26 THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONSthe Yangtze basin and beyond, pushing slash-and-burn, itinerant abo
riginals aside or before. Most of these eventually found shelter in the
mountains and other areas unsuited to intensive cultivation. They still
live there—China's largest minority.
In this wetter, warmer clime, mild winters and long summers per
mitted full double cropping: winter wheat, for example, harvested in
May, and summer rice planted in June and harvested in October or
November. Where conditions permitted, the Chinese went beyond
this, over to rice gardening in submerged paddies. Taking quicker-
growing varieties, they got three or more crops per year. To do this,
they saved and applied every drop of dung and feces; weeded inces
santly; and maximized land use by raising seedlings in nurseries (high
density) and then transplanting the mature shoots (needing more
space) to the rice fields. In economic terms, they substituted labor for
land, using sixty and eighty persons per hectare where an American
wheat farmer would use one, and obtaining yields double and triple the
already good results achieved in dry farming—as much as 2,700 liters
per hectare. At the maximum, a thousand people could live on the
food produced by a square kilometer. "By the thirteenth century China
thus had what was probably the most sophisticated agriculture in the
world, India being the only conceivable rival."^11
All of this left little room for animals, except those needed for plow
ing and hauling and as mounts for the army. The pig was another ex
ception—China's great scavenger and primary source of meat for the
rich man's table. But few cattle or sheep: the Chinese diet knew little
of dairy products or animal protein, and wool clothing was largely un
known. When the British tried to sell their woolens to the Chinese,
they were told their cloths were too scratchy for people used to cotton
and silk. They surely were.
- Later innovations added marginally to the Chinese granary. In the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, new plants were taken from dis
tant lands—peanuts, potatoes, sweet potatoes, yams. These grew well
in dryer uplands, but in the last analysis, they were only a supplement
to a rice complex that could no longer keep up with demand.* - The overwhelming concentration on rice yielded a mix of good
and bad. The appetite of rice for nutrients (particularly phosphate and
- Ingenuity and labor can still increase farm output, if not of rice and cereals, then of
accessory crops. See Emily M. Berstein, "Ecologists Improve Production in Chinese
Farming Village," N.T. Times, 10 August 1993, p. C4, re increase in fish crop and sav
ings in fertilizer.