Cool Footnote # 2: Pertaining to the promiscuity of rice
In the year 1012, the third emperor of the Song dynasty, Zhenzong, having grown increasingly concerned about the intersection of famine and population growth in southern China, ordered 30,000 bushels of the seeds of a particular variety of “early-ripening” rice to be distributed at state expense to peasants across the empire. The rice had many advantages, including drought resistance, but was especially popular because its early maturing qualities meant that it could be sown and reaped twice a year. This state-sponsored rice improvement project was a massive success. According to Francisca Bray, an authority on the history of Chinese agriculture, the new rice “permitted a quantum leap in the productivity of Chinese rice-farming.”
The original source of the rice was the kingdom of Champa, encompassing a region that is now central Vietnam. Over the course of centuries, speculates Bray, Champa rice had migrated north, peasant farmer by peasant farmer, until it caught the attention of Zhenzong, who is believed to have sourced his bushels of seed from the southeastern coastal province of Fujian.
In 2011, Randolph Barker, a rice agronomist who played a role in the 20th century’s green revolution, published an article noting that the kingdom of Champa was strongly influenced by Indian culture: the court and elite classes spoke Sanskrit and subscribed to Hindu beliefs. Barker states that a colleague of his had identified a sample of Champa rice as belonging to the aus subpopulation of rice associated with the Bangladesh/Myanmar region. Barker theorizes that this rice made its way to Champa via the same migratory cultural pathways that transmitted Sanskrit and Hindu beliefs.
More recent research in Taiwan pushes back on Barker’s argument, stating that a comprehensive genetic review more properly categorizes Champa rice as belonging to the indica subpopulation, but for my purposes the distinction is moot. Indica rice is believed to have originated in India, and aus is believed to be derived from Indica.
The best current archeological and genetic guess is that rice was first domesticated 9000 or 10,000 years ago in China’s Yangzi valley. A separate domestication is believed to have taken place in India roughly 5000 years ago, but according to recent genetic sleuthing, that domestication did not really take hold until crucial genes from the rice domesticated in China were incorporated in the Indian rice genome.
And then, a thousand years ago, a descendant of that India/China rice hybrid comes back, via ancient Vietnam, to the Yangzi valley, to where the human story of rice began, and, as a joint venture between emperor and peasant, kicks off a medieval green revolution.
A better example of the inherent border-ignoring promiscuity of food is hard to imagine.