22770 Anderson_FoodEnvironmentChina_FM.indd 6 4/18/14 10:08 AM 22770 Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China Anderson_FoodEnvironmentChina_FM.indd 1 4/18/14 10:08 AM 22770 ENCOUNTERS WITH ASIA Victor H. Mair, Series Editor Encounters with Asia is an interdisciplinary series dedicated to the exploration of all the major regions and cultures of this vast continent. Its timeframe extends from the prehistoric to the contemporary; its geographic scope ranges from the Urals and the Caucasus to the Pacific. A particular focus of the series is the Silk Road in all of its ramifications: religion, art, music, medicine, science, trade, and so forth. Among the disciplines represented in this series are history, archeology, anthropology, ethnography, and linguistics. The series aims particularly to clarify the complex interrelationships among various peoples within Asia, and also with societies beyond Asia. A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher. Anderson_FoodEnvironmentChina_FM.indd 2 4/18/14 10:08 AM 22770 FO O D anD Environment IN earLY AND meDIEVAL CHINA E. N. ANDERSON university of pennsylvania press philadelphia Anderson_FoodEnvironmentChina_FM.indd 3 4/18/14 10:08 AM 22770 Copyright © 2014 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISBN 978-0-8122-4638-4 Anderson_FoodEnvironmentChina_FM.indd 4 4/18/14 10:08 AM 22770 To the Silent Gardeners “The tree of humanity forgets the labour of the silent gardeners who sheltered it from the cold, watered it in time of drought, shielded it against wild animals; but it preserves faithfully the names mercilessly cut into its bark.” —Heinrich Heine, 1833, as quoted in Gross 1983: 323 This book is dedicated to the billions of ordinary people, almost all of them nameless and forgotten, who domesticated rice, developed bread wheat, invented brewing, created soy sauce, tamed the dog, and otherwise discovered our foods, domesticated our crops, invented our basic food processing techniques, and created our basic food production systems—while their leaders, the famous kings and premiers and generals, waged war and massacred. The ordinary people of history gave us life while the leaders gave us death. It is the ordinary creative farmers and gatherers and food technicians who have won immortality. Their names are lost, but their true glory is deathless. “Let us now praise famous men. There be of them, that have left a name behind them, that their praises might be reported. And some there be, which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them. But these were merciful men, whose righteousness hath not been forgotten. Their seed shall remain for ever, and their glory shall not be blotted out.” —Ecclesiasticus 44: 1, 8–13 Anderson_FoodEnvironmentChina_FM.indd 5 4/18/14 10:08 AM 22770 Anderson_FoodEnvironmentChina_FM.indd 6 4/18/14 10:08 AM 22770 Contents Preface ix Usage xi Introduction 1 Chapter 1. Prehistoric Origins Across Eurasia 15 Chapter 2. China’s Early Agriculture 35 Chapter 3. The Origins of Chinese Civilization 55 Chapter 4. TheD evelopment of China’s Sustainability During Zhou and Han 91 Chapter 5. Dynastic Consolidation Under Han 136 Chapter 6. Foods from the West: Medieval China 152 Chapter 7. The Mongols and theY uan Dynasty 182 Chapter 8. Shifting Grounds in Ming 243 Chapter 9. Overview: Imperial China Managing Landscapes 255 Anderson_FoodEnvironmentChina_FM.indd 7 4/18/14 10:08 AM 22770 viii Contents Appendix I. Conservation Among China’s Neighbors 283 Appendix II. An Introduction to Central Asian Food 289 Bibliography 299 Index 331 Anderson_FoodEnvironmentChina_FM.indd 8 4/18/14 10:08 AM 22770 Preface This book covers the development of the Chinese food system from earliest times into the Ming Dynasty. Most attention is devoted to recent work on pre- dynastic China and on the Yuan Dynasty, since these are both key to the system and the subjects of recent major research. Considerations of space have made me leave most of Ming and all of Qing and postimperial China for other venues, but I provide conclusions about China’s food system at the end of imperial times in the early twentieth century, as well as a few comparisons with recent times. For notes on later times, see my website postings “Ming and Qing: Population and Agriculture” on late imperial food and science, “China’s Environmental Ruin” on contemporary mainland China, and “Chinese Food Updates” on con- temporary food ethnography (www.krazykioti.com). These are works in prog- ress, are not to be taken as final, and not to be cited without my permission. This book owes everything to Victor Mair, who expressed interest in my work and helped and encouraged at every stage. I also owe an enormous debt to my lifelong coworker Paul Buell, and to many friends and helpers in the world of Asian food, especially those who kept contact and remained encour- aging during my long years away from China studies—inc luding Jacqueline Newman, Charles Perry, Françoise Sabban, and others. Many more recent friends and fellow scholars have also helped with the enterprise, including Sidney Cheung, David Knechtges, Zelda Liang, Nick Menzies, Tan Chee- Beng, Jianhua “Ayoe” Wang, and Sumei Yi. Peter Agree has served ably as editor, and I am deeply grateful to Alison Anderson and Gail Schmitt for ex- tremely detailed and careful copy- editing. Thanks also for incredible experi- ences in a lost world, to Choi Kwok-tai and Cecilia Choi, and to Chow Hung-fai; and to Purevsuren Tsolmonjav for an intense and inspiring intro- duction to Mongolian life and environment. Finally, I am deeply grateful, as always, to my wife Barbara and our children, children-in-law, and grandchil- dren; they give me life itself. Anderson_FoodEnvironmentChina_FM.indd 9 4/18/14 10:08 AM 22770 Anderson_FoodEnvironmentChina_FM.indd 10 4/18/14 10:08 AM 22770 Usage I use standard transcriptions of the relevant languages. Herein, for western Asia and northern Africa, “Near East” applies to an- cient and medieval times, “Middle East” to the modern zone so called. “West Asia” excludes North Africa but includes some borderlands such as the Cau- casus. “West Asia and North Africa” would be far preferable to either of the former terms, for obvious reasons, but this is not the place to make the change. Finally, one of the most consistent minor annoyances in East Asian studies is the stubborn insistence of historians and art historians on mistranslating Chinese and Japanese words for plants and animals. This is far worse for Jap- anese (where tanuki, the raccoon dog, becomes “badger,” the uguisu bush- warbler becomes “nightingale,” and so on) but bad enough in the case of Chinese. Especially annoying is the persistent mistranslation of mei as “plum.” The plant is actually a species of apricot that is known in botany and in the nursery trade as the “flowering apricot.” The problem would not be so bad if China did not have plums, but it does, and they are called li. Admittedly, “Oriental flowering apricot” is impossibly long for translations of poetry. Thus, herein, I follow some recent authors (such as James Hargett in Fan 2010) and simply use the Chinese word mei. Somewhat farther from food, but important enough to be a problem here, are the absurd Victorianisms like “benevolence,” “righteousness,” and “caitiff” that still afflict Chinese translations and make good Chinese writing sound like stuffy Victorian nonsense. Also a problem is the old tendency to see an- cient China as “feudal” and accordingly to use words like “marquis” and “earl” to translate Chinese titles that really mean something quite different. I shall try to avoid this, but some translations, such as “duke” for gong, are almost impossible to avoid. Anderson_FoodEnvironmentChina_FM.indd 11 4/18/14 10:08 AM Anderson_FoodEnvironmentChina_FM.indd 12 4/18/14 10:08 AM 22770 Introduction One adept at learning is like the king of Qi who, when eating chicken, was satisfied only after he had eaten a thousand feet: if he were still unsatisfied, there would always be another chicken foot to eat. —​­Lü Buwei 2000: 129 Assembling a Food System Chinese food has swept the world. In general, “globalization,” whatever else it may be, has generally meant the spread of American popular culture. The cultural forms that have “swum upstream,” spreading worldwide in the teeth of American advances, are thus of special interest. Among such cultural ways, Chinese food has an almost unique place. Almost no town on earth is without a Chinese restaurant of some kind. Chinese canned, frozen, and preserved foods are available in shops from Nairobi to Quito. Chinese cookbooks abound in every bookstore. The credit for this belongs partly to the quality and diversity of the food, partly to the industriousness and enterprise of Chinese farmers, food workers, merchants, writers, and chefs. However, much of the credit also belongs to the farmers and food entrepreneurs of the rest of the world and to the eclectic Chinese innovators who drew on this global storehouse of ingredients, tech- niques, and knowledges. In anthropological usage, a food system is a process for producing, distrib- uting, and consuming food. It thus takes in agriculture, hunting, foraging, environmental management, trade, marketing, and food preparation, as well as consumption (see P.