Conclusion: the ‘five grains' and their origin
Agriculture plays a vital role in modern China, employing millions of people and feeding 20 per cent of the world's population. The Chinese word for ‘food' or ‘meal' is fan, which denotes a cereal food such as boiled rice or millet porridge.
For those who eat in a Chinese way, fan is essential to everyday life; only fan will satisfy hunger.[689] This emphasis upon plant crops in the East contrasts with the importance accorded to livestock in the West. In Europe grain production has repeatedly been integrated with animal husbandry in a system of mixed farming. In China, farming has concentrated upon grain production throughout the historical period, and may have done the same in prehistory. Up until recently, the Chinese diet has largely been vegetarian, a pattern undergoing fundamental change in recent years.China ranks first among nations in cereal output, primarily producing rice, broomcorn millet, foxtail millet, wheat, barley, maize, potatoes, and peanuts. The cultivation of those crops is consequent upon several episodes of global agricultural exchange between different parts of the Old World, and between the Old World and the New. Maize, potatoes, and peanuts originating from the New World were introduced into China in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries following the European discovery of America. Southwest Asian crops, notably wheat and barley, were adopted into Chinese farming systems in the third and second millennia bce, as a key component of trans-Eurasian exchange. Parallel prehistoric exchanges between East, Southeast, and South Asia and North Africa have also recently been documented. Many such exchanges conversely brought Chinese domesticates to other regions of the world.
The earliest textual evidence of multiple cropping comes from a Shang dynasty oracle bone from Anyang. This script arguably contains evidence for rotation of autumn-sown wheat or barley and spring-sown millets. Such evidence resonates with a recurrent theme of intensively farmed landscapes in various parts of Eurasia, including Mesopotamia and the Indus valley during the third and second millennia bce.
For example, accounts of Mesopotamian farming systems on cuneiform clay tablets depict estatebased agriculture combining an early harvest of autumn-sown barley and a later harvest of spring-sown millet and oilseeds.Legendary accounts of the invention of agriculture by Shennong (the divine farmer) credit him with first cultivating wugu, ‘five grains', and teaching people how to sow them. The lists of ‘five grains' vary and very often include such grains as hemp and sesame that are principally used for oils and flavouring. One list in the Classic of Rites, a manuscript ascribed to Confucius in the sixth and fifth centuries bce, comprises broomcorn and foxtail millet, soybeans, wheat or barley, and hemp. In another version of wugu, hemp is replaced with rice. Stories of Shennong's ‘five grains' are often mythologically charged. Sometimes the crops themselves were regarded as sacred; at other times their cultivation was regarded as the source of agrarian society and civilization itself.
The Anyang oracle bones include characters which may be ascribed to the five grains. Recent advances in archaeobotany and the increasing application of flotation in China have enriched our knowledge of grain production in prehistory. By 2000 bce, all of the legendary ‘five grains' were in evidence at sites in central China, in Henan and eastern Shaanxi provinces. Recent excavation at Erlitou, presumed to be the capital city of the first Chinese dynasty (Xia), yielded charred remains of broomcorn and foxtail millet, rice, soybeans, wheat, and hemp. This list is concordant with the two versions of the ‘five grains', completing a chain that links mythology, text, archaeology, and the contemporary world of Chinese agriculture.