in rainfall.  The officials could produce excellent policy in a good time (such as the early 18^th century), but corruption was common, and in bad decades even minimal law enforcement was difficult. 

The grain tribute brought an enormous amount of food to the capital.  Up to “13-15 million shi” (Li 2007:148; a shi was 133 lb. in the early 20^th century) were stored in the city at a time; that would be about 10,000 tons of grain.  One effect was linking prices over the empire; regionalism was inhibited and grain flowed throughout eastern China and to some extent through the center and west.  The nobility was given huge donations of grain (as well as silver and other items) and sold some of it.  The government tried to keep grain prices low, favoring the urban population but often hurting the farmers.  This is a practice familiar in the modern world, where many countries have done it, usually with unfortunate results for agriculture.

Soup kitchens and other aid facilities, as well as grain storage, helped the hungry.  The system functioned best in the 18^th century, preventing mass deaths.  The dreadful tales of late Ming, which resurfaced in the 20^th century, are singularly absent from the records (Li 2007:247):  no cannibalism, no living on bark, no selling of children for a few coins or bits of food.  Relevant is the wider context of peace; the core provinces were so calm that when a local rebellion finally occurred in Shandong in 1774 (Perry 1981), the local law enforcement personnel could not find their weapons.  When they finally located these in an old storeroom, they discovered that the weapons had rusted away!  I know of no comparable story anywhere else in the world.

In the 19^th century, all this slowly unraveled.  Rising population led to want, which fueled rebellions that brought the Qing down in 1911.  Probably the worst famine in premodern history was that of 1876-79, in which 10-13 million people died (Li 2007:272).  Up to 90% of the population died in some districts in 1878 (Bohr 1972).  Then and throughout the early 20^th century, people were reduced to eating chaff, bark, weeds, and corncobs.  Even the more edible weeds and tree barks were long gone.  Cannibalism from desperation was widespread in the 1876-79 famine, and was observed by sober outside observers, not merely reported by the Chinese sources (which in olden times loved to exaggerate this horrific recourse). 

For the rich, food became ever more sophisticated (See Huang 2000:129 for a list of major culinary works; see Waley-Cohen 2007 for brief history of gourmetship and Tong 1986 for some recipes). Sarah Schneewind tells a hilarious story concerns an attempt to fool a Ming emperor into thinking an auspicious, and therefore rewardable, omen had appeared in the form of two melons growing on one stalk.  The emperor was not fooled. 

The great Chinese gourmet Yuan Mei (1716-1798) flourished in Qing, and his book of food is now widely available; we are hoping to translate it.  His birthday, set at March 25 in the western calendar, has recently been declared as International Chinese Food Day.  You might plant a tree too; he planted one on his 70^th birthday, saying:

“Seventy, and still planting trees….

Don’t laugh at me, my friends.

I know I’m going to die. 

I also know I’m not dead yet.”   (Tr. J. P. Seaton, 1997:92.)

Much more important is everyday food.  As we have seen, Li Bozhong (see above) points out that the effects of the new crops and cropping patterns introduced in Song and Yuan were not widely felt till Ming, and thus Ming population and wealth could grow steadily in spite of the poor governance of that troubled dynasty.  The Yangzi Delta and neighboring areas flourished especially.

Yields stayed about the same in shi per mu in Ming, but the shi was much larger, around 220 lb or more (Li 2003:170).  Thus, though landholdings shrank, the combination of higher yields and higher measures meant that people were not hurting.

            Suzhou in Ming focused on high-quality rice, trading it widely (the peasants who grew it had to sell it to buy cheaper rice).  The gazetteer (local guidebook and products list) in Ming reported “seventeen varieites of nonglutinous and twelve varieties of glutions rice, six strains of wheat and six types of beans…nine kinds of fruit in addition to eleven different tangerines and twelve varieties of plums…thirteen types of vegetables and six of melon” (Marme 2005:23), as well as many fish, water plants, medicinal herbs, and so on.  The fishermen were boat-dwellers, as in early modern south China generally. 

Both the end of Yuan and the end of Ming (like the end of Tang) coincided very closely with dramatic drops in the strength of the monsoon, and it appears almost certain that famine and unrest associated with these events helped bring down the dynasties (Zhang et al. 2008).  The events coincide with dry or cold periods elsewhere in the world.

A frequent question for students of late imperial China has been:  Why didn’t China develop as western Europe did?  As of 1100 A.D., anyone betting on different regions of the earth would probably have bet that China would be the unquestioned leader in all fields for the next many centuries; the Near East and perhaps southeast Europe would stay a strong second; and west Europe would remain a marginal backwater, except in so far as Muslim civilization brought Spain into the wider world.  Clearly, this would have been a wrong prediction.

Modern authors like Kenneth Pomerantz (2000) and Bin Wong (1997) have stressed China’s many advantages in population, resources, productivity, learning, and organization, even as late as the 17^th and 18^th centuries.  They have done much to demolish the idea of European exceptionalism.  Li Bozhong (see above), also, emphasizes the enormous increases in agricultural production and productivity and the other economic gains in Ming.  Moreover, China did have the advantage of European science (admitted out-of-date and thin in many cases), thanks to the Jesuit missionaries, and—contrary to frequent western claims—the Chinese welcomed, adopted, and used these introductions (Elman 2005).  This makes the problem more thorny; it might seem that China could, at any time before 1700, have overtaken and passed the west. 

Against Pomerantz, however, Philip Huang (2002) reaffirms his arguments for agricultural involution (see above), and argues that China was so trapped by its intensive agriculture and high person-to-farmland ratio that few resources (whether land, labor or capital) could be freed for development.  Huang argues from his work in the Yangzi delta, without reference to pioneer fringes like Yunnan and Manchuria that produced more surplus.  Pomerantz has hotly riposted to Huang (2002), and the debate has been joined by others (Lee et al 2002; Brenner and Isett 2002).  The argument winds up turning on misplaced decimal points, misdrawn curves, and other minutiae, and is—in fact—beyond resolution with the data available at this time.  Suffice it to say that it is clear that China had a rich economy with a good deal of surplus that could have been invested, while west Europe had more, including a wealth of animals and an easily accessible trove of coal (Pomerantz 2000).  It is also clear that much of China was trapped in static situation of local lineage power, micro-farms, and razor-thin margins.  Mazumdar’s work, noted above, is again apposite here.  Change was impressive and important in Ming and Ch’ing China, but much of it was driven by governmental desire to centralize and take ever more power, rather than by a real desire for development in the modern sense.  Local individuals and regions might resist, but they could, at best, slow down and dilute the rise of autocracy. 

Most scholars would probably accept the conclusion that, while China failed to expand into global sea trade, Europe was forced to expand in that direction, and profited greatly.  Portugal in particular had nowhere to go but out into the Atlantic, and the Dutch too had little option but to take to seafaring.  These nations were, successively, the leaders of long-range voyaging and trade.  The Dutch are sometimes credited with (or accused of) inventing capitalism as a result.  China was ahead in maritime matters until the early 1400s, but then turned against marine trade and voyaging.  Ming tried to ban sea trade, and Qing fought piracy in ways that damaged the seafaring economy.  This did not stop such ventures, but it did give the west a chance to catch up and then forge ahead, to take a commanding lead by 1500.

I personally continue to accept the hoary, time-honored view that China’s autocratic centralism inhibited change, while the ferment and competition of multinational west Europe forced change.  Ming’s royal family had a touch of paranoia (literal, not a loose use of the word), which led to some mass murders of intellectuals and innovators; the founder, Zhu Yuanzhang, killed an estimated 100,000 elite individuals (Marme 2005:76; cf. Smith and von Glahn 2003, passim), and his successors were often as bloody.  They targeted specifically anyone interested in change—in loosening up the intellectual crust on the country.  Obviously, this had some effect.  The Qing Dynasty, an unpopular reign of alien “barbarians,” found itself forced to become even more autocratic, and did everything to achieve this (see Peterson 2002, passim).  Even their liberation of the serfs and low-caste peoples was apparently a way to create a levelled, easily-ruled society, not as a blow for freedom (Rowe 2002, in the Peterson volume).  Intellectuals protested and advocated small government in terms reminiscent of the American founding fathers, and were savagely repressed in consequence (Peterson 2002; see especially Woodside 2002).  Commerce greatly flourished, and capitalist-like firms and behaviors multiplied (Rowe 2002), but the oppression of all initiative crushed any chance of real development.  It seems clear to me—but I recognize there can be much debate on this—that if Europe had continued on the path to autocracy that it pursued at the same time (see P. Anderson 1974), Europe would have had the same sluggish development and the same involutional tendencies.  Revolution, colonization, and other processes spared them (P. Anderson 1974).

In this, Europe benefited from lack of unity; geography made unification under an autocratic emperor almost impossible (Pomerantz is among many who have discussed this idea).  It was not for lack of trying; from the Romans on down to Napoleon and Hitler, but the mountains always got in the way, saving Europe from unity and stagnation.  Perhaps the European Union will end European progress….  Conversely, if Japan had been a continent with several conflicting polities, it might have parlayed its rather striking parallels with Europe (see von Glahn 2003) into equally rapid and impressive development.

Quite apart from the very real problem of an often autocratic, backward-looking state, there were more immediate incentive issues. For an upwardly mobile Chinese in imperial times, getting into government service was always a major goal.  Families diversified their portfolios by investing in land, trade, and education for government service, rather than focusing on economic development.  China had large cities but rather few large towns, and the population was scattered and rural, in a vast network of marketing areas; Myers (Myers and Wang 2002:579) contrasts this with the highly urban-centric (“plexus”) economy of Europe.

Clearly, there was much more to the whole story.  Richard von Glahn (2003) has reviewed a vast number of theories, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous.  The latter essentialize Europe, making it either innately superior or else a homogeneous realm characterized by a single political-economic framework that somehow unites early Renaissance Italy and modern England (the Japanese appear to be especially prone to this).  In the absence of definitive conclusions, I will not make further claims. 

What matters here is that Pomerantz, Wong, and Philip Huang (1990), as well as other scholars, all agree that China was extremely productive agriculturally during this time.  Myers and Wang’s summary article (2002) describes a stunningly successful, rationalized, developed agriculture with highly sophisticated technology.  Farmers and writers realized that bean plants, plowed in, restored soil fertility, as did beancake fertilizer (see e.g. Myers and Wang 2002:610-611).  They knew the relative values of different kinds of dung.  Efficiency of production, transportation, and processing all increased, at the same time as leasing arrangements, banking, and government policy were making it ever easier to trade in foodstuffs.  On the other hand, rural wages (calculated in rice-buying power) declined as population rose (Myers and Wang 2002:637, citing Kang Chao). 

Moreover, China’s cities were quite “modern,” having—among other things—a wealth of teashops, restaurants, and attendant food-related amenities (see e.g. Rowe 1989, esp. p. 86; Rowe 2002).  The Chinese also practiced birth control and maintained, at least locally, a low birth rate (Lavely and Wong 1998), though frontier areas often had larger families.  (There is some doubt about population figures, since we have no believable figrues from late Ming or the Ming-Qing transition, but the general trends are clear; see Myers and Wang 2002, Rowe 2002.)  The problem was certainly not lack of food or lack of ability to feed a growing, increasingly urbanized population. 

            One revealing insight into the relative decline of China and rise of the west is provided by herbals.  China’s greatest premodern herbal was Li Shizhen’s Ben Cao Gang Mu (see e.g. Métailié 1989).  When it was published in 1596, shortly after Li’s death, it was probably the greatest herbal in the world, but already west European botanists such as Fuchs were breathing hot on its heels.  Dodoens’ great herbal came out at about the same time.  By the early 1600s, Europe was producing flocks of herbals far ahead of Li’s—but China was stagnating.  Li’s herbal was never surpassed in Imperial times, and is still very widely used, though it is now dwarfed by the great herbals of the Communist period (and even by a few from Qing—but they added little that was really new).

            Important work on tea has come out.  Robert Gardella (1994) compared China’s smallholder production with the rise of plantations in the colonial world; Qin Shao (1998), in a fascinating article, showed that China vilified teahouses as dens of freethinking and other iniquities—just as Turkey and later Europe attacked coffeehouses, and just as “espresso joints” were attacked as hotbeds of “beatnikism” within my own memory. 

Keith Schoppa (2002) has chronicled the fate of the Xiang Lake, across the Qiantang River from Hangzhou.  This lake was created as a reservoir in Sung times; it held excess water and released it later for irrigation.  It became famous for its water-shield plants (Brasenia schreberi, a small waterlily relative famous for its crunchy, succulent texture), and for bricks and tiles made from its alluvial clay.  Local elite lineages constantly tried to encroach on it, being stopped off and on by heroic efforts of local activists and magistrates; Schoppa’s main point in the book is that only a few such individuals existed, and could turn the tide, while the vast majority lived in terror of the local elites and dared not combine to act against them.  In the 20^th century, the Xiang Lake met the fate of most of rural China—it was trashed by the Nationalists and destroyed utterly by the Communists, to the enormous damage and impoverishment of the area.

Otherwise, food history during Ming and Qing has not been investigated in depth (though I have not seen Su 2004, which may have changed this).  The tendency is to assume that China kept developing more and more elaborate dishes, and became more and more committeed to what we now recognize as “Chinese cuisine”—no more Central Asian and Near Eastern borrowings (Anderson 2005 [see above]).  Yuan Mei, poet and gourmet, has little that is not thoroughly Chinese in his cookbook (Schmidt 2004; So 1986; Waley 1956).   The Qianlong Emperor loved birds’ nests, but Li Shizhen does not refer to them (Rosner 1999:7).

“Taking grain as the key link”—an infamous campaign of Mao Zidong—had its ancestry in a Qing campaign launched by the Yung-cheng Emperor.  In 1725 he wrote:

“I enjoy eating rice, and I never waste even a kernel.  Rice is a gift from Heaven and nourishes the people.  Because I love the people, I must respect heaven and take great pains to save and treasure rice….  If I…waste foodgrain, Heaven will be angry, and our people will suffer calamities.  I have heard that people in Kiangsi feed grain to the hogs.  This is not appropriate behavior….  Avoid waste and love grain!”  (Quoted Myers and Wang 2002:608.) 

Alas, China today feeds a great deal of its grain to the hogs, and in consequence has to import grain on a massive scale, driving up world prices and impacting the world’s poor.  Heaven will send calamities.

Yet, China continued to deal with Central Asia.  A Muslim Uighur concubine in the court of the Emperor Qianlong in the 1760s and 1770s managed to avoid pork, eating mutton instead, and to eat sweets—probably with a Central Asian flavor (Millward 1994:435). 

Borrowings from the New World—crops like maize and sweet potatoes came in the 16^th century (Sinoda 1977:493)—had a revolutionary effect.  Sucheta Mazumdar’s work dramatically confirms and extends my comments (Anderson 1988; Mazumdar 1999).  Among other things, New World crops allowed Chinese cultivators to continue to live as small independent farmers.  The new crops also fed a sustained population increase that still continues.

            A less pleasant borrowing was opium, long known but explosively expanding its tentacles in the 19^th century.  It was used moderately and reasonably before the 19^th century, but then the British began “dumping” it on China in order to get silver and to get a local foothold on trade.  David Bello has recently updated the history of this drug (Bello 2003 and references therein—a comprehensive bibliography).  The Qing Dynasty tried, not without success, to prohibit it, but the western powers—finding little else they could sell at a profit—forced it on China anyway.  By the end of China’s last dynasty, in 1911, millions of Chinese were addicted to this debilitating curse.  Pace Dikotter et al (2002) the result of the British pressure was a rise in demand and in addiction, and eventually a serious problem, as had plenty of opportunity to observe in Hong Kong in the 1960s.   The effect on food production was serious, as more and more laborers succumbed.  Attempts to eradicate opium in the early Communist years were quite successful, but, with the opening of the market after the 1970s, heroin and other hard drugs flooded in (Dikotter et al 2002—here usable to advantage).

            During Ming and Qing, vast numbers of Chinese migrated to the Nanyang—the “Southern Ocean,” i.e. southeast Asia, including the Philippines and Indonesia—to make a living.  This led to the emergence of many new food traditions, as Chinese adopted local foods and Southeast Asians picked up Chinese foodways.  It is to this that we owe such inventions as ketchup—a Hokkien word (ke tsiap, fermented fish sauce) borrowed into Bahasa Indonesia and eventually used to mean “soy sauce” (kecap in modern Bahasa), and then borrowed into English as “ketchup,” which eventually came to mean a tomato sauce.  Many other Hokkien words entered Indonesian: tauge for bean sprouts, tauhu for bean curd (“tofu”), and so on.  In the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, I saw a Dutch painting done around 1660 of a market stall in Java.  The stall-holder is Chinese, and he is selling not only Southeast Asian fruits such as coconuts, bananas, rambutans, langsats, durians, rose apples, and mangos, but also New World foods:  Pineapples and cashews. 

            The 20^th century is somewhat outside our purview here; observations on Chinese food seem contemporary enough to be logged in the following section.  However, see Anderson (1990), Bohr (1972), Li (2007) and Mallory (1926) for the history of famine and nutrition studies in the early 20^th century.  Population growth and environmental deterioration reached a collision point.  Famines were appalling.  People were reduced to eating husks, roots, bark, and grass, until all the trees died because people had eaten not only the leaves but also the bark.  A superbly detailed account of Chinese foodways in the 20^th century is provided by Simoons (1991). 

By the early 20^th century, however, China had a great deal of international help (Anderson 1990; Li 2007), which at least prevented cannibalism in most cases, though sale of children continued.  In the famines of the 1920s, death tolls were comparable to those of 1876-79 (Li 2007:304).  Even when it came, relief was slight; rations of 8 oz. of grain a day—i.e. 800 calories, 1/3 the needs of an adult—were given in 1921 (Li 2007:300).

By the 1930s, China, especially the north, was in the grip of chronic poverty, and people were reduced to near-starvation even in good times.  William Hinton (1966) reported people in the 1940s virtually hibernating in winter because there were not enough calories to allow any activity.  People simply lay down under wraps for days on end.  Maize had replaced more nourishing grains over much of China, with a resulting increase in malnutrition.  Life expectancy may have dropped to 25 in north China, with infant mortality running to 30 or 40% (Li 2007:315).  Modernization, trade, factory work, and other improvements stabilized matters, but the diet of the ordinary people remained one of coarse grain (as usual, Li reviews all data).  Banquets increased for the well-off, but very few were in that category.   The world depression of the 1930s did not help matters, and the Japanese invasion was utterly devastating.

The Communists after 1949 changed all this.  Resources were freed up by expropriating large estates and other methods.  Agricultural development came fast.  Reforestation was widespread; it usually failed but sometimes succeeded, saving large tracts of land.

Unfortunately, major policy errors—the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, “taking grain as the key link,” and so on—led to massive famines.  The Great Leap Forward in 1958-1961 caused what was almost certainly the greatest famine in all Chinese history.  Li (2007:359) cites an estimate of 23 million dead, but her figures for the areas she knows are relatively higher, and so are mine (very incomplete but revealing) from interviews with refugees in Hong Kong.  I would estimate at least twice that figure, and so do many others.  After long and detailed review of the evidence, Li breaks her usual nonjudgmental, objective stance to say that “the Mao famine…stands alone…an ‘error’ of an individual human being.  Some Qing emperors were exemplary leaders,…others were lacking in ability….  But none could be said to have actually caused a famine to occur….  The spirit of the country was high…. The government was fullyi functional….  For the Mao famine, there is no record, no acknowledgment, no acceptance of …responsibility” (Li 2007:364).  The Qing officials did their best and made reports on any failures.  Not only Mao, but even the post-Mao governments of China, have never done that.  Secrecy was and is maintained.  The story remains untold, and the dead not only unmourned but uncounted.

Policy was substantially changed after Mao Zidong’s passing, leading to dramatic production increases, but the increases came at a rapidly increasing environmental cost.  Massive pollution by extreme overuse of fertilizers and insecticides has accompanied massive loss of farmland to urbanization, erosion, desertification, and pollution.  By the 2000s, China was importing more and more food.  In the process, it is exporting its environmental irresponsibility.  Deals with Brazil have led to replacing the Amazon rainforest and the unique drier forests by soybeans for the Chinese market.  Australia’s eucalypts have been replaced by wheat for China, which has led to massive salinization and loss of millions of acres of land. 

This shift to importing is partly due to economic improvement; the Chinese can eat more meat and other good things.  Unfortunately, it is due in large part to loss of farming at home.  At present, China’s food future is far from assured.

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Su Heng-an.  2004.  Culinary Arts in Late Ming China:  Refinement, Secularization and Nourishment:  A Study on Gao Lian’s Discourse on Food and Drink.  Taipei:  SMC Publishing.

Tong, May M. 1986.  Imperial Dishes of China.  Hong Kong:  Tai Dao, and China Travel and Tourism.

Vermeer, Eduard B.  1998.  “Population and Ecology along the frontier in Qing China.”  In Sediments of Time:  Environment and Society in Chinese History, Mark Elvin and Liu Ts’ui-Jung (eds.).  Pp. 235-279.

Von Glahn, Richard.  2003.  “Imagining Pre-modern China.”  In he Song-Yuan_Ming Transition in Chinese History, Paul Jakov Smith and Richard von Glahn, eds.  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Asia Center.  Pp. 35-70.

Waley, Arthur.  1956.  Yuan Mei.  London:  George Allen & Unwin.

Waley-Cohen, Joanna.  2007.  “The Quest for Perfect Balance.”  In Freedman, Paul (ed.),    Food:  The History of Taste.  Berkeley:  University of California Press.  Pp. 99-134.

Will, Pierre-Étienne, and R. Bin Wong.  1991.  Nourish the People:  The State Civilian Granary System in China, 1650-1850.  Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan, Center for Chinese Studies.

Wong, R. Bin.  1997.  China Transformed:  Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience.  Ithaca:  Cornell University Press.

Woodside, Alexander.  2002.  “The Ch’ien-lung Reign.”  In The Cambridge History of China, vol. 9, part 1, The Ch’ing Dynasty to 1800.”  Willard Peterson (ed.).  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.  Pp. 230-309.

Wu, Yenna.  1996.  “Morality and Cannibalism in Ming-Qing Fiction.  Tamkang Review 27:23-46.

—  1997.  From History to Allegory:  Surviving Famine in the Xingshi Yinyuan Zhuan.”  Chinese Culture.

Yuan Mei.  1997.  I Don’t Bow to Buddhas:  Selected Poems of Yuan Mei.  Tr. J. P. Seaton.  Port Townsend, WA:  Copper Canyon Press.

Zhang, Pingszhong; Hai Cheng; R. Lawrence Edwards; Fahu Chen; Yongjin Wang; Xulin Yang; Jian Liu; Ming Tan; Xianfeng Wang; Jinghua Liu; Chunlei An; Zhibo Dai; Jing Zhou; Dezhong Zhang; Jihong Jia; Liya Jin; Kathleen R. Johnson.  2008.  “A Test of Climate, Sun, and Culture Relationships from an 1810-Year Chinese Cave Record.”  Science 322:940-942.

8.  The Climax of Chinese Agriculture, and Agricultural and Environmental History

            China’s environmental history has received some study, but not nearly enough.  Several important works have stressed the extremely successful, sustainable, intensive nature of Chinese agriculture, which fed hundreds of millions of people over the millennia (see below, esp. Huang 1990; Ruddle and Zhong 1988; Wen and Pimentel 1986a and 1986b; Wong 2000).  As my friend Hugh Baker said, the success of nutrient recycling in China “must make nitrogen atoms unfortunate enough to be in other parts of the world feel unloved” (Baker 1989:661-662, in a review of The Food of China).

In contrast, major books by Mark Elvin (The Retreat of the Elephants, 2004) and Robert Marks (Tigers, Rice, Silk and Silt, 1998) have stressed the extent of deforestation and environmental degradation, particularly in the south.  They also document a great deal of concern with the environment—both love and appreciation of it and serious fears about the extent of deforestation, erosion, flooding, and other major problems.  However, the main conclusion is that the Chinese took enormous care of their farms but little care of their forests and other natural resources.  Elvin and Marks are too harsh; among other things, they barely mention the millions of acres saved as temple groves and sacred forests, or the millions more saved by the Qing Dynasty as reserved land in Manchuria.  They do not mention the sustainable logging of China fir (Cunninghamia lanceolata) practiced for centuries in south China in connection with agriculture (Chandler 1994).  The Chinese also carefully avoided building on the most productive farmland, when there was any alternative.  What is surprising is not that the tigers and elephants retreated, but that any were left after a million years of human presence.

A major work on recent uses of soybeans in China and worldwide has appeared (Du Bois et al 2008). 

An interesting side issue, revealing the extreme wealth and sophistication of the agricultural sector in those days, is garden art (see e.g. Clunas 1996, and, for a contemporary view, the great novel The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin 1973-1986).  China’s gardens reached heights of lavishness and beauty.  Chinese had a major love of environment, shown not only in travels and nature writing (Elvin [see above] and Strassberg 1994 give examples) but in art—notably including the miniature gardens that captured the beauty and spiritual power of the wild for city-bound people (Stein 1990).  Of course, loving natural beauty does not often stop exploitation.  However, behind the aesthetic appreciation lay a genuinely religious bond with the landscape, and this did serve to save forests, wetlands, brush, and mountain environments.

            Many of China’s minorities were much better in their treatment of the environment, especially forests.  The Qing perpetuated Manchu traditions in saving their own original habitat, the forests of Manchuria.  Minorities often cultivate by slash-and-burn agriculture, which is often condemned but which leads to healthy forest regeneration if managed right.  Some plant trees to reclaim swiddens for managed forests; they may use nitrogen-fixing trees like alders, or commercial trees like cinnamon, a practice attested as early as 1639 (Menzies 1988) and surely much older.  Toni Huber’s book The Cult of the Pure Sacred Mountain (1999) documents religious forest-saving in Tibet; Jan Salick is currently researching ethnobotany and vegetation management in ethnically Tibetan parts of Yunnan.  My student Ayoe Wang is carrying out similar research in Tibeto-Burman-speaking and Thai-speaking areas of Yunnan.  In all of these, local minorities treat the environment far better than the Chinese do.

            One thing to stress is that China, in spite of chronic famines, epidemics, floods, earthquakes, deforestation, erosion, and other human-caused disasters, never collapsed ecologically the way that (say) Easter Island or the ancient cultures of southwestern North America did (Diamond 2005).  Instead, China displayed a cyclic pattern of collapse.  Dynastic failures took place “when the government lost the Mandate of Heaven,” as the Chinese said:  i.e, whenever the government became weak, overly far from the grassroots, overly corrupt, and overly torn by palace factions.  There were always power-hungry rebels waiting in the wings.  They failed, unless the people were desperate and the government had lost their loyalty by repeated failure to do much for them.  (As long as the government maintained some “legitimacy” and some enforcement capacity, even if it was singularly inept, people stayed loyal—hence the very long reigns of several dynasties.)   Of course, environmental stresses were part of the reason why the people became desperate.  However, high taxes, uncontrolled bandits, buildup of population, widening gaps between rich and poor, and general corruption all seem to have bulked larger in their minds.  (See any history of China, esp. the comprehensive analytical history of late imperial China by Frederick Mote, 1999.  See also Anderson and Chase-Dunn 2005 on cyclic collapses in general.)  Basically, the Chinese managed their environment better than they managed their government, so it was the latter that gave way first.  The land stayed productive, and loss of land to erosion was balanced by opening up new lands in the south or reclaiming new lands from deltas that were building seaward because of the erosion upstream.  

            However, there were long-term consequences of environmental degradation, especially the steady rise of the south and relative decline of the north.  In Shang and Zhou times, the north was a rich, lush, mostly forested landscape, well-watered, with game, wild foods, and incredibly fertile soil.  Increasingly serious overuse devastated all this by the Song Dynasty.  Deforestation was especially serious, with Song almost finishing off the forests of the north.  A romantic reason was that mass printing of books came in at that time, and poetry and other literature (as well as more mundane publications) took up trees for paper and for ink.  (Chinese ink is made by burning resinous woods).  More serious was the iron industry and other heavy industry, as well as clearing of land for farming.  

            Meanwhile, the south, formerly riddled with malaria and other diseases, and difficult to farm because of dense forests and swamps, was being tamed.  With better conditions for plant growth, it soon took over the lead in both forestry and agriculture.  This changed the dynamics of empire, particularly between 300 and 1400.  The Ming Dynasty sensibly moved their capital to the south (Nanjing—which means “Southern Capital”) but foolishly moved it back to Beijing (“Northern Capital”), where it remains.

            The same gradual transfer of power took place between the Near East and Europe, partly for the same reason:  as the Near East was progressively trashed environmentally, Europe was progressively opened up.  A “tilt” point came in the 1200s and 1300s, when the core Near East was substantially finished off ecologically at the same time that Europe was substantially tamed and converted into its present almost-entirely-cultivated landscape.  Of course there were many other reasons for the rise of Europe.

References for 8 and 9 are combined, below.

9.  Modern Problems and Controversies

            Contemporary China is eating well for the first time.  Modernization of agriculture, through use of new varieties, agricultural chemicals, rationalized practices, and other benefits, has been rapid in the last 40 years.  China’s industrial growth allows the country to import what it does not produce. 

            However, it is clear that the Communists have been harsher on the environment than the dynastic Chinese.  The Communists substituted a mentality of “struggling against nature” for the older tradition of going with nature.  This increased production in the short run, but was marked by appalling famines, including the disaster of the “Great Leap Forward,” in which at least 30 million people starved to death, with some estimates running to 40 or 50 million (Smil 2004).  Further famines during the Great Cultural Revolution continued to erode Communist successes.

Even more serious for the future is the fact that China has damaged the environment seriously and irreversibly.  Lester Brown (1995), Richard Edmonds (1998), Vaclav Smil (1984, 2004), and Judith Shapiro (2001) have been particularly sharp and insightful recorders.  Brown, for instance, points out that China’s aggressive campaign to modernize transportation is sacrificing vast areas of farmland to roads, parking lots, airports, and the like.  I found his claims and figures hard to believe till I visited China in 1999; in a short visit, I personally observed tens of thousands of acres of prime rice land being converted to these uses.  Dai Qing (1998), Deirdre Chetham (2002), Richard Stone (2008), and others have documented the disasters caused by big dams, which, in China as elsewhere, are often planned with inadequate attention to cost/benefit ratios.  Landslides, siltation, damage to downstream fisheries, loss of villages to rising waters, and many other problems have occurred.  Protesters have been ruthlessly suppressed, though dam-protest movements are building in spite of this (Forney 2005).  Coggins (2003) has recorded the problems and trials of conservation in one mountain village. 

            Deforestation increased dramatically in the 20^th century, especially after 1950, and reforestation campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s failed, for various reasons.   Incalculable damage has been done, though forests are left and reforestation is better now (see Richardson 1990 for more on forests).  One result has been massive soil erosion, filling reservoirs and swamping fields with mud.  In 1998, disastrous floods swept central and south China, and the Chinese government finally put an end to forest clearing, whether for logging or agriculture.  This has not proved totally enforceable, but has stopped the worst of deforestation.  In this and many other ways, China has made great strides in environmental management, as acknowledged by e.g. Vaclav Smil, who did the best job of documenting China’s environmental destruction in the 1980s (Smil 1984) but has recently applauded the partial turnaround (Smil 2000, 2004).  Plant conservation has recently been greatly improved (Huang et al. 2002). 

Smil (2004) thus sharply criticizes Brown’s negativity.  On the other hand, Smil agrees with the facts (e.g., China lost at least 15 per cent of its farmland between 1957 and 1990; Smil 2004:124).  Smil differs from Brown only in the projections.  Brown adopts a worst-case scenario in which China keeps going downhill.  Smil, on the basis of hindsight, sees much more hope.  Following the massive floods in 1998 (see below), China’s leadership recognized that something had to be done.  Thus, not only Smil, but other observers of the Chinese environmental scene (Day 2005; Economy 2005), see considerable hope for the future—if the leadership keeps momentum.

However, my observations and my students’ (thanks especially to Ayoe Wang here) make it clear that Smil is too optimistic.  Brown was closer to the truth.  Things are not going well.  Moreover, China is exporting its mismanagement.   Rabinowitz (1998) documents the virtually complete extermination of wildlife in Laos by hunting for the Chinese market.  Most of them go for medicine, for reasons that will appear.  Smil (2004) also points out the devastation of wildlife, noting that a huge percentage of China’s animals are endangered, yet are still sold in restaurants—26% of animals sold in restaurants are endangered (Smil 2004:108).  Ten tons of snake meat are sold daily in Shenzhen, a thousand tons annually in Shanghai (Smil 2004:109).  Swiftlets’ nests, a delicacy, are disappearing fast.  Sea cucumbers are being wiped out even in Canadian and Alaskan waters, to feed the Chinese demand. 

Wildlife conservation is increasingly troubled by poaching, inadequacy of reserves, inadequate enforcement of laws in reserves, excessive tourist development in some of them, and other typical problems of crowded lands with shaky governmental legitimacy (Harris 2008).

The BBC News website (in a posting on 23 April 2007) related that China’s farmland is so seriously polluted that more than 10% is out of production or nearly so.  Pollution took out of production some 307,000 ha of arable land in the first 10 months of 2006 alone.  Excessive fertilizing, polluted water, heavy metals, and solid wastes did most of the damage.  Heavy metals are especially bad, since they persist essentially forever; they caused losses of $2.6 billion in 2006.  China’s farmland is down to 121.8 million ha, an enormous decline from the peak in the 1960s.  As recently as the early 1990s, China had 140-145 million acres (Smil 2004:128), and that was after enormous prior declines; the greatest extent of China’s agriculture came in the 1960s, when some 160 million acres may have been cultivated.  (“May have been” because China’s official figures in earlier decades were often too low [see Smil 2004:125-127], and satellite imagery, now used to correct them, is not adequately available for the 1960s.)

Finally, some 83 million Chinese will die of lung problems in the next 25 years (from 2008), according to projections by the Harvard School of Public Health (“Chinese Lung Disease ‘To Kill 83m’”; BBC News Online, Oct. 4, 2008).  This is largely due to smoking and coal-burning; smoking is the government’s fault, to a great extent, because the Chinese government owns the tobacco company (the blessings of Communism) and thus has done everything possible to promote smoking, including circulating dishonest claims about the health effects of smoking and deliberately suppressing the truth on the matter.

The Communist government’s motto through these years has been “first clean, then green.”  Obviously this does not work.  Even if it could work, those 83 million would not be brought back to life.  What actually has happened is that China has developed an extreme case of “lock-in.”  It is trapped in a dirty economy that is now beyond major change unless there are enormous governmental changes at all levels.  Even if national policy were to shift, local corruption would make major change impossible.

China is beginning to face the consequences of its folly, but its government has locked in much of the pollution by heavy subsidizing of power plants and polluting industries, as well as by pro-car policies.  Above all, a combination of corruption and extreme repression of public opinion has rendered the polluting interests not only above the law but above all criticism.  The usual dynamic has appeared:  an industry heavily subsidized becomes wealthy and politically connected, and thus is too powerful to be controlled effectively.  Pollution is far worse than the government’s statistics admit (on these issues see Cyranoski 2007). 

Even a government scientist—Bojie Fu, writing in Science (2008)—admits:  “Over the past 20 years, the total cost from environmental pollution and ecological deterioration is estimated to have been 7 to 20% of the annual gross domestic product….”  This means that China’s vaunted 10% growth per year is indeed neutralized, as Brown feared.  Moreover, “40% of urban wastewater was discharged into neighborhood water bodies without treatment.  In 2007, water quality at half of the 197 monitored rivers of China was rated as heavily polluted…” as were 60% of lakes.  Air quality was equally bad, and “excess erosion from wind and water has deteriorated about 37.1% of China’s total land mass.”  Recall that this is the government’s official statistics; the truth is certainly worse, but we shall probably never know how much worse.  The World Health Organization estimates that some 700,000 people die from air pollution every year. 

The desertification is being dealt with in some areas by mass poisoning of rodents and other small animals, a measure so ecologically insane that it is certain to backfire (Hao Xin 2008).

Even more serious is the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and dryforest (cerradao) for soybeans and other crops, largely for the Chinese market.  There are many similar accounts, both published and personally given to me.  Mainland southern Asia is losing all its animals and many of its plants (and, for that matter, many of its people—especially young women) to the vast Chinese market.

Many special and local studies have appeared, all agreeing that China under Communism has perhaps the worst environmental record (as well as the worst human rights record) of any country in all history.  Mongolia suffered dreadfully, as Mongol land-sparing patterns of herding were replaced by environmentally disastrous farming and overgrazing (Sneath 1998, on Russia vs. Mongolia; Normile 2007 and Williams 1996, 2000 on China’s ruin of Inner Mongolia).  This was not the only area where plowing fragile desert grasslands led to total desertification.  Meanwhile, Tibet suffered as Chinese hunters decimated wildlife long protected by Buddhism. 

Correlation of human rights abuse and environmental mismanagement is typical, not only in China but worldwide.  One reason is that indigenous peoples are usually good managers, while invaders and new settlers are not usually so aware of the land.  They usually do not know enough to manage it so well.  Moreover, they may destroy its resources simply to destroy or weaken its inhabitants, to conquer and subdue them.  Many Tibetans and Mongols have charged that Han Chinese are stripping resources not only to get the wealth but also to oppress the indigenous people.  The Han Chinese deny this.  Proof—one way or the other—remains elusive.  But the disasters are real, and they match China’s destruction of its own cultural traditions (Leys 1985) all too closely.  All this has caused a problem for modern environmental researchers trying to understand traditional China.  They often back-project the disastrous mismanagement of the 20^th century on earlier periods.  This is an inappropriate way to proceed. 

            China enters the 21^st century almost completely deforested, with very little reforestation.  China’s grasslands have been ruined and desertified except in the most remote areas.  Wetland and aquatic habitats have been lost or polluted; the Yellow River no longer reaches the sea, and tens of millions of people along its former lower course suffer desperate shortages of water.  Croplands have been polluted by industrial wastes and overuse of agrochemicals.  Deforestation, badly-planned or overdone row-crop farming, and a shift from tree and bush crops to field crops have led to loss of much of the country’s topsoil, laboriously built up by thousands of years of soil-enriching agricultural practices. 

Reservoirs and urban sprawl have covered much of what little good land remains.  Biodiversity has been devastated by overhunting, overfishing, medicine collecting, and, above all, habitat destruction  Overfishing has decimated or completely eliminated most of the wild fish resource.  China is now the second largest producer of greenhouse gases (after the United States), thus contributing mightily to global warming, which is drying up west China and producing more typhoons in the south.  China’s air pollution, the worst in the world, is causing enormous damage to crops and forests not only in China itself but in Korea, Japan, Russia, and elsewhere; meanwhile, China’s deforestation is giving it an appetite for trees and other imports that destroy forests, grasslands, and fisheries worldwide (Aldhous 2005; Beech 2005; Lu and Diamond 2005).

Unless something truly revolutionary is done, China will face in 20 years a food, pollution, and environment crisis unprecedented in the history of humanity.  This will have global effects (Brown 1995; Liu and Diamond 2005, 2008).  China is already buying enough food to impact world markets.  Brown (1995) was right:  China was destroying its agricultural potential and would soon be forced to raid the rest of the world for imports.  This has not yet had the effect of raising world food prices (as Brown feared), but it has sealed the doom of Brazil’s forests, which are now a hopeless cause.  Australia, Thailand, and other nations are also suffering because of agricultural overdrive due to the China market. 

Only about eight nations, worldwide, are major net exporters of food.  (The United States, Canada, and Australia are the majors; Argentina, Brazil, Turkey, Thailand, and New Zealand are minor players.  Some other countries are net exporters in good years.)  Most other countries must bid against each other for food from these.  As China grows more affluent and less able to feed itself, the world’s poor—not just the Chinese poor—will be forced to the wall.  All this could have been spared by simply learning from China’s earlier practice.  Meanwhile, China is exporting pollution that devastate neighboring countries and contribute enormously to global warming.

China is consuming more animal protein, and using many of the imported soybeans to feed the animals (Du Bois et al 2008).  Fortunately, animal protein consumption is not as great as often reported, and is leveling off (Smil 2004:106).  Smil doubts that China will ever be a meat-eating nation like Australia and the United States.  Health concerns as well as economic limits supervene.  Smil, and all other recent observers, are struck by the explosive increase in obesity, diabetes, atherosclerosis, and other food-related health problems in China.  China will have to limit its consumption of red meat, fats and oils, and sugars—either voluntarily or through morbidity and death.  The picture is not pretty, but at least the Communist leadership does not have “face” invested in this (as they do in their suicidal big-dam and automobile-development projects), and one can be cautiously optimistic about the chances for limiting “junk food” consumption.

Finally, the new China is too successful at providing bulk calories, too unsuccessful at providing vitamins and minerals.  One-fourth of Chinese are obese (BBC News, July 8, 2008), and the proportion is rapidly rising.  This is due to more bulk calories and less exercise, but I suspect a further factor, one that certainly operates in the west:  unsatisfied hunger due to insufficient nutrients.  “Man does not live by bread alone,” and sugar, oil and white flour do not satisfy, even in excessive amounts.  Not surprisingly, rates of diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease are rising rapidly.  (Diabetes, often blamed on sugar, is actually exacerbated more by polished rice than by sucrose, and once again an unbalanced diet short of vitamins and minerals is a factor also.)

In short, through “modernization,” China has made great strides in food production.  However, this has often involved adopting poor ideas from the rest of the world, from excessive use of chemicals to feeding meat animals on grain that humans could eat.  China may have done more damage to its environment in the last 100 years than in the preceding 1,000,000.  An estimated 300,000 people die of air pollution every year, and probably a comparable amount from water pollution (Liu and Diamond 2005).  Flooding, biodiversity loss, water shortages, and paving of cropland have yet to show their full effects; they will be far more deadly in future.  Food production is compromised in many areas. 

            Even the long-suffering and ever-optimistic Smil admits that China’s reported 10% annual economic growth is offset by environmental costs, for a net gain perhaps as low as zero.

Aldhous, Peter.  2005.  “China’s Burning Ambition.”  Nature 435:1152-1154.

Anderson, E. N.  1988.  The Food of China.  New Haven:  Yale University Press.

Anderson, E. N., and Christopher Chase-Dunn.  2005.  “The Rise and Fall of Great Powers.”  In  The Historical Evolution of World-Systems, ed. by Christopher Chase-Dunn and E. N. Anderson.  New York:  Palgrave MacMillan.

Baker, Hugh.  1989.  Review of The Food of China by E. N. Anderson.  China Quarterly 119:661-662.

BBC News.  2008.  “One in Four Chinese ‘Overweight.’”  BBC News Online, July 8, 2008.

Beech, Hannah.  2005.  “They Export Pollution Too.”  Time, June 27, p. 48.

Brown, Lester.  1995.  Who Will Feed China?  Wake-up Call for a Small Planet.  New York:  W. W. Norton & Co.

Chetham, Deirdre.  2002.  Before the Deluge:  The Vanishing World of the Yangtze’s Three Gorges.  New York:  Palgrave McMillan.

Chandler, Paul.  1994.  “Shamu Jianzhong:  A Traditionally Derived Understanding of Agroforest Sustainability in China.”  Journal of Sustainable Forestry 1:1-24.

Clunas, Craig.  1996.  Fruitful Sites:  Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China.  Durham, NC:  Duke University Press.

Coggins, Chris.  2003.  The Tiger and the Pangolin:  Nature, Culture, and Conservation in China.  Honolulu:  University of Hawaii Press.

Cyranoski, David.  2007.  “China Struggles to Square growth and Emissions.”  Nature 446:954-955.

Day, Kristen (ed.).  2005.  China’s Environment and the Challenge of Sustainable Development.  Armonk, NY:  M. E. Sharpe.

Diamond, Jared.  2005.  Collapse:  How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.  New York:  Viking.

Du Bois, Christine M.; Chee-Beng Tan; Sidney Mintz (eds.).  2008.  The World of Soy.  Urbana:  University of Illinois Press. 

Economy, Elizabeth C.  2005.  The River Runs Black:  The Environmental Challenge to China’s Future.  Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press.

Edmonds, Richard Louis (ed.).  1998.  Managing the Chinese Environment.  Oxford:  Oxford University Press.

Elvin, Mark.  2004.  The Retreat of the Elephants.  New Haven:  Yale University Press.

Forney, Matthew.  2005.  “Power to the People.”  Time, June 27, pp. 46-48.

Fu, Bojie.  2008.  “Blue Skies for China.”  Science 321:611.

Hao Xin.  2008.  “A Green Fervor Sweeps the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau.”  Science 321:633-635.

Harris, R. B.  2008.  Wildlife Conservation in China:  Preserving the Habitat of China’s “Wild West.”  Armonk, NY:  M. E. Sharpe.

Huang, H.; X. Han; L. Kang; P. Raven; P. W. Jackson; Y. Chen.  2002.  “Conserving Native Plants in China.”  Science 297:935.

Huang, Philip.  1990.  The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350-1988.  Stanford:  Stanford University Press.

Huber, Toni.  1999.  The Cult of Pure Crystal Mountain.  New York:  Oxford University Press.

Leys, Simon.  1985.  The Burning Forest:  Essays on Chinese Culture and Politics.  New York:  New Republic Books.

Liu, Jianguo, and Jared Diamond.  2005.  “China’s Environment in a Globalizing World.”  Nature 435:1179-1186.

Liu, Jianguo, and Jared Diamond.  2008.  “Revolutionizing China’s Environmental Protection.”  Science 319:37-38.

Marks, Robert.  1998.  Tigers, Rice, Silk and Silt.  New York:  Cambridge University Press.

Menzies, Nicholas.  1988.  “Taungya:  A Sustainable System of Forestry in South China.”  Human Ecology 16:4:361-374.

Mote, Frederick.  1999.  Imperial China 900-1800.  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard.

Normile, Dennis.  2007.  “Getting at the Roots of Killer Dust Storms.”  Science 317:314-316.

Qing, Dai.  1998.  The River Dragon Has Come:  The Three Gorges Dam and the Fate of China’s Yangtze River and Its Peoples.  Boulder, CO:  M. E. Sharpe.

Rabinowitz, Alan.  1998.  “Killed for a Cure.”  Natural History, no. 4, pp. 22-24.

Richardson, S. D.  1990.  Forests and Forestry in China.  Washington, DC:  Island Press.

Ruddle, Kenneth, and Gongfu Zhong.  1988.  Integrated Agriculture-aquaculture in South China:  The Dike-pond System of the Zhujiang Delta.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.

Shapiro, Judith.  2001.  Mao’s War against Nature:  Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.

Smil, Vaclav.  1984.  The Bad Earth.  Boulder:  M. E. Sharpe.

— 2000.  Feeding the World.  Cambridge, MA:  MIT.

—  2004.  China’s Past, China’s Future:  Energy, Food, Environment.  New York:  RoutledgeCurzon.

Sneath, David.  1998.  “State Policy and Pasture Degradation in Inner Asia.”  Science 281:1147.

Stein, Rolf.  1990.  The World in Miniature.  Tr. Phyllis Schafer.  Stanford:  Stanford University Press.

Stone, Richard.  2008.  “Three Gorges Dam:  Into the Unknown.”  Science 321:628-632.

Strassberg, Richard.  1994.  Inscribed Landscapes:  Travel Writing from Imperial China.  Berkeley:  University of California Press.

Wen Dazhong and David Pimentel.  1986a.  “Seventeenth Century Organic Agriculture in China, Part I:  Cropping Systems in Jiaxing Region.”  Human Ecology 14:1-14.

— 1986b.  “Seventeenth Century Organic Agriculture in China, Part II:  Energy Flows through an Agrosystem in Jiaxing Region.  Human Ecology 14:15-28.

Williams, Dee Mack.  1996.  “The Barbed Walls of China:  A Contemporary Grassland Drama.”  Journal of Asian Studies 55:665-691.

— 1996.  “Grassland Enclosure:  Catalyst of Land Degradation in Inner Mongolia.”  HO 55:307-313.

—  2000.  “Representations of Nature on the Mongolian Steppe:  An Investigation of Scientific Knowledge Construction.”  American Anthropologist 102:503-519.

Wong, R. Bin.  2000.  China Transformed.  Ithaca:  Cornell University Press.

10.  The Contemporary Scene:  Chinese Food in the late 20^th century and the early 21^st.

            First, Chinese food has become much better described for western readers since my 1988 work.  Jacqueline Newman’s general introduction, Food Culture in China (2004), Frederick Simoons’ more comprehensive Food in China (1991), and Shiu-ying Hu’s superb and encyclopedic Food Plants of China (2005) stand out as indispensable basic references (and see also Cheung and Tan 2007).

Most research on Chinese food in recent years has focused on the process of globalization.  In most arenas, globalization has meant the spread of American pop culture (to be more honest, the very worst of American culture, elite and pop both) at the expense of everything else.  In foodways, however, the Chinese have more than held their own.  Chinese food has been going global for centuries, since it spread along the Silk Road and along land and sea routes to Southeast Asia. 

            The long process of blending Chinese and Southeast Asian food thus commands attention, and has received it in several excellent studies.  Notable is one on Chinese food in Singapore (Huat and Rajah 2001).  Chinese settled in southern Malaya by the 1500s, and a fusion cuisine, “Nonya” food, arose as they married into local communities.   It influenced both parents:  returning migrants brought Sinicized versions of Malay foods back to China, and Malay food has adopted countless Chinese ingredients and techniques.  It differs from both parents in a strong emphasis on turmeric and lesser galangal; it uses more hot spices than Chinese food, but less than Malay.  A very similar evolution has taken place in Indonesia, where the peranakan (Indonesian-Chinese) communities developed fusion cuisines and influenced Indonesian food profoundly.  (Ultimately, they influenced the whole world, through such inventions as ketchup.)  “Nonya” cuisine (“nonya” is a local word for a Chinese lady) has been self-consciously revived and modernized in Singapore (and to a lesser extent in Malaysia).  Thus, it has progressively changed.

            The initial diaspora of Chinese food was almost entirely from the south coastal provinces, Fujian and Guangdong.  Southeast Asian Chinese food is primarily from Fujian, with strong Guangdong influence.  In the Western Hemisphere, Chinese food meant Cantonese food—from central Guangdong—until recently.  Only in the last 40 years have Sichuanese, Shanghainese, north Chinese, and other regional cuisines spread much beyond China’s borders.  Today, however, an eclectic cuisine is common.  “Chinese” restaurants in North America and Europe, for instance, typically serve the more famous dishes of several regions.  This regional fusion was looked upon with some disquiet by traditional gourmets, but it is now quite standard in Hong Kong and Taiwan as well as in remote lands.

            Americans first learned of Chinese food in China itself, and developed a stereotype of it (based on Canton experience) as a lot of unsavory dishes of cut-up cats, dogs, and such (Coe 2009; see pp. 32 ff for some truly awful quotes).  Chinese emigrants came to America in the Gold Rush and in much larger numbers in the late 19th century, bringing rural Cantonese food, especially from the Taishan (Toisan) district of Guangdong).  This food was not necessarily China’s finest, and only slowly won acceptance.  Coming of more variety and quality led to an explosive growth of acceptance, making Chinese food universal and beloved (Coe 2009; Newman and Halporn 2004). 

            More recently, Chinese restaurants from Korea and Japan to America and Europe have developed local versions of Chinese food.  (On this, there are several excellent recent studies, notably Newman and Halporn 2004; Roberts 2002; Wu and Cheung 2002; Wu and Tan 2001.  For Korea, a superb article by Kim Bok-rae, 2009, chronicles in detail the changes involved.  Here the main influence was from Shandong, not south China. For France, see Sabban 2009.)   They accommodate to local tastes by changing spices, substituting local ingredients, etc. 

They also, alas, often use much cheaper and worse ingredients than they would dare to use at home.  American Chinese food has gone through several stages in my lifetime.  When I was young, most American Chinese had very impoverished backgrounds, and thus already cooked (by necessity) rather cheap, simple food.  Accommodation to American ways led to making this cuisine even cheaper and simpler, resulting in the food of the “chop suey houses” or “chop suey joints” of old.  These were small local restaurants that served very humble food—“chop suey” is from Cantonese tsap sui, “miscellaneous leftovers.”  New waves of ever-more-affluent, ever-more-educated immigrants brought higher standards, and now the best restaurants in Los Angeles, New York, and—especially!—San Francisco are as good as any (except perhaps the very best) in Hong Kong or Taiwan.  Far from all restaurants come up to (or even very near) this standard, but the old-fashioned “chop suey joint” prevails only in remote rural communities; it has become all but extinct in urban America. 

Similar progress is documented for Australia, Japan, England, and elsewhere, with perhaps less eclipse of the low-end (Wu and Cheung 2002; Cheung and Tan 2007).  In western South America, where Chinese restaurants are known as chifa (presumably a corruption of Mandarin chi fan or Cantonese sik faan “eat rice”), food of the old “chop suey joint” style survives and flourishes, providing cheap, filling food in impoverished communities.

            In Hawaii, where the old “chop suey joints”—fondly remembered by working-class Hawaiians—have given way to “all you can eat buffets” that provide modernized but bland fare (Wu 2008).  There are many Native Hawaiian and mainland Anglo-American influences in the cuisine.  Emphasis has been on providing cheap, filling food to a varied but typically nonaffluent clientele.  Even the long-suffering David Wu, veteran of countless meals in the Chinese diaspora, concludes that, in Hawaii, “[i]t is very difficult at this time to identify any Chinese restaurants that provide a fine dining and exquisite culinary experience” (Wu 2008:23).  Fortunately, this is not true of the Pacific Coast mainland.

            Chinese overseas continue to celebrate with traditional foods—long-life noodles for birthdays, cakes and sweets for life-passsage rites and at New Year, buns, dumplings, roast meat (Newman et al. 1988).  In general, as Chinese immigrants acculturate to receiver societies, drinks and snacks change first; traditional festive dishes change last.

One of the oddest creations of the Chinese diaspora was the fortune cookie—an ordinary American sugar cookie wrapped around a slip of paper with an oracular line on it.  This strange food was invented in California, either San Francisco or Los Angeles.  (San Franciscans tend to blame it on Los Angeles and vice versa.)  The fortune cookie found a chronicler in Terry McDermott (2000), who researched it thoroughly for an article (a very humorous one) in the Los Angeles Times.  Many of the fortunes are recycled bits of Western wisdom literature, and many of the fortune-writers are not Chinese.  (A counter-theory has it invented in Japan; Andrew Coe, pers. comm., Feb. 2010.  This is unlikely; the sugar cookie is alien to Japan.)

            I have developed an interest in cultural ways that “swim upstream,” i.e. that not only survive in the face of Americanization but actually invade America itself.  Chinese food and Italian food are the clear winners in this sweepstakes, though Andean and Celtic music, Australian Aboriginal art, French and Australian wines, and various other cultural entities are noteworthy as well.  (Mexican food has not really swum upstream this way; it was here first.  It has merely retained, and slightly expanded, its home turf.) 

For the target audience of this paper, I should note that Italian food has undergone exactly the same evolution as Chinese:  from cheap, rough and ready fare to extremely sophisticated gourmet dining, almost—but not quite—as good as one gets in Italy.  The difference is that cheap, Americanized Italian fare is so well accepted and loved in the US that the low-end Italian restaurants continue to proliferate in their thousands.

In general, things that “swim upstream” have to be really good, and they have to be actively merchandised.  It helps if they are purveyed by prestigious urban communities, but this is obviously not necessary, given the success of Australian Aboriginal art and Andean indigenous music.  Some things fail simply because they come from cultures that do not like high-pressure salesmanship; a comparison I did between Finnish food and Chinese food in America revealed that Finnish restaurants failed not because the food was bad but because traditional Finnish hospitality requires that guests be fed without charge!  Other immigrant communities (the Ethiopian, for instance) kept restaurants going just long enough to put their kids through college, whereupon the kids became engineers and lawyers and such.  A brief burst of Ethiopian restaurants has narrowed to a small number of dedicated survivors.  The Chinese, even when college educated, love to start restaurants.  The distinguished Sinologist and anthropologist Vivienne Lo, for instance, continues to carry on the family tradition (her father was the famous chef and restauranteur Kenneth Lo) by helping her sister Jenny Lo with professional cooking and cookbook writing (Lo and Lo 2003).  Chinese food is taking over the world more surely than American fast food is.  One reason is the dedication of Chinese in all walks of life to good eating.  Another is the popularity of Chinese food with virtually everybody. 

            Meanwhile, the more usual direction of cultural flow is also noteworthy.  American food, inevitably at its worst, has invaded East Asia.  A superb collection of studies edited by James Watson (1997) records the progress of McDonald’s Hamburgers in Asia.  Yan Yunxiang (1997), writing in this book, records how McDonald’s in China became the “in” place for sophisticated, worldly young people to be seen—a far cry from its identification in its homeland with the most humble social realms.  I have seen the same thing in Hong Kong.  It always amazed me to see Hong Kong citizens, arguably the most food-conscious, gourmet-dining beings that have ever existed on this planet, flocking to a restaurant of this nature.  (Incidentally, McDonald’s started just down the street from where I used to live—in the hardscrabble city of San Bernardino, California.  The McDonald brothers first opened a roadhouse a few miles to the west of the town, then settled in San Bernardino and began to branch out.  The real spread of the chain, however, took place after they retired and sold out to Roy Kroc, who internationalized the chain.  See Schlosser 2002.) 

            With globalization, international influences have also influenced Chinese food in its homeland.  First, the worldwide mid-20^th-century fondness for meat, oil and sugar influenced Chinese food, which became far less healthy than it had formerly been.  This process ran from about the middle 1960’s to the 1990’s.  By the 1980s, a reaction was beginning, again tracking trends elsewhere; the emphasis returned to healthier fare, with smaller portions, more vegetables, more delicate cooking, more attention to fresh high-quality ingredients, and above all less fat and sugar.  This may have been “nouvelle” cuisine in France and America, but it was, for China, a return to the status quo ante.  It has certainly led to what almost anyone would describe as a marked improvement, if one compares a good Chinese restaurant today with one 20 years ago.  But the great restaurants of 40 and more years ago remain, in my opinion, unequalled today.  The biggest difference is in the ingredients.  Few if any restauranteurs today will raise their own chickens and feed them entirely on sesame seeds, for instance. 

            On the other hand, nouvelle cuisine is alive and well in China’s newly opulent cities with their nouveaux riches desperate for status consumption.  Cantonese cuisine has benefited, or suffered, depending on one’s taste, and the resulting challenge to Cantonese tradition has been the subject of a stunningly good and thorough review by Jakob Klein (2007).  Klein documents the rise of expensive nouvelle Cantonese restaurants in Hong Kong and Guangzhou; meanwhile the traditional food suffers some eclipse, I assume because of the difficulty of getting good ingredients in these environmentally-sad times.  Klein’s investigation of the sociological and personal experiences that result defies summary and needs serious reading.  Klein has also given wonderful accounts of the revival of traditional Cantonese food in Guangzhou; some old-timers are not satisfied, but at least they have something of the good old days back (Klein 2006, 2007).  Klein tells of Old Uncle Lu, who complains of sloppy cooking but still eats at the venerable teashop in the center of town.

            “Fusion cuisine” has become a fad in California and some other multicultural environs.  Chinese food is often blended with French, Japanese, Italian, and other “great” cuisines.  The results are always striking and sometimes (!) successful….

            It is well to remember that this is no new phenomenon; fusion cuisine at its most fused (so to speak) is documented in the Yinshan Zhengyao and many similar medieval works. 

            All this raises the question of “authenticity.”  Obviously, by now, “authentic” Chinese food is a very slippery concept.  Hamburgers are not authentic Chinese food, but what do you say about the split bao buns stuffed with flattened Chinese meatballs that were popular a few years ago in teashops?  They were thoroughly traditional in taste, but made to look like the prestigious (!) hamburger.  And what of the thousands of species of fish and shellfish now used in Chinese restaurants round the world?  Most were unknown in old China, but they are now cooked in thoroughly Chinese ways, and they taste just fine.  And it always makes me feel a bit weird to eat hot-and-sour soup (suanlatang) that doesn’t have dried daylily buds or coagulated blood in it.  But, in much of the world, you can’t get daylily buds, and people won’t eat blood.  So, hot-and-sour soup adapts.  Some westernization is a total disaster, such as using sherry instead of Chinese “wine” in cooking, or thickening sauces with flour.  Other westernization works fine, such as adopting asparagus and other newly-Asianized western vegetables.  One has to look case by case.  (Lo and Lo 2003 provide one good recent example of a cookbook that talks thoughtfully about such matters—but even they shamefully allow sherry.) 

            So I prefer to talk about what is traditional—what has been around for generations—and what is new.  Then I care about whether the result tastes good.  I let someone else worry about “authenticity.”  (See David Wu’s books, below, in this context.)

Cheung, Sidney, and Tan Chee-Beng.  2007.  Food and Foodways in Asia:  Resource, Tradition and Cooking.  London:  Routledge. 

Coe, Andrew.  2009.  Chop Suey:  A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States.  New York:  Oxford University Press.

Hu Shiu-ying.  2005.  Food Plants of China.  Hong Kong:  Chinese University of Hong Kong. 

Kim Bok-rae.  2009.  “Chinse Cuisine in Korean Dining-out Culture.”  In Regionalism and Globalism in Chinese Culinary Culture, David Holm, ed.  Taipei:  Foundation of Chinese Dietary Culture.  Pp. 285-398. 

Klein, Jakob A.  2006.  “Changing Tastes in Guangzhou:  Restaurant Writings in the 1990s.”  In Consuming China:  Approaches to Cultural Change in Contemporary China.  Kevin Latham, Stuart Thompson, and Jakob Klein (eds.).  London:  Routledge.  Pp. 104-120.

—  2007.  “Redefining Cantonese Cuisine in Post-Mao Guangzhou.”  Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 70:511-539.

Lo, Vivienne, and Jenny Lo.  2003.  Secrets from a Chinese Kitchen.  London:  Pavilion Books.

McDermott, Terry.  2000.  “The Sage of Fortune Cookies.”  Los Angeles Times, Nov. 4, 2000, pp. A1, A24.

Newman, Jacqueline.  2004.  Food Culture in China.  Westport, CT:  Greenwood.

Newman, Jacqueline M.; Roberta Halporn (eds.).  2004.  Chinese Cuisine, American Palate:  An Anthology.  New York:  Center for Thanatology Research and Education.

Newman, Jacqueline M.: Elaine Kris Ludman; Lois Lynn.  1988.  “Chinese Food and Life-Cycle Events:  A Survey in Several Countries.”  Chinese American Forum 4:1:16-18.

Roberts, J. A. G.  2002.  China to Chinatown:  Chinese Food in the West.  London:  Reaktion Books.

Sabban, Françoise.  2009.  “Forms and Evolution of Chinese Cuisine in France.”  In Regionalism and Globalism in Chinese Culinary Culture, David Holm, ed.  Taipei:  Foundation of Chinese Dietary Culture.  Pp. 369-380.

Schlosser, Eric.  2002.  Fast Food Nation.  New York:  Perennial.

Simoons, Frederick J.  1991.  Food in China:  A Cultural and Historical Inquiry.  Boca Raton, FL:  CRC Press.

Watson, James L. (ed.).  1997.  Golden Arches East:  McDonald’s in East Asia.  Stanford:  Stanford University Press.

Wu, David Y. H.  2008.  “All You Can Eat Buffet:  The Evolution of Chinese Cuisine in Hawaii.”  Journal of chinese Dietary Culture 4:1-24.

Wu, David Y. H., and Sidney C. H. Cheung.  2002.  The Globalization of Chinese Food.  London:  Curzon.

Wu, David Y. H., and Tan Chee Beng.  2001.  Changing Chinese Foodways in Asia.  Hong Kong:  Chinese University Press of Hong Kong.

Yan Yunxiang.  1997.  “McDonald’s in Beijing:  The Localization of Americana.”  In Golden Arches East, ed. by James L. Watson.  Stanford:  Stanford University Press.  Pp. 39-76.

11.  Foodstuffs, and Current Foodways around China

            A great deal more about Chinese food has come out since 1988.  Huang (2000), Newman (2004a), and Simoons (1991) review most of it.  Huang’s huge book goes into much more detail on wheat products (including alum-raised ones, such as yutiao and some bao) and on flavoring pastes than I can possibly summarize.  There are also many cookbooks with ethnographic detail going far beyond simple recipes.  (A few examples from a large, good literature are Lo and Lo 2003, see previous section; Yee 1975; Young and Richardson 2004).

            Local foodways are covered in a major collection of papers, edited by David Holm (2009).  Mark Swislocki (2009) has monographed Shanghai food in the new world order.

            Sticky rice, miscalled “glutinous,” is sticky because it has almost no amylose; the other starch, amylopectin, cooks up stickier.  It also brews better, and is thus the usual feedstock for rice “wines” and sakes.  Most rice is more balanced, and thus sticky to varying degrees. 

            Noodles are made in several ways.  Low-gluten grains like corn and buckwheat are made into a rather wet dough and forced through holes in a colander, directly into boiling water.  This is probably how those 4000-year-old noodles were made.  Bean starch and some wheat/egg noodles are made into lumps or flat sheets and hand-cut.  High-gluten wheat noodles are made in many ways, the most dramatic of which are “pulled” or “swung noodles” (la mian).  For these, the dough is stretched and then swung like a jump-rope, then doubled and re-swung, then doubled again, and so on.  This develops the gluten so much that it produces an extremely chewy noodle.  Swinging the dough without having it neck down and break requires extreme skill.  (Not long ago, the one expert at this in Los Angeles was a Mexican chef working in a Korean restaurant.  Globalization is real.)

            Salt in Chinese culture has been the subject of a major monograph by Hans Ulrich Vogel (2009); he reviews every aspect of its production and consumption in late Imperial times, and compares these with the contemporary European world.  A quote from Song Yingxing’s incomparable Tiangong Kaiwu gives Song’s thoughts on the effects of not getting enough salt:  “A man would not be unwell if he abstained for an entire year form either the acrid, sour, sweet or bitter; but deprive him of table salt…for a ten-day week and he will be too weak to tie up a chicken or to overcome a duck and feel utterly enervated” (Vogel 2010:205).  Indeed; and no one has ever said it better.  Vogel notes, sympathetically, that Chinese add deep-drilling—perfected for salt wells—to the list of the greatest inventions China has given the world.  The rest are paper, printing, the compass, and gunpowder (Vogel 2010:185).

A nice insight into the Chinese experimental mind in eating is provided by a Yuan Dynasty folktale about the previous Song Dynasty:  “[In 1120 A.D.]…a creature somewhat like a dragon appeared in front of a teashop in Kaifeng County.  It was about six or seven feet long [around four feet in modern measure] with blue black scales.  It had a head like a donkey, but with fish-cheeks and a horn on top of its skull.  It bellowed like an ox.  As it happened, the shopkeeper was making up the beds that morning when he noticed something the size of a large dog beside him.  When he looked closely, it was this dragon.  He was so surprised he keeled over in fright.  The teashop was situated very close to an arms manufactory, and when the workers in the mill found out about the dragon they killed and ate it” (Hennessey 1981:41).

Boiling and steaming remain the commonest ways of cooking in China, but stir-frying and especially deep-frying and roasting/baking have become much more common in recent decades.  The result is not always good for health; fat consumption has soared.  Complex cooking involving several processes has become common in restaurants.  Vegetables are more and more often parboiled before being stir-fried, instead of cut up, stir-fried, and then finished in added liquid (the traditional method, at least in the households I knew; but the newer one works fine).

            Vegetarianism has received some attention lately.  Chinese Buddhists are supposed to be vegetarian, and some non-Buddhists are too; this has led to the development of a vegetarian cuisine (see above and Anderson 1988).  Buddhist vegetarianism and avoidance of alcohol have received noteworthy attention and excellent review in two articles in the Sterckx volume noted in Section 3 above (Kieschnick 2005; Been 2005).

Ducks may not be raised from the egg with loving care any more (though some probably still are), but the Quan Jude restaurant—Beijing’s classic “Peking duck” place—has flourished and even franchised out.  The owners were sent down to the countryside for being bourgeois, during the Great Cultural Revolution, but they returned (see Ni 2004).

Insects, rarely mentioned at length in Chinese food books, have been treated along with various annelid and other worms by M. Leung (2000).  Cicadas, waterbugs, silkworms, and others are eaten.  Caterpillars and grasshoppers, in particular, saved countless people from starvation in earlier times.  Locusts were so popular they inspired a religious cult (Hsu 1969).  Insects are a major component of southeast Asian fare, occupying e.g. much of the space in the public markets of Cambodia, where deepfried tarantulas are a delicacy (and see below, Lecture 13.)  Pond snails are popular, and Chinese introduced at least one genus, Viviparus, to the United States, via markets; it still is found therein, but has escaped and gone wild as well (Paul Chace, personal communication, 1987; Hanna 1966:37 on V. stelmaphorus).  More exotic is “winter frog”—the fat, with part of the reproductive system, derived from one species of frog in north China (Newman 2000).  One suspects that other frogs are used, because this and other frog dishes are available even in far Los Angeles.  This is contributing to the worldwide disappearance of amphibia.  Turtles are not only popular food, but medicinal, and their fabled longevity makes them a possible candidate for a long-life food (Newman 2004b).  Unfortunately, turtles, like many other animals, are threatened with extinction in China because of their popularity as food and because the Communist government destroyed the traditions of conservation and resource management that had protected China’s environment for centuries.  The zone of death is, in fact, spreading beyond China; Laos and Vietnam are being drained of all edible biota for the China market.

            Among the saddest cases of failure of conservation is the supply of edible birds’ nests.  These are the nests of a swiftlet, Collocalia esculenta, which makes “white” nests of protein secreted from glands in its mouth.  (Related species produce “black bird’s nests,” not purely mouth secretions, therefore inferior and in need of considerable cleaning.)  The nests are highly regarded as food and medicine, strengthening yin and lungs, good for digestion, and generally tonic.  They actually are made primarily of indigestible long-chain proteins, but include growth stimulants and a unique glycoprotein with immunomodulating value (Kong et al 1990; Langham 1980, using an obsolete scientific name).  The supply is, however, endangered by overcollecting; increasing demand and breakdown of local societies have led to wiping out the swiftlet in China and making it rarer and rarer throughout its range in southeast Asia.

I have written a paper linking contemporary northwest Chinese food with the Yuan Dynasty and its dietary manual (Anderson 2009).

In Shanxi, jujubes are made into a true wine—they are mashed and fermented.  Buckwheat is important there, and is made into noodles, as in Korea.

            In Guangxi, barnyard millet (Echinochloa) is an important grain; its name has spread to maize.  The foods of Guangxi have been described by David Holm (1999).

In Yunnan and elsewhere, a bitter tuber of a water plant, sa pi, comes from a Homocharis sedge.  Pteridium and Osmunda fern shoots are also eaten.  Mallows, chayotes from Mexico, and mushrooms abound.  Yogurt is still widespread.  Lima beans have become very common in Yunnan, and known locally elsewhere. 

            Yunnan cooking still includes dairy products, including thin sheets of goat cheese (ru pi “milk skin”), said to be from the Bai people.  Related is deep-fried soft goat cheese cubes.  Yogurt survives among Tibetan and related minorities.  The extension of milk products to southeast Asia, and their subsequent contraction from much of the region, was chronicled by Paul Wheatley (1965).  He pointed out that they spread with Hinduism and Buddhism, which use milk products ritually, and contracted with the spread of Islam.  An excellent water-buffalo yogurt survives among the Toba Batak of Sumatera, as a local but important food (personal observation; Richard Lando, personal communication over many years).

Basella esculenta, a green vegetable oddly known as “bean curd vegetable,” is eaten in southwest China. 

            One of the large smoky-flavored cardamoms, Amomum villosum, is distinguished (and long has been) as sha ren, not tsaoko.

            Many books and articles on tea have appeared, e.g. Chow and Kramer (1990).

The indefatigable Naomichi Ishige, now probably the foremost ethnographer of Chinese food, has produced a fine review article on dining behavior around East Asia (Ishige 2006).

Fujian food involves, besides the famous red ferment on rice, a flavoring mix often lacking ginger—odd in China (see below).  Raw sea food in wine lees or red ferment is not to the outsiders’ taste, especially since the sound and feel of crunching the shell is part of the pleasure.  Pitahaya, a Mexican cactus fruit, has come to Fujian and elsewhere in southeast China, under the name of “fire dragon fruit” (huo long guo)—a creative name for a scaly fruit of shocking pink and electric green.  New world foods often came first to Fujian, and some odd ones occur, such as a purple field corn similar to rare Mexican varieties—and very good (I met with it in remote rural Fujian in 1999).  Green tea powder is used there, as in Japan.  Fukien “water liquor”—made with yeast, often including the red ferment, and water—is mixed with highly distilled raw alcohol to produce a drink significantly called “tiger piss” (lao hu miao).  Hakka people of the area sometimes skin and smoke-dry field mice for food. 

            Guizhou’s cuisine, previously almost unknown to the outside world, has finally received a short monograph.  The indefatigable Jacqueline Newman (2010) reports both regular and glutinous rice, the usual vegetables, nuts including walnuts, wild sour fruit, and game.  Pickled vegetables are popular, and Newman gives an elaborate recipe (2010:10).  Dog meat is eaten for strengthening.  Recipes include a marvelous one for fish in sour soup.  Many snacks and fish dishes occur.  I remember once seeing in a Chinese cookbook a Guizhou recipe for pangolin—an animal eaten because its weird appearance makes it suspect of powerful qi.  The recipe involved stewing it with every strong-flavored thing in Chinese cuisine, obviously to kill the taste (the animal lives on ants).  I was reminded of the classic American folk recipe for cooking a coot:  Put the coot in water with a brick; boil till brick is tender; throw away the coot and eat the brick.

            Macau has its own cuisine, alas poorly known and poorly described; we need a cookbook (see Sales Lopes 2010).

            Chinese names for dishes continue to delight.  Thin noodles with ground meat and oil (and lots of chile) are “ants climbing on trees,” because the bits of meat stick to the noodles and look like ants on trees—if you have a lot of imagination.  A Beijing sweet delicacy is “ass rolls about”—a sweet glutinous rice cylinder rolled in crushed bean meal.  The rolling process reminds one of a donkey rolling on the sand to scratch his back.  “Across the bridge noodles” is a Yunnan dish in which noodles are poured from one pot into another to finish cooking; the name may come from that, but there is an origin myth involving an elite boy forced to study all the time, and isolated for the purpose on an island in his parents’ garden, food being brought “across the bridge” (Lo and Lo 2003; see ref. in preceding section).  Such cute stories explaining the name of a dish are not to be taken on faith, since the Chinese love nothing better than to make up such tales. 

            Moon cakes are evolving; heavy, sickly-sweet, and doughy, they are unpopular today, so low-calorie forms are evolving, as well as variants using new ingredients.  They too have spread to the United States and become liberated from traditional contexts (Langlois 1972).

            The tea house as ordinary people’s office, a social institution I described in the book, has received its proper historical attention in Wang (2008).

            Tea itself has caught on worldwide, of course, more than ever.  A major art exhibit has chronicled its rise and spread over historic time and over the world (Hohenegger 2009).  The latest fad, as of this writing, is for aged Puer tea from Yunnan; excellent ethnographic and historic research has immortalized this fad and its debates and tastes (Yu 2010; Zhang 2010).

Finally, cannibalism, always fascinating to humanity, continues to receive attention.  As noted in my book, famine drove people to eat human flesh on many occasions, but literature fantastically exaggerated the extent of this, and Yenna Wu has analyzed the issue (Wu 1996).

Anderson, E. N.  2009.  “Northwest Chinese Cuisine and the Central Asian Connection.” 

In Regionalism and Globalism in Chinese Culinary Culture, David Holm, ed.  Taipei:  Foundation of Chinese Dietary Culture.  Pp. 49-78.

Benn, James A.  2005.  “Buddhism, Alcohol, and Tea in Medieval China.”  Sterckx 2005:213-236.

Chow, Kit, and Ione Kramer.  1990.  All the Tea in China.  San Francisco:  China Books and Periodicals.

Hanna, G. D.  1966.  Intrtoduced Mollusks of Western North America.  San Francisco:  California Academy of Sciences.  Occasional Paper 48.

Hennessey, William O.  1981.  Proclaiming Harmony.  Ann Arbor:  Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan.

Hohenegger, Beatrice (ed.).  2009.  Steeped in History:  The Art of Tea.  Los Angeles:  Fowler Musuem at UCLA.

Holm, David.  1999.  Culinary Culture in Guangxi.  Paper, Sixth Symposium on Chinese Dietary Culture, Fuzhou.

Holm, David (ed.).  2009.  Regionalism and Globalism in Chinese Culinary Culture.  Taipei:  Foundation of Chinese Dietary Culture.

Hsu Shin-Yi.  1969.  “The Cultural Ecology of the Locust Cult in Traditional China.”  Annalas of the Association of American Geographers 59:731-752.

Huang, H. T.  2000.  Science and Civilisation in China.  Vol. 6:  Biology and Biological Technology.  Part V:  Fermentations and Food Science.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.

Ishige, Naomichi.  2006.  “East Asian Families and the Dining Table.”  Journal of Chinese Dietary Culture 2:2:1-26.

Kieschnick, John.  2005.  “Buddhist Vegetariansim in China.”  Sterckx 2005:186-213.

Kong Yun-Cheung, Song Myung-Eun and Kwan Pui-Sang.  1990.  “Studies on the Edible Bird’s Nest.”  Paper, Sixth International Conference on the History of Science in China, Cambridge, England.

Langham, Nigel.  1980.  “Breeding Biology of the Edible-Nest Swiftlet Aerodramus fuciphagus.”  Ibis 122:447-461.

Langlois, Janet.  1972.  “Moon Cake in Chinatown, New York City:  Continuity and Change.”  New York Folklore Quarterly 28:83-117.

Leung, M.  2000.  “A Diet of Worms…and Other Critters.”  Flavor and Fortune 7:3:9-10.

Newman, Jacqueline.  2000.  “Snow Frog:  Trailing This Rare Delicacy.”  Flavor and Fortune 7:3:11-12.

— 2004a.  Food Culture in China.  Westport, CT:  Greenwood.

— 2004b.  “Turtle Means Longevity.”  Flavor and Fortune 11:4:5, 8-9, 26.

—  2010.  “Guizhou Cuisine.”  Flavor and Fortune 17:1:7-10, 25.

Ni Ching-Ching.  2004.  “A Slice of History in Chinas Most Famous Duck .”  Los Angeles Times, July 7, p. a5.

Sales Lopes, Fernando.  2010.  “Chinese-Portuguese Cultural Interaction and Chinese Food Culture in Macau:  Macanese Cuisine—Where West and East Blend.”  In Regionalism and Globalism in Chinese Culinary Culture, David Holm, ed.  Taipei:  Foundation of Chinese Dietary Culture.  Pp. 309-324.

Swislocki, Mark.  2009.  Culinary Nostalgia.  Stanford:  Stanford University Press.

Vogel, Hans Ulrich.  2009.  “Salt and Chinese Culture:  Some Comparative Aspects.”  In Regionalism and Globalism in Chinese Culinary Culture, David Holm, ed.  Taipei:  Foundation of Chinese Dietary Culture.  Pp. 181-248.

Wang, Di. 2008.  The Teahouse:  Small Business, Everyday Culture, and Public Politics in Chengdu, 1900-1950.  Stanford:  Stanford University Press.

Wheatley, Paul.  1965.  “A Note on the Extension of Milking Practices into Southeast Asia in the First Millennium AD.”  Anthropos 60:577-590.

Wu, Yenna.  1996.  “Morality and Cannibalism in Ming-Qing Fiction.”  Tamkang Review 27:23-46.

Yee, Rhoda.  1975.  Chinese Village Cookbook.  San Francisco:  Yerba Buena Pres.

Young, Grace, and Alan Richardson.  2004.  The Breath of the Wok.  New York:  Simon and Schuster.

Yu Shuenn-der.  2010.  “Materiality, Stimulants and the Puer Tea Fad.”  Journal of Chinese Dietary Culture 6:107-147.

Zhang Jinghong.  2010.  “Multiple Visions of Authenticity:  Puer Tea Consumption in Yunnan and Other Places.”  Journal of Chinese Dietary Culture 6:63-105.

12.  More on Cooking Strategies:  Some Thoughts for “Slow Food” Devotees

            Chinese food is the original fast food.  Stir-frying takes seconds, or at most a very few minutes.  Food was sliced very thinly and evenly, with maximum surface area exposed, to allow it to cook at maximum speed.  Tender young ingredients are used, partly for taste, but partly—again—for quick cooking.  “Small eats” (xiao shi, the collective term for snack dishes) are sometimes slow to make, but they are sold on the street for eating on the run.  Even slower processes like steaming and soup-making are done fast in the Chinese kitchen.  Baking was speeded up by making the baked items extremely small.  Persian nan, typically about 30-50 cm long, shrank in China to become the shaobing, only about 10 cm.  Baking was done at high heat in very efficient, fuel-sparing ovens or large pots (derived from the Indian/Central Asian tandur). 

All this has everything to do with the incredible difficulty of obtaining fuel in the old days.  I well remember the scarcity and high price of wood and other fuels, even after kerosene and bottled gas came in.  All Chinese cooking is shaped by the need to cook everything with the absolute minimal amount of fuel.  I have seen a full meal for a family cooked by a handful of grass.  Stoves, dishes, and recipes are all exquisitely adapted to this.  The Chinese traditional bucket stove has now spread worldwide into fuel-short areas; I just ran into it in Madagascar, doing research there last year.

The only really slow cooking in Chinese tradition is the stewing and braising used for tough cuts of meat and fish.  This could be very slow indeed—some restaurants kept pots of stock constantly simmering, and put into them anything that needed long cooking.  According to legend, some of these stock pots had been simmering for centuries.  Admittedly this is highly improbable, but certainly some stock pots had been there at the back of the stove for years.  The classic meat dish “Buddha jumped over the wall” (it smells so tempting that a Buddha would break his vegetarian vows and leap for it) is made by very slowly braising sea cucumber, shark fin, deer sinew, fungus, abalone, dried scallops, snow fungus, fish swim-bladder, turtle, and medicinal herbs such as ginseng.  Other, less exotic ingredients are often substituted for the rarer ones.

            I think that when we speak of “slow food” we often really mean something like “real traditional food, made properly.”  About that, I have some thoughts.

            I would highlight, from my book, the observation (based on Elisabeth Rozin’s work cited there) that Chinese cooking is distinctive because of the distinctive combination of ginger, young green onions (scallions), garlic, Chinese wine, and soy sauce—often supplemented with Chinese brown “pepper” (Zanthoxylum spp.), white pepper (not black), Chinese vinegar, chile peppers, and cilantro (coriander leaves).  Some local cuisines or special dishes add black beans (fermented soybeans), malt syrup, and other distinctive flavorings.  Fermented bean-and-wheat-flour pastes can be critical too.  Many Sichuan dishes, for instance, depend on doubanjiang, a pungent mix of broad beans, flour, garlic, and chile.  (I have heard it said—but have not been able to check and verify—that China produces 60% of the world’s broad beans.  If so, there is a lot of doubanjiang around, for it and similar preserves make up the major use for broad beans in modern China.)  It should go without saying that one must pay special attention to all these flavorings, making sure they are top quality, and are used in the dishes that call for them.

Oils are an interesting problem.  The flavor of traditional Chinese cooking depended very much on having the right oil.  In the old days, it would be unrefined, and thus have a lot of flavor.  Unrefined lard, peanut oil, corn oil, rapeseed (“Canola”) oil, etc., really gave special flavors to the old dishes.  Today it is usually impossible to get these.  I use canola oil, which is the closest you can get these days to the traditional Chinese mustard-seed oils that were almost universal in the really old days.  One unrefined oil that is available is sesame, and you need to find that.  It goes on dishes, especially cold dishes, as a flavoring.  It is found in three forms:  from untoasted ordinary seeds, from toasted seeds, and from black sesame seeds.  Each has a very different and distinctive flavor, and cannot be substituted for the others.   

            Chinese food has gotten quite sweet in recent years.  This is not traditional, and no improvement.  Things like pineapple have no place in the traditional cuisine.

            Another change I view with negative emotion is the steady increase in fat and grease.  Chinese food was quite low-calorie in the old days, and was all the better for it.  Stir-frying used just a skim of oil in the pan.  Deep-frying was rare, and was done very fast in very hot oil, to minimize oil absorption. 

            Some cookbooks say you can use sherry to substitute for Chinese wine.  You can’t.  Never use sherry or any other grape wine in Chinese cooking!  Chinese “wine” isn’t wine at all, but a sort of still ale.  It has no substitute.  Good quality (and it has to be good quality) Chinese “wine” is now available everywhere.  Seek it out. 

            Canned Chinese ingredients, especially vegetables, don’t work either.  (Canned mushrooms and shellfish are not so bad.)

            Good soy sauce is essential, and it has to be the right one for the recipe:  light vs dark, thin vs heavy, salty vs sweet, etc.

            Chinese pasta products are much softer than Italian ones.  The Chinese ones are not meant to be al dente.  They are made of regular flours (wheat, rice, bean, etc.), not durum.

13.  Regions and Locales:  Some Further Notes on Foods of Non-Han Peoples Living in or near China

            China’s neighbors and ethnic minorities have very complex foodways of their own.  Korean foodways await a thorough account in English, though Koreana magazine has run a long series of articles, over the years, that if published as a book would do the job.  One important Korean food not known in China (as far as I can find) is acorn mush.  (Chinese do eat acorns, however—usually roasted—as well as a pecan-like nut called a “mountain walnut.”)  Acorns are ground, the tannic acid is soaked out of them, and the meal is then boiled while stirring until it forms a jellylike mush known as dotori muk (the meal is dotori muk karu).  It is tasteless, but is sliced and eaten with seasonings or other foods.  It is almost exactly similar to the acorn mush of California’s Native American peoples, but was clearly an independent invention—there are no intermediate steps to connect the two.

Korean ceremonies still use ancient Confucian sacrifice rites, involving offerings of foods adapted to the Korean context (Kim 1999).  These include jujubes, pine nuts, walnuts, and ginkgo nuts, as well as the usual meats and fish, but also kimchi (Korean pickles) including things like Chinese bellflower and wild dropwort (these are medicinal herbs).  Rice cakes and various wines are used, as well as meat minced with soy and other ingredients.  Meat items include something rather mysteriously defined as “swine’s armpit” (Kim 1999:8; the Chinese character supplied makes things even more mysterious—the character translated “armpit” means “to pat” in Chinese).  Korea now proves to have a very long, complex prehistory (Nelson 1993, 1999).  Millet cultivation began (probably introduced from China) around the 6^th millennium BC (Nelson 1999:150).   Rice was introduced, already domesticated, from China, by 2000 BC or so (Nelson 1999:150).  Pigs and other animals came early, before rice, and pigs became major domesticates. 

A complex agriculture evolved in Korea, spreading eventually to Japan with the Yayoi culture (intrusive from Korea to Japan around 200 BC).  Japan had some agriculture earlier, but it stayed very simple and minor; only with Yayoi did Japan become truly agricultural.

Manchu food is more or less Chinese, in recent centuries, but traditions of venison and distinctive noodle dishes survive.  Newman (2006) provides a few recipes.

Turkic-speakers of central Asia—China’s Xinjiang province and neighboring former soviet republics—include the Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Kirghiz, Uighurs, and others.  They live on bread and meat, with a very large consumption of noodles and wrapped dumplings.  Boiled noodles in soup with mutton is widely popular.  Meat can include goat, horse and camel, but is usually sheep.  Fermented mare’s milk is popular among the Kirghiz, as among some other groups farther north and east.  Vegetables are not popular, except for carrots, but fruit is popular and common.  Melons are favored, and melons from Hami in Xinjiang have a well-deserved reputation for quality.  Grapes are common and wine is produced.  Apricots do especially well—they may be native to this area—and abound where conditions have been stable enough to allow trees to mature.  Mulberries are locally eaten.  A recent book by Martha Weeks (2005) details Kirghiz cooking thoroughly.  This cuisine preserves many dishes similar to those of the Yuan Dynasty.

My own observations, and especially information provided by Gulbahar Mammut (a Xinjiang Turkic student), adds the following details of Xinjiang Turkic cuisine.  Rice pilaf becomes polo (Uighur and related dialects; Uzbek plov).  Manta (yeast-raised; or sometimes unleavened; Uzbek and others, manti) are stuffed with meat and onions, more proof that the modern North Chinese mantou is a recent degeneration from a filled pastry.  Smaller, thin-skinned versions are chüchür (Uzbek chuchuar, but, from the description, chuchuar is more like the Xinjiangese hoshiang: fried, then steamed, dumplings.)  Toqash is a small bread; many other breads exist, such as pitr nan (pita) and qatlama nan (layered, with onions, cheese, and such), and the similar güsh (meat) nan (layered with minced meat).  A strudel-thin bread filled with yogurt is holuq nan.  Filled pastries are samsa or sambusa, from Arabic samusa or sambusak.  Qoldama is a dumpliing.  The tandur over is tunur or tanur in Xinjiang.  Red pepper is laza, from China la jiao.  Noodles are, of course, vitally important, and include the very long lang men (a name that may incorporate Chinese mian, “noodles,” or may be from Persian laghman, like the Uzbek lagman).   Ash is “soup,” as in Persian.  Ordinary cooked rice is gang pen from Chinese kan fen “rice cooked dry.”  Fish is rare and locally taboo.  Qitaq (with a Turkish short i) is yogurt, a basic food; dried, it is qurut.   Sheep, of course, is the really choice food, and as in the Mongol days, all of it is eaten; lungs, stomach, brain.  Kababs are popular—I assume they are like those of Afghanistan, small and much like the sate of southeast Asia, and alternating bits of meat with bits of tail/rump fat.  The skin and feet, however, are not eaten (the Yinshan Zhengyao has gourmet recipes for them), and Islam forbids eating the blood, as was once done.  For the lungs, dough is mixed with water or spices and poured in, with much care to fill all the alveoli. Then the whole is boiled for an hour, and eaten with a spicy dip.  Intestines are stuffed with finely cut veg, rice, and water, and boiled whole.  The meat-and-chickpea stews of Mesopotamia, featured in the Yinshan Zhengyao, have disappeared.  Noodles in soup dominate instead (as in Ningxia).  Sweets, in addition to ubiquitous peaches, apricots, and melons, include halva (Arabic halwa), here made of lamb oil, sugar, and flour, and often served as an appetizer!  Cookies, some at least of Russian origin, occur (pichina).  The Uighurs eat a fair amount of dairy products—yogurt, cheese, and now condensed milk—but, in general, Xinjiang’s Turkic groups are much less dairy-dependent than groups north and west of them.

Uighur food is quite similar to Yinshan Zhengyao food:  rather bland noodle soups with lamb; chicken red-cooked with star anise; nan (Persian bread); rice dishes including polos; and all.  As in Afghanistan, carrots are important.  Potatoes have become a major stew ingredient in the last couple of centuries.  Thus the standard stew can be very much like an Irish stew:  lamb, potatoes, and carrots, without much spice beyond salt and pepper.  The familiar manta dumplings are supplemented by samsa (from Arab samusa).  Soup goes by the good old Arabic word shorba (Arabic root sh-r-b, “drink” [verb or noun], as seen in English “sherbet,” “sorbet,” etc.).  The Persian words laghman for noodles and ash for thick soup or thin stew occur.   Lamb kebabs and whole roast lamb remain featured.  Most of the dishes are very similar to those of Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and other points west, but many Chinese dishes are found, especially west Chinese dishes.

Bread is sacred to most of these groups, and cannot be thrown away or treated without respect; this is the eastern limit of a custom universal until recently in Europe and the northern Middle East.  Bread is usually Persian style: large oval flat loaves baked by sticking them to the sides of a huge tandur oven.  A miniaturized version of this became the familiar shaobing (“roast cake”) of China.  Huge breads remain more popular in central Asia and Ningxia.

The diversity in name, in cooking technique, and in filling of the small filled dumplings shows their basic importance here.  The filled dumpling is probably a Near Eastern invention, but reaches its apogee today in East Europe (pelmeny, pierogi, vareniki, kreplach) and Central Asia.  Of course Italy has had them at least since the Middle Ages, most commonly with the name ravioli.  There seem to be no records of them from the Ancient World, but I would guess (a wild guess, to be sure) that they were invented very early, in the core Near East or in the greater Iranian sphere.   Wheat was domesticated there, and most wheat products were invented there.

            The Dungan or Dong’an, a Muslim group in northwest China, eat food typical of that region; they speak Chinese but their food is a cross between Turkic (pilaf, apricots, mutton in all forms, etc.) and Chinese (noodle dishes including bean threads, chicken with ginseng, Chinese vegetables of all sorts, cold dishes, and the like; see Weeks 2004).

A detailed account of foodways in Vietnam (Ngo 1994) notes that the heating/cooling system and the five-elements system flourish there.  Cooling foods, including many vegetables and fruits, were favored, because of the hot climate.  About 1500 medicinal plants make up the traditional herbal canon; some 150 are food plants (p. 77).  An 18^th-century physician, Hai Thuong Lan Ong, wrote a book, Culinary Art, with 152 recipes for healing foods, with recommendations of foodstuffs.  “For instance:  glutinous rice related to sweet and tepid, strengthened spleen, lung and kidney and cured urobilinury whereas ordinary rice related to sweet and healthy, kept up the body and regulated the temperament.  Regarding beans, soya related to sweet and tepid, strengthend the bone, boosted the temperament and detoxicated whereas green beans related to sweet and cold, dissipated the heat, detoxicated and cured diabetes” (Ngo 1994:77).  Lemon balm, ginger, and other plants were noted.  “[W]omen in delivery should use glutinous rice wine, with hen-egg…” (Ngo 1994:77).  Papaya promoted milk, as did soup of pork leg.   The giant waterbug Lethocerus indicus is important in Vietnamese cuisine (Packard 2003; Smith 2003), as in northern Thailand, whence it has been imported into the United States (Pemberton 1988; also my own observations).  The pheromonal gland produces a scent that is greatly relished.  Insecticides have made the insect rare.  It is traditionally made into sauce with chiles, lime, and sometimes dried fish or fish sauce.

            The Sani of central Yunnan have an ancient tradition of rice agriculture, both upland (slash-and-burn) and wet, but they have more recently adopted New World crops with enthusiasm.  Their villages consist of adobe houses, on and around which are hanging maize, chile peppers in strings, green beans drying, and Mexican squashes.  Even epazote (Chenopodium ambrosioides) has made it there as a pot-herb.  It all looked like a central Mexican village, even to the clusters of maize ears hanging in trees.  This amazed the Mexican contingent at the International Congress of Ethnobotany held in Yunnan in 1990.  Even the common Mexican herb epazote was there, under the name ki chr kimi.  Sani dispenses with vowels in many words.  Ng pan mo is “chile.”  The odd small eggplant—a local species, Solanum khasianum—was a dz, a water buffalo an ng (cf. Chinese niu, Cantonese ngau). Dog is chrzh (the last three letters being used here to write something like the buzzed r in Czech). Simplest of all was “horse”:  m.  (The Chinese is ma.  Except for that buzzed r, these transcriptions are in IPA usage, not the Sani transcription system.) 

The Akha, related linguistically (but much more fond of vowels), practice slash-and-burn cultivation and some wet-rice agriculture in southern Yunnan.  They eat a typical southeast Asian diet of rice with greens, fish, fruit, peppers, and forest products.  My student Ayoe Wang, an Akha from Yunnan, is carrying out detailed ethnobotanical researches on the Akha.

The Mian of southern China and neighboring southeast Asia traditionally ate bland, simple food, but used southeast Asian basil varieties, cilantro, mint, and lemon grass, at least in their southeast Asian villages.  Minced beef with basil, eaten in a lettuce leaf, is a favorite dish, and resembles Thai and Vietnamese dishes.  Sticky rice has also spread from the north Thai world.  (Information from Jeff McDonald.)

The Yao have varied foodways, many of which are being lost.  The Ao Yao of Guangxi used to salt down small birds with rice powder to dry them off; this is no longer done.  They pickled many foods.  Otherwise, their diet was, or at least now is, more or less the standard diet of impoverished mountain dwellers:  sweet potatoes, maize, and such, with rice and pork the luxuries (Huang 2009).  Huang gives a recipe for blood sausage—blood and rice in a pig’s intestine, with salt and flavorings. 

China’s largest minority is the Thai-speaking (now often Han Chinese-speaking) Zhuang, who live in Guangxi Province and neighboring areas; there are perhaps 30,000,000 of them.  Their food remained mysterious until recently, but now an article (unsigned, but almost certainly by Jacqueline Newman, 2005), among other sources, opens them to the world.  They eat both sticky and nonsticky rice; nonsticky seems to be usually (not always?) the staple.  They are fond of cassia and fennel, and flavor their tea with orange flowers.  Black rice soup flavored with cassia and fennel is a typical dish.  Eggplant is cooked with rice vinegar, white pepper, cinnamon, sugar, fermented sticky rice, and oil.  Dr. Newman, who is systematically chronicling the minority foodways of China, has gone on to describe the foods of the Dong (Tung), another Thai minority very close to the Zhuang (Newman 2007).  (In fact, people speaking these languages—both quite close to each other and almost as close to standard Siamese Thai—are called “Dong” or “Zhuang” indifferently, depending on local history.)   A characteristic Dong flavor is tea oil, from fruits of Camellia species including C. oleifera, C. sasanqua and C. kissi (but not from true tea, C. sinensis).  Sticky rice is common as a staple.  Not really “glutinous” though usually called so, this rice has a form of the starchy amylose that cooks up sticky.  it is the staple food in northeast Thailand and neighboring areas.  Vegetables are marinated in a mix of sugar, salt, Chinese hard liquor (technically a vodka or unaged whiskey), and rice wine.   

Taiwan’s Austronesian-speaking aboriginal peoples have received considerable attention, but few dramatic breakthroughs can be noted.  A major exception is Yamamoto and Nawata’s extremely detailed and well-documented study of Tabasco chile pepper use by these groups (Yamamoto and Nawata 2009).  Names and genetics show varieties in the southern areas of Taiwan were introduced from the Philippines (and often ultimately from Indonesia).  These small hot chiles are used not only for food, but for ornament, medicine, and ritual.  Young leaves as well as fruits are eaten.  This all indicates a long and interesting history.  The plants must have been introduced soon after the Spanish occupied the Philippines in the 16^th century.

            A huge, scattered, and unsynthesized literature on China’s local and minority foodways has grown up in the last few decades.  Most of this is in Chinese (but see e.g. Alford and Duguid 2008), and what is found in English is usually in manuscript form.  For some examples:  Lui Pei-Gui (1999), among others, has studied Mongol uses of mushrooms.  Mongols use large numbers of both individuals and species from many genera, including the common Agaricus, Boletus, and Tricholoma as well as less known genera.  Yang Zhuliang has chronicled mushrooms in Yunnan (Yang n.d.).  Mushrooms also figure large in Tibet, where they are collected by Tibetans and minorities as food.  Sale of them has made many people quite well off (Arora 2008).  The caterpillar-parasitizing fungus Cordyceps sinensis complex is an extremely important medicine, sale of which actually is the biggest single moneymaker in rural Tibet (Winkler 2008).  It is used for almost anything by Chinese and Tibetans, but is not known to have any empirically demonstrable benefits.  Many other mss. on mushrooms, as well as taro, herbal medicine, edible insects, wild game animals, pine nuts, dogs, and other edibles have crossed my desk, but in preliminary or partial forms that cannot be cited here.

            Southeast Asian food and its history has been reviewed in an excellent historical study by the Japanese scholar Akira Matsuyama (2003).  This book is particularly good on fermented foods, and provides an opportunity for someone to do a really major study by comparing them with those documented in Huang (2000).  Ties with China are very clear.

Alford, Jeffrey, and Naomi Duguid.  2008.  Beyond the Great Wall:  Recipes and Travels in the Other China.  New York:  Artisan.

Arora, David.  2008.  “The Houses that Matsutake Built.”  Economic Botany 62:278-290.

Buell, Paul D.  2004.  “Popoli e Ciba della Steppa.”  In Massimo Montanari, and Françoise Sabban, eds.:  Atlante dell’Alimentazione e della Gastronomia.  2 vols.  Torino: UTET.  Vol. I, pp. 242-257

Huang Heyu.  2009.  “Ao Yao People in Huala Village.”  Flavor and Fortune, Fall, pp. 5-7, 15.

Kim Chun Ho.  1999.  “On the Exchange and Comparison of the Confucian Dietary Culture between Korea, China and Japan.”  Paper, Sixth Symposium on Chinese Dietary Culture, Fuzhou.

Liu Pei-Gui.  1999.  “Mongolian Uses and Taxonomic Study on Economic “Kou Mo” Used by the Mongolian Steppe Herdsmen in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China.  Ms.

Matsuyama, Akira.  2003.  The Traditional Dietary Culture of South East Asia:  Its Formation and Pedigree.  New York:  Columbia University Press.

Nelson, Sarah M.  1993.  The Archaeology of Korea.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.

—  1999.  “Megalithic Monuments and the Introduction of Rice into Korea.”  In The Prehistory of Food:  Appetites for Change, ed. by Chris Gosden and Jon Hather.  London:  Routledge.  Pp. 147-165.

Newman, Jacqueline.  2005.  “Zhuang People in China.”  Flavor and Fortune 12:3:19-20.

—  2006.  “Manchu People and Their Foods.”  Flavor and Fortune 13:4:19-20, 32.

—  2007.  “Dong:  A Chinese Ethnic Nationality.”  Flavor and Fortune, fall 2007, pp. 34-36.

Ngo Duc Thinh.  1994.  “Vietnamese Eating Tradition in Relation to Fostering and Disease Curing.”  Vietnam Social Sciences 1990/4, 74-78:74-77.

Packard, Le Anh Tu.  2003.  “Bug Juice.”  Natural History, March 2003, p. 63.

Pemberton, Robert W.  “The Use of the Thai Giant Waterbug, Lethocerus indicus (hemiptera: Belostomatidae), As Human Food in California.”  Pan-Pacific Entomologist 64:81-82.

Smith, Robert L.  2003.  “On the Scent.”  Natural History, March 2003, pp. 60-62.

Weeks, Martha E.  2004.  “Cuisine of Dungan (Hui) People.”  Flavor and Fortune 11:2:9-11, 28.

—  2005.  Kyrgyz Cooking.  Northampton, MA:  Martha E. Weeks.

Winkler, Daniel.  2008.  “Yartsa Gunbu (Cordyceps sinensis) and the Fungal Commodification of Tibet’s Rural Economy.”  Economic Botany 62:291-305.

Yamamoto, Sota, and Eiji Nawata.  2009.  Use of Capsicum frutescens L. by the Indigenous Peoples of Taiwan and the Batanes Islands.”  Economic Botany 63:43-59.

Yang Zhuliang.  N.d.  “A Preliminary Ethnomycological Study on Wild Edible Mushrooms Consumed by National Minorities in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, China.”  Ms. 

14.  Food as Medicine

            Folktales of nutrition leading to power are as old as China.  The Mawangdui texts have revealed a tremendous store of nutritional medicine, earlier and more elaborate than anyone thought (Harper 1997).  Many (probably most) of the common medicinal foods were known and used then about as they are now. 

            The classics of Chinese medicine that appeared during the Han Dynasty have been reanalyzed (notably by Paul Unschuld, e.g. 1986, 2003; see also Lo 2005, cited under Later Zhou above).  One thing that emerges is that these works (like medical textbooks everywhere) were revised regularly, and do not necessarily resemble the original, any more than the new 39^th edition of “Gray’s Anatomy” resembles the original work by Henry Gray in 1858.  Thus the description and effective treatment of beri-beri and the description of an effective oral rehydration therapy in Zhang Zhungjing’s Shang Han Lun (Hsu 1981; Zhang 1993) may be Zhang’s or may be later additions.  Since these are extremely important historically—being by far the earliest such descriptions, and indeed the earliest descriptions of precise, effective food therapy in Asia—we need to know.

Common in classical times, and by no means extinct today, is a theory that eating grain feeds the corpse worms that are latent in all of us (waiting to devour us when we die).  Abstaining from grain thus lengthens life.  Reading old texts makes it fairly clear that people were observing the effects of a purely-grain diet—i.e., deficiencies of iron, vitamin A, vitamin C, and other nutrients.  They were quite aware that a diet rich in pine seeds and other high-nutrient foods corrected this.  They thus tried to live entirely without grain—a logical bit of overreaction.  The locus classicus for this and other food myths is the Bao Pu Zi by Ge Hong (4^th century AD).  This great work was translated by James Ware (1966).  Ge’s other book, Traditions of Divine Transcendents, has recently been translated by Robert Campany (2002).  Ge advised people that pine seeds, wild herbs, and alchemically produced elixirs are necessary to long life.  Another great work, recently translated, was Sun Simiao’s “Recipes Worth a Thousand Gold (Sun 2007/654).  Several other translation editions of traditional Chinese medical texts have appeared, mostly in uncritical editions; the field is badly in need of more serious work (see e.g. Zhang 1987, 1993; for modern compilations of traditional remedies, Sun 1990, Zhang 1990.)

            Since Pillsbury’s classic article (1978) there have been several studies of “doing the month”—recovering from childbirth.  Women still stay warm and quiet and eat high-protein, high-iron foods; the custom, so valuable if restricting, has not changed as much as most traditions in this modern world.  Pork liver is a favorite for this and for building blood—it works, being the richest in iron and vitamin B12 of any common food.  Also useful are eggs and greens. Red foods such as red jujubes, peanuts (Chinese peanuts have red skins), and red wine are used for buillding blood, but with less excuse—they have some value, but their color is the main draw.  By similar magical thinking, black foods—black jujubes, black chickens, black dog meat, Guinness Stout (called “black dog” in colloquial Chinese)—are used to build body.  Their saturated color is thought to indicate their strength.

            Infant feeding methods in old times were studied by B. S. Platt and S. Y. Gin (undated separate from Archives of Disease in Childhood, ca. 1938).  In the 1930s, Chinese (largely Yangzi Delta people) breastfeeding was almost universal.  Thirty-six families had used a wet nurse; otherwise, mothers nursed their infants, though six mothers used powdered milk (having been apparently unable to nurse) and one claimed, unbelievably, to have used only rice powder.  Rice powder was used as supplement from very early.  From five or six months, soft rice supplemented the milk, and from about eight months, soup, eggs, and the like.  Chinese jujubes often came in at this point to promote blood and body; the jujubes do have iron and vitamin C.  Mothers ate pork, dry beans, cuttlefish, chicken, shrimp, sea cucumber, Chinese wine, wheat cakes, and millet to produce more milk.  They were aware of the nutritional value of silkworms, which are indeed very rich in vitamins and minerals.  Interestingly, soymilk was not used for feeding babies.

            A major discovery of the last some years has been the influence of West Asia on Chinese food and medicine.  First studied by Berthold Laufer (1919) and Edward Schafer (1963), this exchange has turned out to be far more important than even they suspected.  They studied primarily the Tang Dynasty and the time just before it.  Work since has focused on later dynasties.  The Mongol Empire’s court manual of nutrition and diet, the Yinshan Zhengyao (“Necessary Knowledge for Drinking and Eating,” 1330), is primarily Central and West Asian in content (Buell, Anderson and Perry 2000; Lo 2005).  The Mongols also compiled a huge encyclopedia of Near Eastern medicine; only fragments survive, but even these are impressive, and fortunately include the names of hundreds of drugs, mostly identifiable from West Asian sources, and mostly still used in traditional Arab and Persian medicine (Kong 1996).  Most of the Near Eastern lore imported by the Mongols (or their predecessors) died out slowly during Ming, but some persisted and became part of Chinese tradition. Spices, flavorings, new vegetables, ideas for candying and sugaring foods, noodle dishes, and breads were among the main items borrowed. 

Meanwhile, of course, Chinese foods and kitchenwares migrated in the opposite direction.  A fascinating case is blue-and-white pottery, invented by the Persians, perfected by the Chinese under the Mongol rule, and then traded from China back to the Middle East.  Many of the best surviving blue-and-white pieces are in the Topkapi in Istanbul.  Supposedly it has a healthful effect on food served in it.  Among medicinal foods, Coptis teeta, Smilax china, Chinese rhubarb Rheum emodi (Akira 1989), camphor Camphora officinalis, and cassia Cinnamomum cassia, and some less important items, were adopted by Near Eastern medicine in early days (Said 1990).

The myths die hard.  I heard in Taiwan in the 1970s that certain rich and powerful individuals abstained from rice noodles, humorally dry foods (such as peanuts), etc., eating instead a good deal of easily digested, nutritious food like chicken and vegetables and fruits.  They drink honey and use little oil.  This enables them to enjoy many lovers, which in turn built more vigor, since they could absorb yin energy from them.  They even eat ground pearls to supplement yang force.

            Of course, some plants really are nutritionally superior.  In addition to the pine seeds noted above (and now threatened by overharvesting; Allen 1989), the berries and leaves of Chinese wolfthorn (Lycium chinense; go qi zi and go qi zai respectively) are so rich in vitamins and minerals that they have served as de facto vitamin pills for millennia.

            The dietary combinations so feared in Chinese tradition have received some further attention since my coverage in The Food of China; see Lo (2005).

            Tea is proving itself; green tea, in particular, turns out to be preventive of cancer,  heart disease, and other degenerative conditions.  This confirms the long-maligned enthusiasm of the famous Dutch “tea doctor,” Bontekoe, who was long ridiculed for insightfully making these claims in the 17^th century.  This is apparently because of the tannins and other bioflavinoids and polyphenols that tea contains. “White tea”—tea leaves steamed at picking and then dried, so that they retain more of their chemical compounds—is better still.  It slows bacterial growth and kills fungi (Conis 2005).

Then there are other medicinal matters….  Cockroaches, boiled to treat colds and pimples, found a more subtle yet direct use in the Castle Peak Bay community where I lived for two years.  When a child was “shamming sick” to get out of going to school, his or her mother would quickly brew up some cockroaches and say, “All right, here, take this.”  The usual response was, “No, no, I’m fine, I’m going to school!” 

            Several hallucinogenic plants were known to Chinese traditional medicine, including henbane (Hyoscyamus niger), datura (Datura spp.), marijuana (Cannabis sativa), and toxic mushrooms including Amanita and a “laughing mushroom” that may have been a Panaeolus (Li 1977).  These plants made people see ghosts or “devils.”  Some plants that are toxic but not really hallucinogenic were classed with them; Phytolacca and Ranunculus, for instance.

            Moving from historical research to China today (see e.g. Farquhar 1993, 1994; Kleinman et al. 1975):  A brilliant new group of experts on Chinese medicine has arisen, many forming a network based around the Needham Institute at Cambridge.  Their research has focused largely on clinical treatment practice (Hsu 1999, 2001), but food cannot be neglected in any study of Chinese medicine, and they do not neglect it (see esp. Engelhardt 2001; Engelhardt and Hempen 1997).  Livia Kohn has reviewed much practice in a new book (Kohn 2005).  The Newman and Halporn (2004) anthology noted above has several articles on food and medicine, including one by myself (Anderson 2004).  Chinese traditionally focused on trying to maximize longevity—not a surprising concern in a country whose traditional life expectancy was in the 25-30 range.  Equally unsurprising, given China’s history of famine, was the fact that they were most concerned with nutrition. 

            Chinese food is indeed very healthy, or once was.  Ironically, much of the health value comes not from the foods believed to be good for you, but from the humble, often-despised everyday grains and greens.  Studies by Cornell University in the 1980s and 1990s showed that Chinese under traditional rural conditions had incredibly low levels of cholesterol (average 127—vs. over 200 in the contemporary USA), were lean and in good shape, and had very low rates of heart disease, many cancers, and other circulatory and degenerative ailments (Campbell and Campbell 2005; Campbell and Chen 1994; Chen et al 1990; Lang 1989).  Some areas, at least, had rather high rates of cancer.  Cancer incidence can increase from having too low a cholesterol level (Barbara Anderson, personal communication).  But, in general, traditional Chinese food was healthful.  Some “long-life villages” in south China—often Thai-speaking villages—have especially long life expectancies (as do villages in parts of southern Japan, notably Okinawa).  The secret seems to be mountain air and water, mountain exercise, and a diet of whole or nearly-whole grains, vegetables, some fish, and little meat. 

            Chinese women traditionally breastfed for a long time, sometimes three years (but usually half of that).  Frequent pregnancy and long lactation, and frequent spells of malnutrition, meant that women rather rarely menstruated, which may explain Chinese beliefs about menstruation as a rather strange and dangerous state (Harrell 1981).

Today, the situation is changing, and not always for the better.  Eating more meat, fat, and sugar, and less vegetables, bean curd, and unprocessed grain, has led to skyrocketing rates of obesity and diabetes.  Longevity increases with modern medicine, but heart attacks are commoner.  Moreover, the Chinese government has turned away from its spectacular early successes in medical care—which more than doubled life expectancy from the 1940s to the 1980s.  Health spending as a part of total government spending declined “from 28% to 14% between 1981 and 1993, allocation to the rural ‘cooperative medical-insurance system’ decreased from 20% to 2%” (Dong, Hoven and Rosenfield 2005:573).  Rampant corruption and price-gouging have denied care to the poor (Dong, Hoven and Rosenfeld 2005:574).  Given the epidemics of SARS and AIDS as well as the drastic decline in healthy eating, China is in deep trouble.  Problems for the future include not only obesity and diabetes, but specific deficiencies, such as anemia (chronic in China for millennia) and folic acid deficiency (an emergent danger with the decline in eating vegetables and whole grains).  Folic acid deficiency is probably the major cause of birth defects round the world, and is probably increasing in China.  (The double “probably” reflects the dismal state of knowledge of this terrible, insidious problem.) 

On the other hand, life expectancy continues to increase (so far), and the Chinese live almost as long as Westerners.  In Taiwan, and parts of south China, they live as long as do the inhabitants of many European nations.  Food and medical care continue to be reasonably adequate, and the scale of differences from two generations ago are almost unparalleled in world history.  However, public health care is declining seriously in rural areas (Arif Dirlik, talk of May 26, 2005, UCR), threatening the future.

            Meanwhile, Chinese medicinal food has spread to the western world, not only via books but also via such restaurants as the TT Chinese Imperial Cuisine of San Gabriel, CA—a restaurant serving medicinal foods to the local Chinese community.  In China itself, restaurants serving yaoshan—“medical dining,” traditional medicinal dishes—have been growing in number and elaborateness since their beginning around 1980 in Sichuan.  They use variously-updated recipes from the medical-nutrition classics.

            And the classic four tastes—salt, sweet, sour, and bitter—have been increased to five:  the human tongue has receptors for glutamate, giving us the taste known in Japanese (and now in English) as umami.  This gives the spark to MSG and many Asian ferments. 

Akira, Haneda.  1989.  “On Chinese Rhubarb.”  In The Islamic World from classical to Modern Times:  Essays in Honor of Bernard Lewis.  Princeton, NJ:  Darwin Press.  Pp. 27-30.

Allen, Thomas B.  1989.  “Shaking Gold from China’s Treetops.”  International Wildlife 19:4:34-36.

Anderson, E. N.  2004.  “Heating and Cooling Qi and Modern American Dietary Guidelines:  Personal Thoughts on Cultural Convergence.”  Newman and Halporn 2004:26-33.

Buell, Paul D.: E. N. Anderson; Charles Perry.  2000.  A Soup for the Qan.  London:  Kegan Paul International.

Campbell, T. Colin, with Thomas M. Campbell II.  2005.  The China Study.  Dallas, TX:  Benbella Books.

Campbell, T. Colin, and Chen Junshi.  1994.  “Diet and Chronic Degenerative Disesases:  Perspectives from China.”  American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 59 (supplement):1153S-1161S.

Campany, Robert.  2002.  To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth:  A Translation and Study of Ge Hong’s Traditions of Divine Transcendents.  Berkeley:  University of California Press.

Chen Junshi; T. Colin Campbell; Li Junyao; Richard Peto.  1990.  Diet, Life-Style, and Mortality in China:  A Study of the Characteristics of 65 Chinese Counties.  Ithaca:  Cornell University Press.

Conis, Elena.  2005.  “White Tea Merits Further Research.”  Los Angeles Times, March 21, p. F3.

Dong, Zigang; Christina W. Hoven; Allan Rosenfield.  2005.  “Lessons from the Past:  Poverty and Market Forces Combine to Keep Rural China Unhealthy.”  Nature 433:573-574.

Engelhardt, Ute.  2001.  “Dietetics in Tang China and the First Extant Works of Materia dietetica.”  In Innovation in Chinese Medicine, ed. by Elisabeth Hsu.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.  Pp. 173-191.

Engelhardt, Ute, and Carl-Hermann Hempen..  1997.  Chinesische Diätetik.  München: Urban und Schwartzenberg.

Farquhar, Judith.  1993.  Knowing Practice:  The Clinical Encounter of Chinese Medicine.  Boulder:  Westview.

—  1994.  “Eating Chinese Medicine.”  Cultural Anthropology 9:471-497.

Harper, Donald.  1997.  Early Chinese Medical Literature.  London:  Kegan Paul International.

Harrell, Barbara B.  1981.  “Lactation and Menstruation in Cultural Perspective.”  American Anthrooplogist 83:796-823.

Hsu, Elisabeth.  1999.  The Transmission of Chinese Medicine.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.

Hsu, Elisabeth (ed.).  2001.   Innovation in Chinese Medicine.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.

Hsu, Hong-yen and William Peacher (tr. and ed.).  1981.  Shang Han Lun, the Great Classic of Chinese Medicine.  Los Angeles:  Oriental Healing Arts Institute.

Kleinman, Arthur; Peter Kunstadter; E. Russell Alexander; James E. Gale (eds.).  Medicine in Chinese Cultures.  Washington, DC:  United States Dept. of Health, Education and Welfare.

Kohn, Livia.  2005.  Health and Long Life.  Cambridge, MA:  Three Pines Press.

Kong, Y. C.  1996.  Huihui Yaofang.  Hong Kong:  Y. C. Kong.

Lang, Susan.  1989.  “The World’s Healthiest Diet.”  America’s Health, Sept., pp. 105-112.

Laufer, Berthold.  1919.  Sino-Iranica.  Chicago:  Field Museum.

Li Hui-lin.  1977.  “Hallucinogenic Plants in Chinese Herbals.”  Harvard Botanical Museum Leaflets 25:6:161-181.

Martin, Katherine Gould.  1978.  “Hot Cold Clean Poison and Dirt.”  Social Science and Medicine

Pillsbury, Barbara.  1978.  “’Doing the Month’:  Confinement and Convalescence of Chinese Women after Childbirth.”  Social Science and Medicine 12:11-22.

Said, Hakim Mohammed.  1990.  “Some Common Herbal Drugs Used in Chinese and Greco-Arab Medicine.”  Paper, Sixth International Conference on the History of Science in China, Cambridge, England.

Schafer, Edward.  1963.  The Golden Peaches of Samarkand.  Berkeley:  University of California Press.

Sun Guangren; Liu Zhaochun; Li Hongho; Yang Suqin; Chong Guipin.  1990.  Health Preservation and Rehabilitation.  Shanghai:  Publishing House of the Shanghai College of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

Sun Simiao.  2007.  Recipes Worth a Thousand Gold.  Translated by Sumei Yi.  Ms.

Unschuld, Paul.  1986.  Medicine in China:  Nan-Ching, the Classic of Difficult Issues.  Berkeley:  University of California Press.

— 2003.  Huang Di Nei Jing Su Wen:  Nature, Knowledge, Imagery in an Ancient Chinese Medical Text.  Berkeley:  University of California Press.

Ware, James R.  1966.  Alchemy, Medicine and Religion in the China of A.D. 320:  The Nei P’ien of Ko Hung.  New York:  Dover.

Zhang Wengao; Jia Wencheng; Li Shupei; Zhang Jing; Ou Yangbing; Xu Xuelan.  1990.  Chinese Medicated Diet.  Shanghai: Publishing House of the Shanghai College of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

Zhang Zhongqing.  1987.  Synopsis of Prescriptions of the Golden Chamber:  A Classic of Traditional Chinese Medicine.  Tr. and ed. Luo Xiwen. (Chinese orig. 2^nd century A.D.)  Beijing:  New World Press.

—  1993.  Treatise on Febrile Diseases Caused by Cold, with 500 Cases.  Tr. and ed. Luo Xiwen.  (Chinese orig. 2^nd century A.D.).  Beijing:  New World Press.

15.  Food in Society:  Conclusions

            After almost 50 years of somewhat intermittent study of Chinese food, I continue to be struck, most of all, by the incredible creativity of the Chinese people.  As I pointed out in The Food of China, the Chinese did not develop their foodways as a response to simple population growth; the foodways usually developed (or were borrowed) for more immediate economic or ecological reasons—often, by farmers simply trying to get more profits.  Population expansion came after, but then did tend to force more intensification.  However, we know from history that people do not have to intensify food production when population increases; they are, in fact, much more apt to migrate, go to war, or even just starve.  Intensification usually requires an economic and development infrastructure. 

            Creativity continues today, and again we can see that it is more often done to pursue restaurant profits than to feed the hungry.

            In spite of this, and pace the real problems raised by many writers, I continue to be impressed by the success of the Chinese in dealing with their environment over the millennia.  They created a system that was desperately overstretched and often destructive, but it fed hundreds of millions of people over thousands of years.

            Chinese food remains the most ecologically efficient, in that one can feed more people on fewer inputs of land and capital than by any other system (at least, any other that has been well studied).  As the world runs out of oil and other resources, we will all have to move toward something like the Chinese system if we want to keep eating.

            Chinese foodways have been shaped not only by economics by also by prestige, religion, family ideologies, social needs, symbolism, and, not least, the single-minded drive for better food.  Values of freshness, succulent texture, subtle combination of many flavors, and bringing out the natural best flavors of foods have remained important, though they have weakened somewhat in recent years, because of limitations on availability of fresh high-quality ingredients.  Sometimes, a particular chef’s or family’s creation takes off spectacularly, because it fits perfectly with new needs and wants; the rise of mapo doufu and “Mongolian barbecue” could be mentioned.  (Mapo doufu, the perfect expression of Sichuanese taste, appears to have been invented in the 19^th or early 20^th century, probably by a family named Chen.  “Mongolian barbecue” was invented in north China by a Chinese chef in the 20^th century; it is vaguely Mongolian by inspiration, but was a truly new creation.)  As always, we learn that foodways are very complex cultural constructions. 

            Today, Chinese food plays out its changes and evolution on a worldwide stage.  New variants and fusion cuisines are emerging.  Ingredients from around the world (from caviare to the “geoduck” clams of northwest North America) find places in Chinese food.  Chinese food, of widely varying degrees of quality, becomes a familiar quick-and-easy option for workers from Brazil to Britain. 

            The future lies ahead.  If China and the rest of us survive the ecological and environmental meltdown that is sure to come in the next 20 years, we will all be eating Chinese food for some time to come.

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