Rice Sorghum For The People: The Origin and Sustainable Development of Ancient Chinese Agriculture

【Guangming Academic Writing】

Editor's Note

Agriculture is related to national food security, people living and working in peace and contentment, global economic and trade development and climate change. From a historical point of view, as a traditional agricultural power, agricultural development has had an important impact on the formation and development of Chinese civilization, the characteristics of The context of Chinese history, and the identity and inheritance of Chinese culture, which should be paid attention to and studied in depth. Four experts in the fields of historical geography and agricultural archaeology are invited to analyze the development of Chinese agriculture in the historical period, agricultural technology and its impact on historical changes and social governance from the perspectives of domestication and agricultural origin, rice and Chinese historical geography, traditional irrigation technology and ancient agricultural spatial pattern expansion in arid areas, and sustainable development of traditional Chinese agriculture, in order to gain experience and enlightenment from them.

Domestication and agricultural origins

Li Shuicheng (Professor, Peking University, Chair Professor of Liberal Arts, Sichuan University)

Before the advent of agriculture, human beings went through a long stage of development. Between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago, due to climate change and human evolution, human society entered the origin stage of agriculture. The peak of the last Ice Age of the Holocene was between 21,000 and 15,000 years ago. After the end of the Ice Age, human society has undergone a series of development and changes, the biggest of which is reflected in cultural aspects, such as the standardization of stone tools, the emergence of religious rituals, the expansion of social network systems, including the emergence of agriculture and the subsequent emergence of settled societies, pottery and other processing tools.

When humanity began to enter the stage of domestication agriculture from the long hunter-gatherer society, it underwent an important change, that is, the emergence of the "broad-spectrum revolution" form. The ecological explanation is that humans have shifted from using "k-select resources" (large animals, with limited growth potential, overuse will lead to resource depletion) to "r-select resources" (small species with high potential yields and will not deplete resources due to exploitation). Climate change has led to the extinction or alteration of ranges of many large animals, forcing humans to seek new and more stable food sources beyond fishing and hunting.

What is "domestication"? With choice as a prerequisite, the growth and reproduction of animals and plants are changed by human activities, and a symbiotic relationship developed between animals and plants and humans is "domestication". And the amount of food obtained through active production exceeds half of the food needed by a society, and the domesticated animals are no longer confined to their natural habitat, and such a quantitative degree can be said to have entered the domestication stage.

The domestication of plants by humans is a very slow, complex process. The first is the cultivation and acquisition of wild crops, and then it can enter the real domestication stage. The emergence of a grain production system that includes partially domesticated crops and that requires systematic cultivation is a real sense of domestication. What are the signs of domestication? Taking barley as an example, the wild form of barley has defensiveness and diffusion, and the domesticated form of barley defense disappears, the size becomes larger, the growth is relatively stable and synchronized, and the self-pollination germinates rapidly, which is the domestication process of crops from the morphology.

Exploration and Practice of Domestication and Agricultural Origins. The early theoretical exploration of agriculture and domestication by European scholars is the "agricultural strip distribution theory". The theory holds that from the polar region to the tropics, polar hunters, nomadic groups, plough farmers, nomadic + hunter-gatherers, tropical growers + hunter-gatherers are distributed in turn. After the 20th century, botany, genetics and agronomy began to explore the origins of agriculture, and the Soviet scientist Vavilov made great contributions to the study of botany, genetics and plant populations. On the basis of plant taxonomy and distribution, he depicts and summarizes 7 domestication centers, including tropical South Asia center, East Asian center, Southwest Asian center, Mediterranean center, Ethiopia center, Central American center, and Andean (South American) center. But botanical conclusions do not solve the problem of crop domestication and agricultural origin in the true sense, and the real solution to the problem requires the intervention of archaeology.

The famous British archaeologist Childe was the first to put forward the theory of the "Neolithic Revolution". The advent of farming and the raising of livestock were a major turning point in human history, and this turning point occurred in the Near East, so this area is an important area for exploring the origins of agriculture. From the 1940s to the early 1950s, multidisciplinary comprehensive research gradually became the benchmark research method for the origin of agriculture. The American archaeologist McNeish, who began archaeological excavations and research in Central America in the 1950s and 1960s, believes that the initial stage of agriculture was not accompanied by the emergence of settled villages, pottery, polished stone tools, etc. that were listed by Childe as the basic elements of the "Neolithic Revolution". Therefore, McNiche proposed that the origin of agriculture was not a revolution, but a long evolutionary process.

Seven domestication centers in the world. Through archaeological discoveries, research and unremitting exploration, we can already determine that there are seven important domestication centers in the world, including the two river basins in western Asia, the Savannah region south of the Sahara Desert in Africa, North America, Central America, South America, and China's Yellow River Basin and Yangtze River Basin. The two river basins in western Asia, including the Levantine region in the west and the Zagros Mountains in the east, are very important areas of agricultural origin, especially the Levantine region on the eastern Mediterranean coast. The area is native to wild barley, one grain of wheat. The domestication lineage of wheat, through extensive archaeological, botanical, genetic, and genetic studies in the Near East, has been found to be from one wheat to two wheat and then to six wheat. Agriculture spread outward after the emergence of the Near East, showing a wave of spread to northwestern Europe, a process that lasted for more than 5,000 years. Agriculture in Africa enters the lower Nile valleys along the Mediterranean Sea from the southern Levant, but Africa itself has indigenous agriculture, mainly in the Savannah region of the southern Sahara Desert. The varieties of indigenous African agriculture are represented by pearl millet, sorghum and African rice. The domesticated crop species of the Americas are so abundant that they can account for 60% of our food species today, which has had an important impact on the composition of the world's crop varieties, including pumpkins, corn, potatoes, sunflowers, peanuts and legumes. Agricultural development in East Asia is mainly in China. The main domesticated crops in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River are rice, and the jade toad rock in Dao County in southern Hunan and the site of the Immortal Cave in Jiangxi Are of great significance for studying the origin of rice farming. The earliest rice grains have been found at the Yutouyan site in Daoxian County, dating back to about 18,000 to 16,000 years ago, and the earliest pottery in China and even the world has been unearthed. About 10,000 years ago, rice cultivation in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River has become quite popular. In the 1970s, the Hemudu cultural site in Yuyao, Zhejiang Province, also unearthed a large number of rice seeds and agricultural tools for growing rice. The Yellow River Basin and the dryland agricultural areas of northern China are also important domestication centers. The ancestral plant of the dry-land crop millet is the dogtail grass that we can see everywhere today, and the ancestor of the millet should have been a wild species that grew in the northern region at that time. Soybeans, the oil crop, are also important crops for domestication in East Asia. Many archaeological sites in the northern region have unearthed carbonized millet, millet, soybeans, and hemp. There is also a center of domestication, namely Southeast Asia and Oceania. The area is an island in the tropical ocean, and people eat a large number of tuber crops, such as potatoes, taro and so on.

Based on the above new archaeological data, it can be concluded that the origin of agriculture is not limited to individual parts of the world, but independently produces unique crop varieties in several scattered areas of the world. The Agricultural Revolution is often thought of as a shift from hunter-gatherer to settled agrarian society.

Domestication and the effects of agriculture. There are about 200,000 edible plant species growing on Earth, of which 2,000 to 3,000 have been used as food by humans and 200 have been domesticated by humans. 70% of the earth's arable land is grown with grain, and grain provides 50% of the heat to humanity. But agriculture is not a way of production that human beings aspire to or prefer, but is a change that human beings are forced to change under the influence of an external force. Some scholars have a negative view of this. However, domestication is, after all, the historical trend of human development. The stage of hunting-gathering activities in human history has completely relied on nature, and the domestication activities and the birth of agriculture have made human beings shift from simply relying on natural sustenance to active creation and acquisition, which has led to the development of society at an unprecedented high rate. As Arvin Toffler points out, the emergence of agriculture was the first of three great waves in the course of human history. Around 4500 years ago, human beings entered the early national stage, which reflects the great impetus that domestication and the birth of agriculture have had on human society.

The traditional irrigation technology in arid areas and the spatial pattern of ancient agriculture have expanded

Zhang Jingping (Research Fellow, School of History and Culture, Lanzhou University)

In general, agricultural production depends on three natural conditions, namely light and heat, soil and moisture. Our ancestors have long mastered the method of transforming the water conditions in agricultural production - irrigation. Dujiangyan, Zhengguoqu and other well-known irrigation projects in the humid semi-humid areas on the right side of the "Hu Huanyong Line" have the main function of ensuring stable and high agricultural production, while the water conservancy projects in the vast arid areas of the northwest are related to the survival of agriculture. Traditional irrigation techniques in arid areas with distinctive characteristics ensure that China's agricultural production continues to develop and have a far-reaching impact in the hinterland of Eurasia. This article only takes the Hexi Corridor as an example to discuss this slightly.

Composition of traditional irrigation techniques in arid areas

The traditional irrigation technology in arid areas contains three main contents, namely, the canal head technology as the basis, the channel technology as the main body, and the key control technology.

The head of the canal is an engineering facility that introduces natural water bodies such as rivers and lakes into artificial channels. The simple construction of the canal head formed by fixed sand and stone by trees and firewood grass is the most widely used method of canal head construction in arid areas, and has been seen in the Dunhuang documents at least in the Tang Dynasty. Shiyuan stacked canal head is another type of typical canal head used for a long time in the Ming and Qing Dynasties West Corridor and parts of Xinjiang, which is a hollow cage made of native plants such as red willow or mustard grass, filled with pebbles and stacked to form a water and water diversion building, the principle is close to the "pebble bamboo cage" in the early Dujiangyan construction. The Hexi Corridor also has a pond dam type canal head that is used to intercept and store spring water gushing out of the surface. The method is to find herbaceous plants with well-developed roots and uproot them, and then stack the grass attached to the soil to form a dam, and the grass roots play a role in consolidating the soil. Overall, the hexi corridor canal head technology developed slowly, gradually lagging behind the Central Plains from the 14th century AD.

Channels are the main body of irrigation technology. The plane distribution of the canal system in the Hexi Corridor and most of Xinjiang is leaf vein-like rather than grid-like. This is due, on the one hand, to the fact that agricultural production in these regions pays less attention to drainage issues, and on the other hand, it is related to the water rights system. Since the Tang Dynasty at the latest, the region has a strict water rights system directly related to the conscription, and once the channels intersect, it is not easy to calculate water rights. In terms of specific engineering structure, the widespread use of water diversion tunnels since the Ming and Qing dynasties is a distinctive feature of traditional water conservancy technology in Arid Areas of China, in Turpan and other places in Xinjiang, it is a karez well that uses groundwater, and in the Hexi Corridor, it is a cave canal that references river runoff.

In irrigation technology, the control technology directly involves the allocation of water, which is related to the fair efficiency of irrigation activities. Since the late Ming Dynasty, the water conservancy control technology of the Hexi Corridor has been embodied in two aspects, one is the intuitive water volume division technology, and the other is the irrigation time control technology. The former is represented by the setting technique, that is, the construction of isometric channel mouths of different widths at the common diversion of multiple channels, and the proportion of the width of the canal mouth is determined by the proportion of taxes borne by the irrigation land, which is mostly used for irrigation to distinguish water; The latter is represented by the incense method, that is, when the incense is lit in turn, the amount of irrigation used by each household is determined by the length of its burning time, which is mostly used for the daily irrigation of farmers' fields.

Constraints on agricultural production in arid areas by traditional irrigation techniques

From a technical point of view, traditional irrigation technology also has a lot of constraints on agricultural production and even social and economic development in arid areas, including the Hexi Corridor. First, the traditional drainage head causes a huge consumption of human resources. The rivers of the Hexi Corridor change frequently, and the construction of the shunhe canal head is easy to lead to repeated abandonment, so since the Han Dynasty, the first choice of barrage canal head. However, the first project of the barrage canal is huge, and it lacks the foundation of the permanent reserve project of the Central Plains "strip stone-pile foundation", and it must be repaired many times a year. Arid areas are already sparsely populated, the construction of canals occupies far more human resources than normal farming activities, and a large number of laborers are tied to water conservancy and cannot be transferred to other fields. Second, the dependence on canal systems has limited the development of commercialized agriculture. In the Hexi Corridor, every small piece of farmland is tied to a large canal system, following very strict irrigation rules. This system cannot achieve differentiated irrigation, and irrigation rules can only be based on wheat, the most important food crop. Originally, the Hexi Corridor was very suitable for melon and fruit cultivation, but the irrigation requirements for more flexible melons and fruits must be planted in areas with special water rights, so it was not widespread for a period of time. Third, due to the lack of means of regulation and storage, agricultural development in the lower reaches of inland rivers cannot be sustained. The most typical example is the Juyanhai area in the lowest reaches of the Heihe River, whose agricultural development began in the Han Dynasty, through the Western Xia and Yuan Dynasties, and was completely abandoned in the Ming Dynasty. Today's researchers mostly blame upstream agriculture for causing the downstream river to stop flowing, in fact, the downstream river channel is not waterless all year round, but there is no water during the irrigation season; If non-irrigated season water sources could be stored, the situation would be very different. Because of these constraints, the technical potential of traditional water conservancy in the Hexi Corridor was exhausted by the late Qing Dynasty, and agriculture declined and society withered. Since the end of the 1930s, the Hexi Corridor has begun to build Yongbeihua canal heads, machine well irrigation areas and large and medium-sized reservoirs, becoming the first region in China to embrace modern water conservancy, and its agricultural development side has entered a new stage of development.

The spatial shaping role of irrigation technology

In the arid region of northwest China, represented by the Hexi Corridor, irrigation technology was born to serve agricultural production, but its spatial shaping influence extends far beyond agriculture. The traditional irrigation technology with large-scale artesian irrigation areas as the carrier has directly led to the formation of large-scale agricultural oases, which not only profoundly shaped the agricultural pattern, but also affected the social development and governance pattern of the region.

The natural oasis of the Hexi Corridor has the dual attributes of suitable for agriculture and grazing, and the spring water gushing out is suitable for the development of small-scale primitive agriculture, and the wetland is suitable for animal husbandry. Moreover, these oases are often interspersed with brine grit when not artificially shaped, and the interior is not continuous and uniform. Since the Han Dynasty, state forces have begun to build large artesian irrigation areas in these oases, reaching their peak in the Ming and Qing dynasties. By draining the swamps and moistening the wasteland, the scattered natural oases are turned into contiguous fertile fields, and the oases are completely pastoralized. The formation of large-scale agricultural oases in the Hexi Corridor has played a more obvious role in blocking the two nomadic sections of the Mongolian Plateau and the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, and the agrarian oasis wetlands have not only made the Great Wall defense line more stable, but also become a new type of melting pot for ethnic integration.

The emergence of large-scale agricultural oases has also created conditions for the "Centralization" of hexi corridor society. A strong agricultural base is the guarantee of the county system. The Dunhuang region in the western part of the Hexi Corridor is farther from the Central Plains than the eastern part of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, but the county system is far more difficult to enter the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau than dunhuang, one of the reasons is that some areas in the eastern part of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau cannot develop large-scale agriculture, and the state apparatus applicable to agricultural population control cannot be deployed. The complex irrigation system relied on by large-scale agricultural oases constitutes the basis for the existence of the Central Plains grass-roots governance system. In the Dunhuang region of the Tang Dynasty, the conscription of conscription depended on water conservancy figures such as "Qutou" and "Weir Head", and the Ming and Qing Dynasties Hexi Corridor had a water conservancy community that was deeply integrated with the Lijia system, and the network of state power was always attached to the irrigation network to control the local society.

Agriculture is the foundation of the country, and the agricultural development of the arid areas of the northwest frontier depends on the popularization and development of irrigation technology, and the trinity of "water management, agriculture, and border consolidation" is integrated. With the support of irrigation technology, the spatial pattern of China's agriculture has been expanded, which in turn has affected the pattern of regional development and governance. As can be seen from the examples of the Hexi Corridor, irrigation technology itself can be deeply involved in the shaping of history as an important constituent element.

From breadth development to in-depth development

-- Sustainable development of traditional agriculture in China

Han Maoli (Professor, Center for Paleogeography and Ancient Literature, Peking University, Polytechnic Professor)

China is a large agricultural country with a long history, but also one of the world's earliest domestication of crops, long-term agricultural practice not only explored a set of intensive farming agricultural production technology, but also promoted the development of Chinese civilization through sustainable agriculture. Although the ancients did not put forward the concept of systematic sustainable development, they ran its essence throughout in practice. The sustainable development of China's agriculture benefits from the theory of heaven, earth and people advocated by the ancients, which is dominated by people to reasonably coordinate the relationship between heaven, earth, water and soil and crops, ensuring the sustained and stable development of agriculture, of which the key technical support lies in the following three aspects.

According to the time of day, favorable geographical conditions, and the form of land use according to local conditions

Soil is the supplier of crop nutrients and water, supply and consumption, and the reciprocating cycle in agricultural production, so that ancient Chinese farmers not only mastered the technology of identifying soil, but also committed to fertilization, fertilizer, and use of land according to local conditions.

Identifying soil is the premise of using soil and transforming soil, the ancients identified soil from two aspects, and the identification is based on the whole country, focusing on the macro scale to understand soil traits. The earliest dialectic comes from the "YuGong" written in the early Warring States period, which divides the world into Kyushu, and according to the state of Yinong, the soil of Kyushu is divided into nine grades. Soil focuses on each piece of farmland where crops are grown. There are many expositions about the material soil of the pre-Qin Zhuzi, among which the Xunzi Wangzhi says: "Phase high and low, see fat [~ symbol ~], the five kinds of preamble ... The matter of ruling the field also. "The core of the soil lies in arranging crops according to local conditions and determining the correspondence with crops according to soil characteristics."

From choosing to use soil to improving soil. In the early days of China, agriculture belonged to the rotational farming system, people divided the land into several pieces, the soil fertility was naturally restored by taking turns to save the land, and the crops were constantly replacing the land in the desertion-tillage cycle. About after the spring and autumn the land entered continuous use, artificial soil fertility appeared. Agricultural books such as the Zhou Li, the Book of Victory, and the Qi Min Zhi Shu record that the initial way to replenish soil fertility was to seed manure rather than dung, that is, to wrap manure juice on seeds. The fertilizer efficiency of manure seeds is only in the seed germination stage, for the full growth period of crops, followed by manure fields, which is commonly referred to as fertilization.

The premise of fertilization is fertilization, and the Song Dynasty Chen Xu's "Agricultural Book" mentions that livestock manure and "burning ash, dusty chaff, broken leaves", river mud can be superior. And "wherever the farmhouse is flanked by dung houses, low eaves to protect them from the wind and rain, and manure dew stars and moons are not fat." The dung house is chiseled into a deep pond, and the bricks are made to prevent leakage. Whoever sweeps away the soil, burns the ashes, raises the chaff, breaks the fallen leaves, accumulates and burns, and accumulates with dung juice." In the Song Dynasty, the economic center of gravity of ancient China has shifted to the area around the Taihu Plain in the south of the Jiangsu Province, which has also become a model area for intensive cultivation, and the Song people Qin Guan once had such an exclamation: "Today, the fields under the sun are said to be like Wu, Yue, Fujian, and Shu, and their one acre is several times that of other states. Pi Wu, Yue, Min, Shu, ancient Yangzhou, Liang Prefecture land also. According to the "Yugong" Yangzhou Tian Ninth, Liangzhou Tian Seventh, is the field of the two states in the Kyushu, etc. the lowest, and now the wo yan is called He Zhao? Wu, Yue, Fujian, and Shu are narrowly populated, and the contribution of cultivating dung irrigation is also the same. After the accumulation of fertilizer, how to fertilize is equally important, Chen Xu's "Agricultural Book" said: "Depending on the nature of its soil, it is appropriate to dung and dung, and it is reasonable to be reasonable, slang is called fecal medicine, and it is also used with feces to use it." "The use of manure pays attention to the rational fertilization of time, place and crop.

Land use adapted to local conditions. Soil is only the foothold of crops, and each seed of crops carries geographical information, so the choice of water and soil not only began at the beginning of agriculture, but also ran through the entire development process. Each side of the water and soil has its own crops, and the establishment of the corresponding relationship between crops and water and soil is to adapt to local conditions. Such measures have existed as early as the agricultural activities in the Spring and Autumn Period, and since then they have been promoted to future generations and spread throughout the country.

Intensive farming techniques for agricultural production

Intensive farming system is to support the sustainable development of traditional Chinese agriculture to achieve the basis, fertilization is only one of the links, seed selection, breeding, farming, land preparation, sowing, cultivation and weeding, irrigation, harvesting, the main content of contemporary farming, the ancients have long been incorporated into practice, and successfully achieved sustainable development of agriculture. The pre-Qin document "Lü's Spring and Autumn" raises a series of questions, including almost all aspects of agricultural production, reflecting the practices that farmers have already thought about and are doing during this period.

Since the "Spring and Autumn of the Lü Dynasty", the Western Han Dynasty's "Book of Victory" and the Northern Wei "Qi Min Zhi Shu" have presented all aspects of farming to people one by one, of which "farming" is the core of traditional agronomy, accompanied by a series of operations such as harrowing land, raking land, paddy field rake land and fertilization, which will create a foothold for crops as a top priority. If we summarize the intensive cultivation of Chinese agriculture, most of it is used on the soil, the other half is used on crops, and it is completed through weeding, fielding, fertilizer and irrigation, and the labor is not only "noon on the day of hoeing", but also runs through each agricultural time.

Agricultural planting system from breadth development to deep development

Breadth development is land expansion, and depth development is multi-species with wheel as the core. The rotation of crops practiced in ancient Chinese agriculture includes: the purpose of increasing the number of harvests, the implementation of a one-year ripening system for the same piece of land, and the rotation of crops for the purpose of maintaining the performance of the land.

There are two types of crop rotation, one is to rotate crops for the purpose of maintaining the performance of the land. A piece of land grows the same crop for many years, absorbing the same nutrients, and the soil will be impoverished as a result. Each crop has a corresponding pest and disease, and a piece of land growing a crop for many years is equivalent to providing stable growth conditions for a certain pest and disease. Crop rotation can effectively alleviate these problems, such as cereal crops absorb more nitrogen and potassium, while calcium absorption is less, legume crops are just the opposite, the implementation of these two crop rotation can successfully balance soil nutrients. The "Qi Min Zhi Shu" pointed out: "In the field of all valleys, mung beans and small bean bottoms are the top, hemp, millet and flax are secondary, and turnips and soybeans are the bottom." "According to the demand for soil nutrients from cereal crops and legumes, the rotation of these two types of crops constitutes nutrient complementarity. The second is to rotate crops for the purpose of increasing the number of harvests. Agricultural production provides food and clothing for people's livelihood, and the population continues to multiply under the nourishment of agriculture. To meet the food needs of the multi-breeding population, expanding the land is one way, as is improving land utilization and implementing the multi-ripening system of crops.

When rotation requires knowing the heavens, the land, and the peasants, the knowledge of the heavens, the earth, and the peasants comes from the labor of the peasants, and the implementation of rotation is taken from the needs of the people. The two-year three-cropping system with winter wheat as the core was implemented in the area of present-day Shandong as early as the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, and gradually prevailed in North China. Compared with the two-year three-cropping system in the north, the southern part implements a two-year rice and wheat rotation, which matured in the Song Dynasty. Rice is originally a product of the water village environment, and the implementation of rice and wheat rotation is to implant dryland crops in paddy fields, which is very rare even in the world's major rice-planting areas today. With a two-crop rotation a year, Gangnam not only harvested two crops, feeding more people, but also took a big step forward in agricultural technology.

Since the Qin and Han Dynasties, the Yangtze River Basin has been implementing the "fire cultivation and water transfer" system of easy land, and the land utilization rate is up to 50%. After the "Anshi Rebellion", the northerners went all the way south, and the population pressure pushed the land utilization rate in Jiangnan from 50% to 100%. After the continuous cultivation of the land, the replanting technology of "pulling and planting" prevailing in the northern rice fields was adopted, and on this basis, the seedling planting technology was formed. Rice occupies the land from May to August and winter wheat from September to May, and the two crops of rice and wheat fill each other's gaps in time and space, creating conditions for changing the form of land use and crop rotation in the southern plains. The double-cropping of rice and wheat in one year not only increased the land utilization rate in Jiangnan from 100% to 200%, but also doubled the yield of crops. The Taihu Plain, supported by the rotation of rice and wheat crops twice a year, has a wealth that surpasses other regions, which promotes the southward shift of the economic center of gravity in ancient China.

Population history research tells us that for more than 2,000 years, the Chinese mouths ranged from 20 million, 50 million to 80 million, 100 million, to 400 million in the Qing Jiaqing period, and behind the population reproduction were the products provided by agricultural production. This climbing population figure is a testament to the success of China's agriculture and agricultural technology. In the thousands of years before industrial society, agriculture became the basis for all social development.

Rice and China's Historical Geography

Zeng Xiongsheng (Researcher of the Institute of Natural Science History of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Professor of the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences) From a historical point of view, rice has had a great impact on the formation and development of Chinese civilization, the trend of Chinese history, population growth and cultural identity.

In 1973, the discovery of a Neolithic cultural site 7,000 years ago in Yuyao Hemudu, Zhejiang Province, challenged the long-standing understanding that Chinese civilization originated in the Yellow River Basin. Subsequently, the discovery of more Neolithic cultural sites from 4,000 to 5,000 to tens of thousands of years in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River proves that the Yangtze River Basin is also one of the origins of Chinese civilization. Rice agriculture is the pillar and characteristic of the Yangtze River civilization. Ancient historical records, the distribution of wild rice, the discovery of Neolithic rice crop remains and modern genetics have proved that the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River and the area south of it are the origins of cultivated rice in Asia, and Liangzhu culture agriculture has taken the lead in entering the era of ploughing rice.

Rice participated in the construction of the Yellow River civilization. Since 1921, when the Swede Anderson first found traces of rice husks at the Yangshao site in Henan, there have been many rice remains in prehistoric sites in Gansu, Shaanxi, Shanxi, Henan, Shandong, Jiangsu and other places in the Middle and Lower Reaches of the Huai River Basin and the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River, ranging from 9,000 to 4,000 years ago, including the site of The Tao Temple in Shanxi, which is known archaeologically as the "earliest China". Historical records show that Dayu had already planted rice in the wet land when he was curing the water; The word "rice" already exists in the oracle bone; Early texts such as poems and books also mention rice.

Rice, which originated ten thousand years ago, after thousands of years of slow development, to the Song Dynasty, which is about a thousand years old, has become the most important food crop in China after millet and wheat. In the last five hundred years, despite being challenged by exotic crops such as corn, sweet potatoes and potatoes, its dominant position has not been shaken. Rice plays a key role in the national economy and people's livelihood. Southeast China, the main rice-producing region, has thus become the center of gravity of China's economy. Later, the state tax was relocated to rice, which was originally an autumn tax levied from September 1, because "japonica rice whisker frost fell to fruit", and the rent was collected on October 1. The national statutory measurement standards have been changed by rice, and the original weights and measures based on millet have been partially replaced by rice. The number of people dependent on rice for their livelihoods is also increasing. By the end of the Ming Dynasty, a situation of "those who cultivate the people under the heavens, and those who live in rice have seventeen" have been formed.

Rice greatly affects the number and quality of the population. In 1935, the geographer Hu Huanyong delineated the Yaohun-Tengchong line, which accounted for 36% of the country's land and 96% of the population on the east side, which basically coincided with the distribution of rice.

Rice also influenced the cultural identity and social psychology of Chinese, and even played a certain role in shaping the national map. After the Song Dynasty, southerners actively promoted rice cultivation in the north while rejecting foreign crops such as wheat. Since the Han Dynasty, people in the Great Wall have thought of planting rice to prevent the northern cavalry from moving south. For example, Zhang Kan of the Eastern Han Dynasty opened more than 8,000 hectares of rice fields under the Hunu Mountains, He Chengzhi, Huang Mao and others in the early Song Dynasty introduced water to plant rice in Hebei, and Tried to plant rice in Ningxia, northern Shaanxi, Northern Jin, Hebei, Tianjin and other places along the Great Wall of the Ming Dynasty. Although the barriers created by these efforts are limited, the distribution of rice has greatly affected the territory of the state and the regime. From the establishment of the Three Kingdoms to the confrontation between the North and the South dynasties, and then to the Song and Jin Dynasties, it is basically bounded by the Huai River, south of the Huai River is the main rice-producing area, and north of the Huai River is dominated by nomadic and dry grain crops. Since the opening of the Grand Canal of the Sui Dynasty, the southern rice and northern transportation has solidified the differences in farming between the north and the south while maintaining national unity, so the difference in staple grain crops has become the basis for the division of north and south in China. The soil south of Jianghuai is mudded, and the rice planted should be rice."

But the geographical division between north and south did not prevent rice from breaking through the Huai River. From the day of its origin, rice has continued to move north, and while participating in the construction of Chinese civilization in the Yellow River Basin and the consolidation of China's northern frontier, rice cultivation technology has also developed in the north. Artificial irrigation technology for paddy fields, rice cultivation technology in saline-alkali land (halogen-repellent land), water temperature regulation technology for paddy fields, and even rice transplanting technology were first found in the northern literature. After the 10th century, the southern rice cultivation technology developed by the influence of the north was introduced to the north by various paths through various ways under the advocacy of people of insight and the encouragement of national policies. In some places, such as the Shanxi Jinci Temple, Beijing Jingxi and Tianjin Xiaozhan, rice cultivation has developed to varying degrees due to the influence of traditional culture, royal politics and military tuntian. Historically, rice production has been highly valued by the whole country, Song Zhenzong, Kangxi and other supreme rulers of the feudal dynasty have participated in the selection and promotion of rice varieties, Champa rice and imperial rice have received widespread attention, Kangxi also planted imperial rice varieties to the Chengde Summer Resort, ending the history of not planting rice north of the Great Wall.

Guangming Daily (2022-09-13 11 edition)

Source: Guangming Network - Guangming Daily