February 27, 2009
As with pigs, Vavilov speculated that chickens might have been domesticated independently in the Near East and in southeast Asia. That seems wide of the mark. The best evidence to date suggests that red jungle fowl (Gallus gallus) in a small area of Thailand were the ancestors of all modern chickens, with a bit of [...]
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February 25, 2009
The Chhi Min Yao Shu , in its section on exotic plants, quotes the late +3rd-century Kuang Chih which refers to a cereal called ta ho , ‘great millet’, introduced to China from Su-the-kuo (probably Sogdiana), over ten feet tall and with seeds like mung beans, as well as to a cereal called ‘willow millet’ ( yang ho ), as tall as rushes, which it says was the same as the ‘Szechwan millet’ ( pa ho ) or ‘tree millet’ ( moo chi ) of the Central States.
…The grain can also be used to distil wine and a fierce spirit, and Wagner claims that up in 90% of the kaoliang crop was used for this purpose in Yunnan and Szechwan “Grain yields are comparable to those of Chinese millets, in the region of 800 to 1000 kg/ha, though the early 18th-century Nung Tshan Ching claimed yields of 2 shi/mu, equivalent to approximately 1900 kg/ha, but the yields of straw are double those of millet, varying from 1500 to 3000 kg/ha, a very important consideration in impoverished areas.
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