ABSTRACT
The place of American food plants in the history o f Chinese agriculture can be better
understood after the nature o f two major agricultural developments in early-modern and
modern China is briefly described. Historically, the core of Chinese agriculture, during the
last millennium at least, has always been its cropping system, despite some improvements in
agricultural implements and water-control which cannot be called major technological
progress. In the absence o f major technological inventions such as affected modern western
agriculture, the improvement in China’s food crops did more than anything else to push the
agricultural frontier further from the lowlands, basin, and valleys to the relatively well-
watered hills at first and then to the more arid mountains. In retrospect, the first long-range
revolution in land utilization and food production in early-modern China was brought about
by the development of an ever-increasing number of varieties o f early-ripening and relatively
drought-resistant rice, consequential to the introduction of the Champa rice from central
coastal Indochina at the beginning of the eleventh century.2 Throughout subsequent centuries
the early-ripening rice was responsible for the conquest of hilly regions where the topsoil
was sufficiently heavy and rainfall or spring water was adequate. With the development of
some extremely early-ripening varieties, which matured between fifty and thirty days after
transplantation, and their dissemination in the hitherto sub-marginal rice land during the first
half of the nineteenth century, rice culture seems to have approached its saturation in China
proper. But some, three centuries before the apparent limit in rice culture was reached,
various American food plants, such as the peanut, the sweet potato, and maize, which after
the Chinese, hitherto mainly a plain and valley folk, systematically to tackle dry hills and
mountains and sandy loams too light for rice and other native cereals. If we call the conquest
of relatively well-watered hills by the early-ripening rice the first revolution in land
utilization in early-modern China, the conquest o f a large area of dry hills and mountains,
still virgin land by about 1700, and sandy soils along the southeast coast and inland rivers by
these American food plants can justly be called the second revolution in China’s food
production. In fact, during the last two centuries when rice culture was gradually reaching its
limit and beginning to suffer from the law of diminishing returns, the various dryland food
crops introduced from America contributed most to the increase in national food production
and made possible a continual growth of population.
