A champion rice going for a song in China

A few days back Jeremy shared with me a blog post he had come across which made reference to a documentary which featured an old scroll from China’s Song Dynasty:

The documentary had a nice section about a scroll produced in this period, showing the scrum of life along a river during a festival. It is apparently one of the most famous images in all of Chinese history, so, I feel chastened never to have heard of it previously.

The scroll is online, with annotations along the way to help you understand what’s going on. They’re all pretty interesting, but the very last one is particularly relevant to us here. It’s associated with some paddy fields.

Here’s what is says.

New Varieties of Rice

A farm house on the outskirts of the city. “In the early part of the Song dynasty … a new variety of early-ripening rice was introduced into China from Champa, a kingdom then located near the Mekong River Delta in what is now Vietnam, and by 1012 it had been introduced in the lower Yangzi and Huai river regions. … Because the variety of rice was relatively more drought-resistant, it could be grown in places where older varieties had failed, especially on higher land and on terraces that climb hilly slopes, and it ripened even faster than the other early-ripening varieties already grown in China. This made double-cropping possible in some areas, and in some places, even triple-cropping became possible … the hardiness and productivity of various varieties of rice were and are in large part responsible for the density of population in South, Southeast, and East Asia. According to the Buddhist monk, Shu Wenying, the Song Emperor Zhengzhong (998-1022), when he learned that Champa rice was drought-resistant, sent special envoys to bring samples back to China.”

Lynda Noreen Shaffer, in “A Concrete Panoply of Intercultural Exchange: Asia in World History,” in Asia in Western and World History, edited by Ainslie T. Embree and Carol Gluck (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1997), 839-840.

If you’re interested in Champa rice, there’s a whole paper about it.