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, techniques, and knowledges.

      In anthropological usage, a food system is a process for producing, distributing, and consuming food. It thus takes in agriculture, hunting, foraging, environmental management, trade, marketing, and food preparation, as well as consumption (see P. West 2012: 18–26 on anthropology of food).

      The Chinese food system did not develop in isolation. It was, in fact, formed from a diverse set of regional agricultures and cuisines, merging and borrowing from each other and being themselves further influenced by foods and foodways from every part of the earth. Many people are surprised to learn that such foods as chiles, peanuts, and potatoes were not indigenous to China, but rather Native American domesticates acquired by China in the last very few centuries. Much earlier, wheat, sheep, and dozens of other West Asian foods migrated across Central Asia to China.

      The present book does not attempt to tell the whole story, let alone the story of China’s contacts with the world. Excellent recent histories, including the Cambridge History of China and the newer but briefer Harvard series of histories of the great dynasties, cover the story. Some of the new Harvard histories, including Mark Lewis’s history of Tang (2009) and Timothy Brooks’s of Yuan and Ming (2010), are particularly good on China in its world-system context.

      Instead of trying to do too much, this book centers on western Eurasian contacts and influences during the Yuan Dynasty—the Mongol Empire’s Chinese phase. This book also provides dense coverage of all the events leading up to this period. I briefly consider the Ming, but have—in the interests of space—ended this book with the end of Ming, except for a final chapter that generalizes about China’s food and environment in history.

      Imperial China lasted 2,200 years, during which time the population grew from perhaps 40 million to 400 million. Assuming an average population of 100 million over that time, and three generations per century, perhaps as many as 300 billion individuals had to be fed. Famines were frequent, malnutrition common, and life expectancy short, but the accomplishment still stands as incredible. No other part of the world supported such a dense population for so long. Natural increase led to continual pushing the resource base hard. Serious famines occurred on the average of every other year. Yet most people, most of the time, managed to eat.

      Admittedly, China had some rough periods. The time of the Three Kingdoms after the fall of Han, the period of Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms after Tang, the collapse of Ming in 1630–44, and other dynastic meltdowns were dreadful. But they were quickly resolved and did not lead to the long and profound dark ages that ended the Roman Empire, the lowland Maya civilization, or the great empires of Africa and Central Asia. China’s natural endowments have much to do with this but obviously are not the main story. Other parts of the world were well endowed with resources but did not do so well.

      China has a great deal of fertile soil and well distributed and abundant rainfall in much of the country and is well supplied with rivers. It has the greatest biodiversity of any temperate zone area; this biodiversity is concentrated in the southwest, because of the lush mountains and valleys there. Much of contemporary China is desert or barren high-altitude plateau, but most of these areas were not part of China until the Qing Dynasty. China has a great extent both north-south and east-west, allowing people, crops, and other plant and animal resources to migrate freely but also to take advantage of resources from different climate zones. Jared Diamond (1997) pointed out the disadvantages of having a long, narrow north-south country; it is hard to transfer crops around—they have to readapt to new climate zones. Climate change was frequent in Chinese history but had minimal effect, because of the north-south and east-west mobility noted above. If the climate turned warm and wet, as it did in Zhou and to some extent in Tang, people moved north and west. If the climate turned cold and dry, as it did in Ming, people moved south.

      The one time this was ruinous was the Medieval Warm Period—but not because of climate. That period of astonishingly rapid and dramatic warming led to the Jurchen, Mongols, and other Central Asian nomadic groups being able to increase their human and livestock populations by stunning amounts and to spread and conquer. Genghis Khan was particularly good at parlaying good weather into world empire, but the successes of the Liao and Jin show he was not alone. Conversely, Song was weakened by disease, drought, local torrential rainfall, and other phenomena probably associated with the Medieval Warm Period. Climate is not destiny, but it can enable figures such as Genghis Khan. Otherwise, China dealt with the worldwide cooling of the early centuries CE and the much more dramatic cooling of the Little Ice Age, around 1400–1800 (Pages