Ancient Chinese food gardening culture

Vegetable Gardeners, 1496
By Shen Zhou, Chinese, 1427-1509
Link to image here.

The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom
by Simon Winchester

The great Sinologist Joseph Needham (1900-1995) is a legend for his Science and Civilization in China, an encyclopedic account of China’s achievements in science and technology. Presently there are 24 volumes in his classic series. On his first day in China in 1943, he saw a gardener at work and this set in motion his magnum opus.

Excerpt:

Needham wrote: “The old Chinese gardener in ragged blue coat and trousers with a wispy white beard who potters around smoking one of these long pipes with a tiny bowl — and a mongol cap, periodically performing elaborate grafting techniques on the plum tree.”

Winchester wrote “He (Needham) had evidently stopped to watch this old gardener, and not just because of the man’s exotic appearance. He realized that in following as closely as he could the manner in which the man was splicing, tying, and grafting the plum tree, he was actually witnessing something rather important.

He was watching a performance — the carrying out of a technique, a craft, a science — that was very, very different from the performance of similar techniques he remembered at home.

“Later he recalled his father working on the single apple tree that grew in the backyard of the family house in London — and if he closed his eyes he could see just what his father had done one long-ago summer day when he himself was just a child, while trying to top-graft this tree to help make it stronger and bear more fruit. The more he thought back, the more he realized that what his father had done was wholly unlike what this Chinese gardener was doing here in Kunming. Perhaps, of course, the difference was simply because the family tree had been apple, and this one was plum. But he doubted it. More probably it was because in China they did things differently.

“A further thought struck him. Perhaps the Chinese not only did their grafting differently but may have done this different kind of grafting very much earlier than anyone in Europe had done anything like it. Perhaps this old man’s technique was thousands of years old. Further still, quite possibly Needham could prove it was thousands of years old by researching old Chinese books on botany — which of course he could now read with ease. He could hunt down any references to fruit grafting in ancient times, and compare these accounts with published histories of gardening in the English language.

“So he made a quick penciled note about the precise nature of this gardener’s technique, and a reminder to check the ancient texts. This notation is historically important — it represents the very first piece of information that Joseph Needham ever recorded with the specific intent of one day putting it into the book he was thinking of writing. If this gardening technique was different, then maybe he would have discovered a vital piece of information showing that Chinese horticulture had an antiquity far greater than anyone in the West supposed.”

See The Man Who Loved China by Simon Winchester here.

See Volume VI, Biology and Biological Technology Part 1, Botany (1986) and Part 2, Agriculture (1984) here.

See the Needham Research Institute here.