[VOL III] SOWING RICE, AT SOO-CHOW-FOO, PROVINCE OF KIANG-SI

SOWING RICE, AT SOO-CHOW-FOO, PROVINCE OF KIANG-SI

Cover Image: Sowing Rice, at Soo-chow-foo ( Province of Kiang-su ) / SuZhou JiangSu China / Drawn by T. Allom Engraved by W.Wetherhead – ALAMY Image ID:2X55N40

*Suzhou was one of the important regions for ancient rice cultivation in China. According to statistical data from the Wu Kingdom’s bronze artifacts unearthed in Suzhou between 1975 and 1980, it was found that farming tools accounted for 60% of these artifacts. This suggests that Suzhou had rich agricultural activities in ancient times, including the cultivation of rice and tilling of farmland. Rice was one of the crucial crops in ancient Chinese agriculture and had a profound influence on Chinese history and culture. The rice cultivation tradition in the Suzhou region can be traced back to ancient times, providing valuable historical clues about ancient Chinese agriculture and rural life.

– Then, wake, that you may live.
Here, take the best prescription I can give;
Your bloodless veins, your appetite shall fail,
Unless you raise them by a powerful meal,-
Come, take this rice.

HORACE.

IT is to the productiveness of the oryza sativa, a（*It is called in Arabic, aruz; Hindustan, chawl; Latin, oryza; Italian, riso; French, riz.） simple grass, on which nature has conferred the peculiar property of growing in marshy or inundated grounds, that the vast regions of the East owe the density of their population, and their early submission to social obligations. Immense districts in China and Hindoo countries would, unquestionably, have still lain desolate and untenantable, were it not for the ability to alter and to cultivate the surface of the globe, which a knowledge of the rice-plant conveys. To what simple causes, therefore, does delicate analysis sometimes lead, in our efforts to trace the most remarkable effects to their proper sources; for, the density of nations, from the earliest periods, seems to have been materially influenced by the discovery and cultivation of this “staff of life.” Previous to its introduction into Egypt and Greece, it had been long known in more eastern lands, for Pliny, Dioscorides, and Theophrastus all speak of its importation from India; but, in their age, it was little cultivated on the shores of the Mediterranean. Within the last three centuries, however, its popularity has become universal, restricted only by the limits of climate, for it now occupies the same place in intertropical countries as wheat in the warmer parts of Europe, and oats and rye in those that are more northern. In the United States of North America, Carolina especially, the cultivation of rice forms a principal occupation of the rural population, and chief export of the maritime; there, the date of its introduction, 1697, is tenaciously remembered, the benefits of its naturalization being of such importance to the national wealth and happiness.

From the facility with which it can be cultivated, yielding two crops annually, and the watery soil to which it is partial, the presumption is, that rice was specially provided by the all-wise Creator, as the chief food of most sultry kingdoms. Besides the Chinese and Hindoos, the Malays and neighbouring islanders have paid the utmost attention to this species of cultivation; and Japanese, Cingalese, and Batavians experience the benefits of a crop, which is not only semi-annual, but yields six times as much as an equal space of wheat lands. A fondness for this wholesome food pervades the German states, where, in the southern latitudes, from long culture, it has acquired a remarkable degree of hardiness, and adaptation to the particular temperature—a circumstance adduced as an argument in favour of cultivating exotics; but seeds imported directly from India will not ripen at all in Germany, and even Italian or Spanish seeds are much less early and hardy than those ripened on the spot. One experiment was made in England to raise this Indian beverage, and a healthy crop of rice was successfully reaped on the banks of the smooth-flowing Thames.

In Oriental countries, rice is extolled as superior to all other species of food, and in China it is an article of the first necessity. So completely is its presence deemed requisite at all meals, that the term fan, boiled rice, enters into every compound that implies the ceremony of eating; tche-fan, to eat rice, signifies a meal generally; tsao-fan, morning rice, means breakfast; and by oan-fan, evening rice, supper is implied. It is undoubtedly a light and wholesome diet, although it is supposed to include less of the nutritive principle than wheat.（*Carolina rice contains—of starch, 85.07; of gluten, 3.60; of gum, 0.71; of uncrystallizable sugar, 0.29; of colourless fat, 0.13; of vegetable fibre, 4.8; of salts with lime bases, 0.4; and of water, 5.0.） From the small proportion of gluten which it contains, it is not capable of being made into proper bread, but is highly valued for puddings, and many culinary preparations. Its excellent qualities, rapidity of production, and consequent cheapness, confer upon it claims to attention as a general article of sustenance for the lower classes of society; and, it is ascertained, that a quarter of a pound of rice, slowly boiled, will yield upwards of a pound of solid and nutritive food.

Besides its offices in the support of life, there are others which rice discharges, useful, profitable, and agreeable. Its flower being reduced into a pulp with hot water, is molded into figures, and shaped into bracelets, which the Chinese fashion, and adornment with scroll-work, resembling mother-of-pearl toys. In our cotton factories, it is used in making weavers’ dressings for warps; and at Goa, on the Malabar coast, as well as in the island of Batavia, the ardent spirit called rack, or arrack, is obtained from a decoction of rice, fermented and distilled, and mixed with the juice of the cocoa-nut tree. Civilization is not, in this instance, solely chargeable with the guilt of furnishing intoxicating liquors to the Indians, for, before the Portuguese, or the Dutch, or the British, had any settlements in the far east, the demoralizing beverage of sewat-tchoo, a distillation from rice, was sold in every little public-house in China.

Inevitably was the only deplorable consequence supposed to attend exclusive oryzaeus diet; in some provinces, the prevalence of ophthalmia was foolishly attributed to its copious use. That this charge is groundless seems highly probable, from the fact, that the millions who dwell in the great Hindoo continent, and live solely upon rice, are not subject to any such disease. Besides, in Egypt, where the ophthalmia was much more prevalent in ancient times, than it was ever said to have been in China, this grain was neither known nor cultivated until the reign of the Caliphs, when it was brought thither from the East. If this disease predominate in China, which is questioned, it is probably owing to the crowded state of their low dwellings, always filled with smoke from the sandal-wood tapers that mark the hours of fleeting time, to the constant and general use of tobacco, to the miasma exhaling from the offal uniformly collected near each entrance, and, lastly, from the very frequent practice of bathing the face with warm water.

The benefits and the blessings of such a staff of life as this readily-raised crop, suffer no slight detraction, from its precarious character; for, any failure, however slight, is attended with the most deplorable consequences. Where population is so amazingly crowded, subdivision of land practised to so inconsiderate an extent, and riches rarely ever laid by for the day of inability or misfortune, a check to the annual produce must necessarily prove fatal to numbers of the poorest classes. Too frequently, therefore, famine visits and wastes the land, for the rice-crop is subject to many casualties. A drought, in its early stages, withers the young shoots in the ground; and, an inundation, in a more advanced state, proves equally destructive; add to which, that birds and locusts continue to wage everlasting war upon fields of rice, in preference to any other of the cultivated labours of man, and these enemies are particularly numerous in China. Wheat and millet being raised in the northern provinces, the chances of being visited by famine are consequently reduced in proportion to the increased variety of grains, and Europeans have urged upon the attention of the Chinese agriculturists, with all the candour and humanity that belong to this quarter of the globe, the advantage of introducing the potato, as an auxiliary to rice and wheat, in averting those periodic visits of scarcity. To obviate the fatal effects of such calamitous failures in the rice-crop, the emperor causes a large supply to be constantly laid up in the public granaries, for distribution at moderate prices when the day of dearth arrives. This system is of ancient usage, and belongs naturally to all patriarchal, imperial, or feudal governments, in which the lord is bound to look paternal ly to the wants of his retainers; but the Chinese family has grown too large for its beneficial operation, and the minor mandarins, by their extortions and inhumanity, are known to intercept the rays of imperial favour, and suffer the poorest classes to wither away in the chilling shade of famine and destitution.

Although there are very many qualities of rice, there appears to be but one species. Climate and cultivation produce such obvious changes in its value, that different qualities resemble different kinds. Mountain-grain, cultivated in Cochin-China, and amongst the Himalayan chain, is by some called dry-rice, but even this quality is not raised without the aid of heavy periodic rains, so that every quality is properly an aquatic crop. The vast length of time it has been known in China, and the absolute necessity for its cultivation, have enabled these simple but laborious agriculturists to understand its constitution, and taught them the best mode of improving it. Chinese irrigation is proverbially ingenious, and Chinese husbandry peculiarly interesting.

The singular construction of the rice-plough, the natural history and docility of the water-ox, and the mechanism of the water-wheel, or the float-boards that traverse in a trough, and sweep the influx with them, have been alluded to in former descriptions of Chinese food and husbandry, and are again noticed in those that follow.（*Vide vol. i. p. 56, and “Transplanting Rice,” p. 30, seq.）

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