1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [96]
Song and Yuan, Ming and Qing—every dynasty understood both this vulnerability and the concomitant necessity of maintaining China’s agricultural base by controlling the Yangzi and Huang He. So important was water management that European savants like Karl Marx and Max Weber identified it as China’s most important institution. Creating and operating huge, complex irrigation systems, Weber claimed, required organizing masses of laborers, which inevitably created a powerful state bureaucracy and subjugated the individual. In an influential book from 1957, the historian Karl Wittfogel built on Marx to describe China and places with similar water-control needs as “hydraulic societies.” Wittfogel’s view of these societies can be gathered from the title of his book: Oriental Despotism. Europe, to his mind, avoided despotism because farmers didn’t need irrigation. They fended for themselves, which created traditions of individualism, entrepreneurship, and technological progress that China never had. In recent years this thesis has fallen out of favor. Most Sinologists today believe that hydraulic Asia was just as diverse, individualistic, and market oriented as anywhere else, including non-hydraulic Europe. But this image still remains influential, at least in the West, where China is all too often viewed as an undifferentiated mass of workers, moving ant-wise to the directives of the state.
None of the challenges to past thinkers dispute that China had a relative dearth of land suitable for rice and wheat. From this perspective, the Columbian Exchange was a boon, and China raced to embrace it. “No large group of the human race in the Old World was quicker to adopt American food plants than the Chinese,” Alfred W. Crosby wrote in The Columbian Exchange. Sweet potatoes, maize, peanuts, tobacco, chili peppers, pineapple, cashew, manioc (cassava)—all poured into Fujian (via the galleon trade), Guangdong (the province southwest of Fujian, via Portuguese ships in Macao), and Korea (via Japan, which took them from the Dutch). All became part of the furniture of Chinese life—who can imagine Sichuan (Szechuan) food today without heaps of hot peppers? “While men who stormed Tenochtitlan with Cortés still lived,” Crosby said, “peanuts were swelling in the sandy loams near Shanghai; maize was turning fields green in south China; and the sweet potato was on its way to becoming the poor man’s staple in Fujian.” Today China is the world’s biggest sweet potato grower, producing more than three-quarters of the global harvest; it is also the world’s second-biggest maize producer.
Epitomizing China’s readiness to experiment was the Yuegang merchant Chen Zhenlong, who came across sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas) during a visit to Manila in the early 1590s. Probably native to Central America, I. batatas had been encountered by Colón on his first voyage; Spaniards had brought the species to the Philippines, where it was quickly adopted by Malays, who already grew the tuber crop taro. Liking the taste, Chen decided to take sweet potatoes home with him. “He bribed the barbarians to get segments of their vines several feet in length,” reported his great-great-great-grandson in True Account of the Story of Planting Sweet Potatoes in Qinghai, Henan, and Other Provinces (1768), a book-length essay devoted to bragging about the sweet potato feats of the author’s ancestors. Chen hid the vines by twisting them around ropes and tossing the ropes into a basket. Spanish customs agents noticed nothing. (They weren’t trying to stop the export of sweet potatoes per se, so much as trying to prevent the Chinese from getting their hands on anything from which they might derive commercial advantage.) In this way Chen smuggled sweet