Ancient Trade Root：How the Sweet Potato got to China
Hello, and welcome to The Context. My name is Scott Pruett and I’m an anchor with NewsChina. With our podcast, we aim to provide insight into the current trends of modern China allowing you to clearly see what’s happening today through a historical lens.
Today, we’re going to talk about how sweet potatoes made their way to China, and how, as a relatively recent import to this ancient civilization, they became a staple food among the common folk.
Imagine for a moment what life might be like if 16th-century sailors and explorers hadn’t introduced potatoes to Europe. How different would your dinner look? More importantly, would your ancestors have survived?
The discovery of the potato and its introduction to the continent’s colonial powerhouses by the likes of Sir Walter Raleigh or Christopher Columbus – depending on what history books you read – was pivotal. Potatoes provided a stable, easily cultivated food source that prevented famine and improved nutrition among the poorest in society.
Coincidentally, at around the same time, on a different side of the world, a very similar story was unfolding, but instead of the humble tuber we know in the West, it was the introduction to China of the more exotic sweet potato. In China, it goes by different names depending on what region you’re in. The most commonly used monikers are hongshu (red potato) and ganshu (sweet potato).
For millennia, the staple crops in China were wheat in the north and rice in the south, but Chen Zhenlong, a businessman in the late Ming Dynasty who lived from 1543 to 1619, changed all of that. Now, 400 years on, Chinese diets revolve around not just rice and grains, but sweet potatoes – roasted and boiled, ground into flour for noodles, mashed with pickles or deep fried with honey, even fermented into a kind of liquor.
Proverbs and literary illustrations related to sweet potatoes have also been passed down, such as, “If an official does not serve the people, it’s better for him to go home and sell sweet potatoes.”
However, if not for Chen Zhenlong, there would be no sweet potatoes to sell.
Chen was born in Changle County in southeast China’s Fujian Province. He had tried to get ahead by climbing the ladder of the imperial examination system, but after failing to get a foothold via the provincial-level exam, he decided to follow others in his county and conduct trade with The Philippines.
It was there that Chen tried sweet potatoes for the first time. He immediately wanted to bring this tasty, filling and resilient food back to his home, with a belief that it would end regular food shortages caused by droughts and floods.
While wheat and rice are comparatively labor-intensive crops requiring larger tracks of land, sweet potatoes have proven to be more fruitful and robust as they are able to withstand harsh environmental shifts.
Like their tuberous cousin that was claimed by Sir Walter Raleigh, sweet potatoes originated in Central and South America. They were cultivated as crops by the indigenous people there for over 5,000 years. Christopher Columbus found sweet potatoes in Haiti and brought them back to Europe, dedicating it (like everything else he did) to the Spanish royals. Around the first half of the 16th century, the Spanish and the Portuguese took sweet potatoes to their colonies in Asia.
The sweet potatoes Chen enjoyed in the Philippines had only recently been introduced by the Spanish. And while several routes have been suggested to explain the introduction of sweet potatoes to China, popular opinion holds that it was Chen who first brought shipments of them to Fujian Province.
The story goes that in the early 1590s, Chen hid sweet potatoes in the bottom of a rattan case on his trip back to China, but he was caught by Customs officers who were trying to stop China from getting its hands on any product that could lead to a trade advantage. The second time, he put sweet potato vines into a rattan basket, but this too was discovered. As a result, he was branded a thief, badly beaten, and came close to being tossed in prison.
It was not until 1593 that he finally managed to sneak the crop past Customs by twisting sweet potato vines into a water-drawing rope and smearing the outside of it with mud. After sailing seven days and nights in choppy seas, he finally got the sweet potato vines back to Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian Province.
It was Chen Zhenlong’s son, Chen Qinglun, who presented the sweet potatoes, together with an explanation about the benefits of the plant, to the governor of Fujian. He said the new crop could feed people cheaply as it does not rely on complex irrigation systems required for rice cultivation.
When a rice famine struck in 1594 and huge swathes of crops were destroyed, sweet potatoes once again were brought to the attention of the governor. This time, to stave off the famine, the governor ordered farmers to grow sweet potatoes extensively. He even published and distributed instructions explaining how to cultivate the crop.
For Chinese farmers who had been struggling for survival, sweet potatoes were a gift from above. If it were not for their introduction, countless more would have starved. And the people of Fujian knew who to thank as they built the Xianshu Temple and Xianshu Pavilion in Fuzhou to commemorate Chen Zhenlong for introducing sweet potatoes to the area.
In addition to Chen Zhenlong, two other routes have been recorded to explain how the sweet potato made it into China – one starts in Vietnam and goes into south China’s Guangdong Province, while the other originates in Myanmar and finds its way to southwest China’s Yunnan Province. Distribution of sweet potatoes via the three routes took place almost simultaneously, but the historical records on Chen are more complete and with better documentation, so his story is more widespread and has a greater influence.
The popularity of sweet potatoes grew exponentially in China following the publication of The Sweet Potato Book by Ming scholar Xu Guangqi. In it, he praised sweet potatoes for their resilience and incredible versatility.
With its simplicity of cultivation and widespread availability to people of all social strata, the vegetable changed the course of China’s dietary and demographic structure. Historical documents from the Ming and Qing dynasties recorded that up to eight out of 10 farmers survived years of famine thanks to the crop.
The Chinese population also proliferated following extensive cultivation of sweet potatoes. In 1700, during the reign of Qing Emperor Kangxi, the population of China was about 150 million. By the end of that century, during the reign of Emperor Qianlong, Kangxi’s grandson, the Chinese population had doubled to over 300 million.
Today, China is the world’s number one producer and consumer of sweet potatoes, boasting about 60 percent of the world’s planting area and 80 percent of the world’s total output.
If we were to take an inventory of the various foods served on modern Chinese dining tables, alongside sweet potatoes, we would find that many of those common ingredients first arrived in the country as imports. However, they have been grown so widely, and for so long, that their international origins have been forgotten. Some of these ingredients have become integral to modern Chinese cuisine, such as peanuts, sesame seeds, chili peppers, spinach, and garlic, just to name a few.
Celebrated characters from Chinese history, such as Han Dynasty explorer and Silk Road pioneer Zhang Qian, who lived from 164 to 114 BC and traveled from the Chinese heartland to West Asia and back again, and Zheng He, who lived from 1371 to 1433 AD and extended and promoted China’s official maritime trade during the Ming Dynasty, also brought a bounty of ingredients from their trips along the ancient Silk Road and from voyages across the oceans.
Thanks to them, and Chen Zhenlong, the people of China can enjoy the fruits of trade, openness and exchanges that have endured for centuries.
Well, that’s the end of our podcast. We want to thank our writers Lü Weitao and Zhang Jin, translator Yang Guang, and copy editor James McCarthy. And thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed it and if you did, please tell a friend so they, too, can understand The Context.