Small potatoes in the torrent of history

In the Forbidden City, a strange small white flower caught the attention of Emperor Wanli.

This is a kind of "tribute". Since Columbus discovered the New World in the Americas in 1492, potatoes have swept the table in Europe because of their advantages of easy cultivation, high yield and large starch content, and have made great contributions to solving the famine problem in various countries.

In the 16th century, as the Dutch set up a stronghold in Taiwan, they sent envoys to Beijing many times, and this kind of yellow and hungry lump came to Middle-earth, and changed its name to "potato", which became a royal tribute.

But the royal family and nobles of the late Ming Dynasty did not look down on this kind of crop that was not amazing at all. Anyway, it is also a "tribute", so the division took the potato as an ornamental plant and planted it by the Taiye Pond in Xiyuan, hoping that the emperor could see the small white flowers unique to the potato when he passed by.

This white flower was considered ominous by the Wanli Emperor.

Soon, potatoes, which were used as "tribute", were disliked and distributed to the vegetable household camp.

▲Potato flowers. Source: Photo.com

1

Although the Wanli Emperor looked down on potatoes, Jiang Yikui, who was an official under him, paid attention to this new crop early on.

As a security official in Beijing, Jiang Yikui's daily hobby is to collect folk anecdotes and gossip. His writing is not bad, and he wrote a book "Chang'an Hakka", which is dedicated to describing what he saw and heard in Beijing. In this book, he writes about potatoes: "Potatoes are absolutely like peanuts and taro in Wuzhongluo, and they are also like taro, and this is not pine. In other words, when potatoes were introduced to Middle-earth, they looked like taro, but the taste was relatively average.

However, the vegetable household camp in the Ming Dynasty was not an ordinary institution. According to the Beijing Encyclopedia, Caihuying was a settlement of professional farmers who grew vegetables for the royal family, and was managed by the Shanglin Yuan Jiavegetable Department. Therefore, the vegetable household camp almost gathered a group of people who were the best at growing vegetables in the world at that time, and most of the vegetables and fruits they produced eventually flowed into the court for the emperor and queen to enjoy. According to this, it can be seen that the first Chinese to eat potatoes should still be the royal nobles of the late Ming Dynasty, although they do not look at this foreign crop in their hearts.

During the Chongzhen period, the eunuch Liu Ruoyu recorded the food of the palace in his book "Zhizhongzhi": "The pine nuts of Liaodong, the yellow flowers and golden needles of northern Jiangsu, the local medicine and potatoes in the capital, the moss of the southern capital, the chickpeas bamboo shoots, black essence and yellow essence of Wudang...... The list goes on and on. In other words, after decades of cultivation, potatoes, which were once unbearable, have become a rare "specialty" in Beijing.

However, the potatoes cultivated by the vegetable household camp are still difficult to reach the table of ordinary people. Without the royal family and Gyeonggi, ordinary people still cannot obtain high-quality potato seeds. This point can be corroborated by Xu Guangqi's "Complete Book of Agricultural Administration".

▲Xu Guangqi (1562-1633). Source: Internet

In this masterpiece of agriculture in the late Ming Dynasty, Xu Guangqi writes a lot about the sweet potatoes that were introduced to China from Europe at about the same time. He wrote a special article "Sweet Potato Shu", which summed up the experience of sweet potatoes after the first trial planting in Shanghai, and became a famous sweet potato Songjiang planting method in the history of agronomy. In the face of potatoes, this bachelor at the end of the Ming Dynasty only introduced its alias, shape and eating method, indicating that even if he is as high and powerful, it is impossible to try and summarize the cultivation methods of potatoes.

When the taste of potatoes gradually became accepted by the upper echelons of the Ming Dynasty, a great famine continued to sweep through the Ming Dynasty.

According to the "Meteorological History of China", there have been four Xiaoice periods in the history of the mainland. The most obvious feature of the so-called "Xiaoice River" is that the weather suddenly turns cold, and it lasts for a long time. According to Zhu Kezhen's calculations, China's Fourth Xiaoice Period occurred between the middle of the Ming Dynasty and the middle of the Qing Dynasty. Among them, during the period from Wanli to Chongzhen, the secondary disasters caused by this extreme climate were the most serious.

During this period of time, Taihu Lake, Poyang Lake, Dongting Lake, Huaihe River and other southern water systems have frozen one after another, and even south to today's Guangdong, Hainan and other places, the records of "summer cold" and "summer frost and snow" are also common.

In the last years of Chongzhen, the drought caused by extreme weather almost swept the four directions of the Ming Dynasty, among them, Shunde Mansion, Daimyofu and Hejian Mansion in Hebei Province successively broke out due to the epidemic caused by drought, "to one night, the people fled and the city was empty." In Shaanxi and Gansu, where the drought was most severe, droughts and locust plagues lasted for 15 years.

Since Zhang Juzheng reformed the "One Whip Law" in the Wanli era, the Ming Dynasty has rarely had any changes in economic planning. The core of the "One Whip Law" is to integrate the people's taxes and forced labor, allowing the people to pay a certain amount of tax and silver according to the area of land they own. This tax system reached the Chongzhen era, but it became the last straw that crushed the Ming Dynasty. On the one hand, the uneven development of the northern and southern regions of the Ming Dynasty, and the use of unified standards for taxation eliminated the corruption of officials to a certain extent, but also invisibly increased the economic burden of the people. On the other hand, the tax law stipulates that only money is collected, and the people can only sell the grain for money and confiscate it.

▲ Wanli first assistant Zhang Juzheng. Source: Internet

In years of famine, food is used to save lives. Now, after selling the money and paying taxes, you can only go hungry.

Due to the long-term lack of food, the Shaanxi man Li Zicheng rose up, played the slogan of "welcome the king, do not accept food", quickly assembled the team, and carried out activities in Shaanxi, Gansu, Sichuan, and Hubei, with the intention of overthrowing the decadent rule of the Ming Dynasty.

If the rulers of the Ming Dynasty had the foresight to realize that the potato was not only a "tribute" but also a "hero" to survive the famine, and vigorously promoted its cultivation, it is not clear whether this turmoil caused by starvation would have been eliminated. But the Ming Dynasty was for potatoes, and if you miss it, you will miss it forever.

2

Li Zicheng really attacked the Forbidden City, and the Ming Dynasty died. But Li Zicheng is not a true dragon emperor, and soon, under the cooperation of Wu Sangui's internal and external affairs, the eight banners of the Qing army outside the customs rushed in and successfully won the Central Plains.

The great changes in history have also changed the direction of potatoes.

The Qing Dynasty abolished the imperial food supply system of the Ming Dynasty, and the "vegetable households" who originally grew vegetables for the royal family were instantly reduced to commoners. With the change of the identity of vegetable households, potatoes and other vegetables and fruits that were originally only supplied to the royal family were all relegated to "mortal" and gradually appeared on the table of the common people.

Although the people in the Gyeonggi area were able to eat potatoes at this time, they were a royal tribute in the old days, and compared with staple foods such as wheat and rice, potatoes were still in a relatively awkward position for a long time.

As the messenger of potatoes in China, the Dutch have never given up hope.

After the death of the Ming Dynasty, Zheng Chenggong, the "national surname", led his troops into Taiwan and drove out the Dutch, who had been colonizing here for 38 years. The Dutch had no choice but to flee to the island of Java and carry out the Oriental maritime trade with the help of the Dutch East India Company, which had previously been established there. As a result, a large number of potatoes that entered southern China arrived in the area of Beijing and Tianjin from Java via Guangzhou with the Dutch mission in the summer of the 12th year of Shunzhi (1655).

The purpose of the Dutch's trip was to enter into consensus negotiations with the Qing emperor on the Dutch trade in Chinese mainland. The Dutch believe that the mysterious East still retains many ancient Xi customs, and there is a great gap between it and the ever-changing Europe. Of course, for the Qing Dynasty, which was enjoying the joy of victory at that time, the potatoes that had been on the table of the emperor of the Ming Dynasty were still not welcomed.

But the Dutch never gave up on their vision of opening up the Chinese market.

From 1663 to 1792, Dutch missionaries and official missions came to China five times. Because potatoes were rich in vitamin C, they had a good preventive effect on scurvy, which was common to seafarers at that time. Therefore, when members of the mission come to China, they must have potatoes on board. The potatoes followed the footsteps of the mission and made their way to the southern coastal cities along the way. Since then, the potato, which is called "potato" in the north, has been given the name "Javanese potato" in the south.

At this time, China's population was experiencing a round of explosive growth. In order to appease the people of the Central Plains, the emperors of Kangxi and Yongzheng implemented the policies of "breeding people in prosperous times and never giving them more" and "spreading them into acres", which objectively provided a boost for population growth. According to statistics, during the Qianlong period after Yongzheng, the Chinese population showed a straight upward trend, and in just half a century, the country's population surged from 143 million in the sixth year of Qianlong to 313 million in the 59th year of Qianlong, more than doubling.

The rapid increase in population has led to a sharp increase in the demand for food in the whole society, which in turn has led to the further intensification of the contradiction between man and land. This laid the groundwork for the shortage of grain and the price of rice in the Qianlong era.

In order to make ends meet, the people who lack food and food can only take risks, confront the rich businessmen and the government, and grab rice and grain. As a result, rice grabbing has occurred one after another across the country. From the winter of the eighth year of Qianlong to the spring of the tenth year, "Huguang, Jiangxi, Jiangnan and other places were not exempt from cases of grain grabbing, and especially in Jiangnan, there were more than 100 cases of grabbing in one city."

In the areas through which Caoyun passed, such as Suzhou Prefecture, the grain tide was even more severe. Yuan Mei's Gu Yaonian is just a cloth cloth in Suzhou, "asking for the price of square meters, advocating the crowd to beat the officials", and was arrested and interrogated by the government, which unexpectedly aroused the anger of the people of Suzhou. The government continued to send troops to suppress it, and more than 30 people were arrested before and after the incident was calmed down.

Faced with the social turmoil caused by food shortages, Emperor Qianlong obviously did not want to repeat the mistakes of the late Ming Dynasty, so he decided to relax the household registration management and encourage the people to move to open up the wasteland. In this context, potatoes have also begun the historical process of "conquering the city".

3

In the 37th year of Qianlong (1772), the imperial court proposed to "permanently suspend the compilation and review", and the household registration management was loosened, and the yeoman farmers had the opportunity to move freely. The growth and mobility of the population has brought the society's demand for land reclamation and grain growth to an unprecedented level.

Potatoes, which were previously only grown in a small area in Beijing and Tianjin, have become the staple food of migrants because of their high starch content and satisfying advantages.

Because potatoes are cold and drought tolerant, following the pioneers from all over the world, their cultivation has also spread throughout the country, settling in Hebei, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Shandong, Henan, Sichuan, Yunnan and other places.

Yan Ruyu, who served as the prefect and prefect of Hanzhong for 20 years, wrote in the "Three Provinces Border Preparedness": "The potatoes (potatoes) have purple flowers, round leaves, raw taro under the roots, the roots are as long as threads, and they are dozens or dozens of fruits. The color is purple, such as fingers, fists, such as small cups, sweet and light. A piece of ravine, digging taro often dozens of stones...... Artichoke slices can be stored for a long time, and flour and buckwheat can be used for cakes and buns. ”

▲ Wolf tooth potato. Source: Photo.com

This shows that at the latest in the Jiaqing and Daoguang periods, potatoes have become one of the staple foods in southwest China.

The same historical process took place in the Northwest Territories. Xing'an Prefecture (now Ankang City) in Shaanxi Province mentioned in the local government chronicles: "Thirty years ago, the autumn harvest in this place was dominated by millet and grain, and ten years later, it was mixed with grain and artichoke (potato), and by the end of Qianlong, it was all over the mountains and valleys." ”

Gradually, people suffering from famine discovered the secret of high potato yields.

It turns out that potatoes can be grown at least twice a year. Generally, it is planted in March and April every year, and can be harvested in summer and August, and the yield per mu can be as high as one ton. You must know that during the same period, the yield of wheat per mu in the north was only about 300 catties, while even if there were two crops of rice in the south, the annual yield per mu was only five or six hundred catties.

It can be said that the high-yield potato has saved the lives of many Chinese and changed the dietary structure of Chinese for thousands of years. As recorded in the 21st year of Daoguang (1841) Hubei "Jianshi County Chronicles": "The people eat bread grain, artichoke, the second is fern root, the second is artemisia, and the rice eater is eleven ears." ”

At this point, after more than 200 years of being introduced to Middle-earth, the potato was finally accepted and relied on by the Chinese people.

4

As the people's dependence on the staple food of potatoes became stronger and stronger, in the middle of the 19th century, in addition to the name of "potato", people gave it yam eggs, yang potatoes, ground eggs, ground beans, sweet potatoes and other Chinese names that fit the characteristics of various places.

As the champion of the imperial examination in the 22nd year of Jiaqing (1817), who grew up eating potatoes, Wu Qijun, a native of Henan, recorded the planting method and dietary function of potatoes for the first time in his "Illustrated Examination of Plant Names":

"Potato, formerly known as potato, is available in Guizhou and Yunnan. Green stems and green leaves, leaf size, sparse, oblong shape is different, the roots are more white whiskers, the lower knot is round and firm, the stem is pressed and the root is as complex as a sweet potato, the stem length is weak as a vine, and the cover is yellow and unique. Cure hunger and famine, the storage of the poor, the roots and fertilizers are interspersed in autumn, the taste is sweet like taro, like potatoes and light, and the soup is simmering and burning, all of which are not suitable. The leaf flavor is like pea seedlings, and it is smooth and timeless when eaten according to the wine. Flowering purple pentagons, with blue stripes between them, red in the middle, green stamens - wisps, also complex Chuchu. Shanxi is planted as a field, commonly called yam eggs, especially huge, white flowers. At the end of the year, the southern mountain hooligans are particularly planted, and the rich harvest hundreds of stone clouds every year. ”

What Wu Qijun didn't know was that around the time he wrote this book, Ireland in Western Europe was suffering from the worst famine in history.

The Great Famine, caused by the late blight, raged in Ireland for five years. During this period, the population of Ireland under the "empire on which the sun never sets" plummeted by nearly a quarter. Behind the famine was the disease's erosion of potatoes, which the local population relied on as their staple food. The stems, leaves, and edible tubers of the potato seedlings infected with the late blight bacterium all rotted, resulting in a large number of potato harvests in these years, and the inhabitants were starved and starved.

▲Van Gogh's masterpiece "The Potato Eater". Source: Internet

In the same way, as one of the main food rations of the Chinese people in the 19th century, when the potato was planted on a large scale, it also caused a certain degree of famine.

In the fifteenth year of Guangxu (1889), Sichuan, Guizhou and other places had more rainfall in summer than in previous years, drought-tolerant and cold-tolerant potatoes were flooded in a large area, the local people lost the food they relied on for survival, and a large number of hungry people poured into the mountains, "the four towns were hungry and the people were very hungry".

Throughout Chinese history, although there was still considerable pressure on the people's food problem in the late Qing Dynasty and even the Republic of China era, for the Chinese people who have always held the concept of sustainable development, potato breeding and selection has always been the most important thing to reverse this disadvantage in people's livelihood.

As the founder of China's earliest agricultural journal Acta Agricultura, Luo Zhenyu advocated the introduction of high-quality potato seeds from Europe and the United States in 1900 and the establishment of seed fields, "so as to multiply, avoid the labor of seeking from afar, and reap the benefits of multiplication". This provides a new idea for domestic potato breeding.

Later, under the dual influence of the imperialist invasion and the introduction of Chinese seeds, several cold-tolerant varieties of potatoes in China, such as white-skinned, yellow-skinned, red-skinned, and purple-skinned, ushered in the peak yield per mu in the 30s of the 20th century. According to Mr. Tang Qiyu's statistics, in 1936 alone, the total output of potatoes in the country was as high as 25 million catties. The abundant potato production brought the "potato light" of life to that era that was hit by the double blow of war and famine.

Continuing this tradition, in 1939, Yang Hongzu, an agronomist who returned from his studies in the United States, brought the potato hybrids he had introduced from Krenz, a potato breeder at the University of Minnesota, and planned to carry out the first batch of hybrid breeding trials in Chengdu, Sichuan. Unexpectedly, just in time for the outbreak of late blight, Yang Hongzu's potato seedlings transplanted to Sichuan were almost lost. Later, with the help of Soviet potato breeding experts, Yang Hongzu was able to introduce 16 wild potato varieties grown in Europe and the United States to continue his hybrid experiments.

After years of trial and error, in 1951, Yang Hongzu finally discovered 8 varieties of hybrid seeds that could be immune to late blight epidemics in the field.

With the blessing of new technology, potatoes once again saved the lives of many Chinese in the famine of the 50s of the last century.

Today, China has become the world's largest potato producer. Many experts believe that with the rapid increase of the global population, only potatoes can save humanity in the event of a food crisis in the world in the future. To this end, China has also taken the lead in launching the strategy of turning potatoes into a staple food, making this crop, which has been imported from China for more than 400 years, among the four major staple foods in China, along with rice, wheat and corn.

▲ Potatoes. Source: Photo.com

As time goes by, when the potato realizes its "identity" counterattack, does anyone still remember its embarrassing figure when it first arrived? And who would have thought that the small white flower that was considered "ominous" in the Forbidden City at the beginning was actually the last bottom line of the good times?

Bibliography:

Chen Guichao: The Legend of the Potato, Huazhong University of Science and Technology Press, 2014

Tong Pingya, "The History of Potato Cultivation in China", Historical Materials of Chinese Science and Technology, No. 1, 1990

Zhai Qianxiang, "The Spread of Potatoes in China in the 16th and 19th Centuries", China Science and Technology Historical Materials, No. 1, 2004

Xie Conghua and Liu Jun, "The Change of Chinese Potato from a Shortage Crop to a Staple Food", Journal of Huazhong Agricultural University, No. 4, 2021

Tang Wenji, "The Grain Problem and Its Countermeasures in the Qianlong Period", Studies in Chinese Social and Economic History, No. 3, 1994

Zheng Nan, "The Impact of the Introduction of Foreign Crops on Chinese Society from the Introduction of Corn, Sweet Potato and Potato", Hangzhou Asian Food Science Forum, 2011