The Chinese, or Han people, as they came to call themselves,
started in the north, in the forests edging the barren inner Asian
steppe. They cleared the land (by fire?) and worked it as hard as they
could; but what with irregular rainfall and no trees to hold the soil, se
vere erosion soon killed the yield. They then moved, not into the open
dry lands to the west, which could not support an already dense pop
ulation, but south, on to the loess soils along the upper Yellow River. *
Loess agriculture was a school for water control and irrigation
technology. It prepared the way for the next move, into the wetter,
more fertile, but also more precarious river basin environment of the
lower Yellow River and its branches.^1 There the Han came to know
rice, a crop that yielded many more calories per area, although the tra
ditional cereals—millet, sorghum, barley—remained important. Wheat
came later.
By about 500 B.C.E. the Chinese had learned to improve the supply
and use of water by means of artificial devices and arrangements; were
making use of draft animals (above all, the water buffalo) for plowing;
were weeding intensively; and were putting down animal waste, in
cluding night soil, as fertilizer. All of this required prodigious labor, but
the work paid off. Yields shot to a high of 1,100 liters of grain per
hectare, which would have left a substantial surplus for the maintenance
of nonfood producers. The Chinese energy system was in place.
Between the eighth and thirteenth centuries of our era came a sec
ond agricultural revolution. The Han people kept moving south, into
Loess is a loose loam, ranging from clayey soil to sand, fertile if well watered, well
suited to cereal crops. It was not the richest land within reach, but rich enough, and
it possessed the virtue of being easy to work because it did not carry heavy timber and
could be cleared and cultivated with nonmetal instruments.
In the western parts of North China, the primary loess deposits run as much as 250
meters deep. The soil is fine and friable, hence easily plowed—see Bray, "Swords into
Plowshares," p. 23. On the critical importance of ease of cultivation as against poten
tial fertility in the early stages of agriculture, see above on the European experience.
On China, see Lattimore, Inner Asian Frontiers, pp. 29-30. In his n.8 he cites Witt-
fogel to the effect that Egyptian agriculture began, not in the Nile delta, but upstream
around what was to become the site of Memphis. Also the agricultural anthropologist-
archeologist Carl Sauer, who stressed the importance of a soil "amenable to few and
weak tools," and noted that the American Indians first cultivated poorer but more
workable soils.
t Irregular precipitation upstream led to large variations in the volume of water, and
the build-up of alluvial deposits at the great eastward bend had the Yellow River chang
ing course all over the place as it splashed and poured into the Great Plain. Hence the
nickname: China's Sorrow.
