Wen 丨 Shen Yi
preface
The watermelon (Citrullus Vulgaris) is a melon that has spread throughout the world in the cucurbitaceae family. Sweet and juicy, it is a good product for summer heat, and today it has become the most common fruit for our people to eat in summer.
2019 data show that the world's population accounts for 20% of the Chinese, growing nearly 70% of the world's watermelons, even if the total output of watermelons in the world's second to tenth melon producing countries is added, the amount is only 1/4 of China.
Due to the short shelf life and other reasons, the export volume of watermelon in China is very small. That is to say, so many watermelons, almost all of them are solved by ourselves!
According to the calculation of 10 pounds of watermelon, Chinese eat 16 billion watermelons every year! Among them, Guangdong is the most powerful, and the per capita monthly consumption of melon can be as much as 10.37 kilograms, which can be called China's largest province for eating melons. "Dead vines old trees, air conditioning WiFi watermelon". For watermelon, Chinese can be described as a special love! It even gave birth to the Internet celebrity word "melon eating masses".
But are you really a qualified "melon eater"? Do you know when watermelon appeared in China?
(Distribution map of watermelon planting types in China: picture from the Internet)
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > the origin of watermelon</h1>
In terms of meaning, "watermelon" is of course derived from "west", not from Chinese mainland. The question of the origin of watermelon in China has been debated since the Ming Dynasty, and The Complete Book of Agricultural Politics of Ming Xu Guangqi said:
"Watermelon, planted in the western region, hence the name."
The 1980s attracted a great deal of attention from the academic community. Some scholars advocate the introduction of five generations of Chinese watermelon, and some scholars advocate that watermelon is native to China.
But a growing body of archaeological evidence proves that watermelon originated in Africa. Archaeologist Engel deduced that the origin of watermelon is in South Africa, and the native species of watermelon have been found in equatorial Africa.
Spread from Sudan to Egypt and western Asia in 2000 BC, and in 1857 the British explorer David Livingstone discovered a variety of wild watermelon communities in Kalahari, Botswana, southern Africa. Watermelons can also be seen on the images of paintings preserved in ancient Egypt.
The Berbers called watermelon tadelaât, unlike the Arabic name battikh, which proves that watermelon was cultivated very early in North Africa. BC watermelons have spread throughout southern Europe and Asia. The eastern Mediterranean coastal region, the Caucasus, Iran and Central Asia Minor are all keen to grow watermelons. Watermelons were planted in Central Asia Minor, no earlier than the eighth century, and after the Hui dynasty moved west, they were transplanted from there to the north and south of the Tianshan Mountains east of the Onion Ridge.
The earliest mention of "watermelon" can be seen in Chinese writings, which is the diary "The Record of Traps" written by Ling Hu Ofe in Jin County after five generations after he fled to the Khitan Dynasty.
In 947, Hu Yu followed Xiao Han, the head of the Khitan tribes at the time, on an envoy to the Khitans, and after Xiao Han's death, he stayed in the Khitan for seven years and returned to the Central Plains in the third year of later Zhou Guangshun (953 AD). He recorded his experience of eating watermelon in The Book of Traps in the Khitan Shangjing (note: present-day Balin Zuoqi Nanboluo City, Inner Mongolia), which was later quoted by Ouyang Xiu's "Appendix II of the New Five Dynasties History of Siyi":
"From Shangjingdong to forty miles to Zhenzhu Village, the first food vegetables, tomorrow eastbound, the terrain is getting higher and higher, looking west to the pine forest of the flat land, yuran tens of miles, tunneling into the Pingchuan River, more grass and trees, the beginning of watermelon, Yun Khitan broke back to get this kind of seed, with cow dung covered and planted, as big as Chinese winter melon and sweet taste."
This passage in Hu Zhao's diary shows that when he entered Pingchuan, he tasted watermelon, and it is said that the Khitan defeated Hui qi to get watermelon seeds, which were planted with cow dung, which were as big as Chinese winter melons and tasted very sweet.
At that time, watermelon was already cultivated in northern China, from the Tianshan Mountains and Hexi Corridor in the west to Yanbei in the east. In Jurchen, watermelon is called xeko. According to this description by Hu Zhao, it can be speculated that watermelon was introduced to Xinjiang by the Uighurs from Central Asia after 940. After the ninth century, watermelons quickly spread eastward through Turkistan to China and westward into southern Russia.
The Turkic word for watermelon is tarbuz, qarpuz, harpuz, harbuz, and the Turkic word for "watermelon" comes from the Middle Persian "harbōjīnā" and the Persian word "herbuz".
watermelon
The Uighur (Ancient Uyghur) language refers to watermelon as karpuz. The Uyghur language calls watermelon "Awuz." The Turkic Dictionary mentions that in the tenth century AD, "'Awuz' was already widely cultivated in southern Xinjiang and Central Asia. "Among the artifacts unearthed from the astana tomb in Turpan are watermelon seeds from a thousand years ago.
Central Asia Minor and Mesopotamia are both places where large watermelons are produced. Watermelons grown in Xinjiang, China, are also very distinctive, and were introduced entirely from Central Asia. In the bapu city west of Kupyan in Central Asia described in the Early Yuan Dynasty Yelü Chucai's Journey to the West, the watermelon was fifty pounds large, and the "melon is as big as a horse's head" in Xunsgan (Samarkand) is also a watermelon.
The "Grass and Woods" believes that the ancestors of the Yuan Dynasty obtained watermelon species in the western region, because they introduced new varieties from Central Asia and from Central Asia, so Ibn Battutai, who visited China, said that the quality of watermelons produced in China was very similar to the products of Huarazimo (located in the geographical region of western Central Asia, the lower reaches of the Amu Darya River, the southern shore of the Xianhai River, present-day Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan) and Isfahan (present-day central Iranian cities).
This claim has been confirmed by the "Feast and DrinkIng Map" discovered in 1955 by the researchers of the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Ao Han QiYang Mountain, Ao Han Qi, Chifeng City, Inner Mongolia. From this mural, it can be seen that on the black square table in front of the owner of the tomb, there are two plates of fruits, one plate contains pomegranates, peaches, dates and other fruits, and the other black disc is obviously placed in three watermelons. According to archaeologists, the tomb was built during the sixth to seventh years of the Taiping period (that is, 1026-1027 AD) of the Liao Shengzong Yelü Longxu Taiping. These three watermelons are nearly a thousand years old, and may be the earliest "watermelon" found in ancient Chinese paintings so far.