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Encyclopedia of India–China Cultural Contacts v1.c6.s3: C. Technological Exchanges

Encyclopedia of India–China Cultural Contacts v1.c6.s3

Language
English

Contents

C. Technological Exchanges

Qi Min Yao Shu

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*Important Means of Subsistence for Common People* (Qimin Yaoshu) was a comprehensive agricultural book in the Northern Wei period and was one of the four ancient “agricultural books” as well as the earliest and most systematical important book in global agriculture history. It was written by Jia Sixie between 533-544 CE. The book recorded some crops from foreign areas (including Indian crops) and provided relevant knowledge. It was an important historical book to know about Sino-foreign (including India-China) agriculture knowledge exchanges.

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*Important Means of Subsistence for Common People* had 10 volumes and 92 chapters. It expounded comprehensive contents in the aspects of agriculture, forest, animal husbandry, sideline production and fishery such as fruits, vegetables, crops, agriculture, horticulture, forestation, farming, brewage, breeding and relief etc. It was claimed as one of “ancient Chinese encyclopaedias” and had profound influences. Volume 10, “foreign products including five cereals, fruits, melons and vegetables” recorded over 100 tropical and subtropical plants and over 60 wild and edible plants, included varieties such as cucumber, coriander, shallot bulb, rocambole, walnut, celery, clover and grape etc. Volume 10 of *Important Means of Subsistence for Common People* quoted growth season of Indian wheat from Records of Countries in the Western Regions, “wheat is grown on the Winter Solstice ie November 6 and it is ripe on December 16 which is called as the 12^th month of the lunar year”. It also quoted records related to the thinking tree (bodhi) from Records of Song Mountain. This tree is the Indian Ficus bodhi tree and its scientific name is Ficus Religiosal. Historical materials such as bodhi tree in *Important Means of Subsistence for Common People* and Mochu tree from Simhala (or Sri Lanka) have certain values to study history of crop plantation in China and South Asia. *Important Means of Subsistence for Common People* also collected methods of some foreign species. Its Volume 7 quoted “pepper wine method” in Records about Vast Topics where the cold or hot wine can be drunk after smashing one liang of dry ginger and 70 peppers into powder, mixing five litres of spring wine and juice of five pomegranates, warming it on fire. This “Biba wine” formulated by Hu people was a common Indian pepper medical wine and had the function of curing diseases. *Important Means of Subsistence for Common People* recorded multiple wine-making methods with pungent and fragrant materials such as black pepper, dry ginger, caryophyllus and Piper longum Linn etc which witnessed eastern propagation of ancient Indian medical wine.

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(*Chen Ming*)

Sugar Making

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India is one of the countries in the world which have a long history of sugar making and consuming. China is the near neighbour of India and they both have had close exchanges of technology in sugar making for more than a thousand years.

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The earliest sweets in ancient China were not made of sugar. Yi and Tang, as the main sweets during the times from the Zhou Dynasty (1046 BCE-256 BCE) to the Northern and Southern Dynasties (420 CE-589 CE), were made from rice, wheat or barley. It was much late when sugarcane was introduced and planted from abroad, and, as a precious variety of crops, it was not afforded by normal families for a long period of time.

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Sugarcane was generally cultivated during the times of Northern and Southern Dynasties. However, its planting region was confined to south China. There are various theories about the native habitat of sugarcane and quite a lot of scholars produce linguistic evidence in favour of India as the homeland of sugarcane. They argued that the name of a country in central Bengal was Gauóa and this word was derived from Sanskrit guóa meaning sugar. Besides, one of the most famous families in ancient India was Ikùvàku and its name came from Sanskrit ikùu meaning sugarcane. India has a long history of sugarcane planting partly because the environment of many places. Bengal, for instance, is very suitable for sugarcane growing. All these tend to form the grounds for the argument favourable to India as the native habitat of sugarcane.

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In China, the cane sugar-making seemed to begin at some time between the Three Kingdoms (220 CE-280 CE) and the Tang Dynasty (618 CE-907 CE), while the Northern and Southern Dynasties merits special attention. Being left behind in technology Chinese decided to learn from their neighbours. During the reign of Tang Taizong (598 CE- 649 CE), he sent envoys to India to get the sugar-making skill. It is recorded in vol. 221 of New Annals of Tang Dynasty that “the king of Magadha, a former vassal state of Central India Kingdom, lived in the city of Pàñaliputra which was situated at the south bank of Gaïgà. In the 21st year of Zhenguan Era (627 CE-649 CE), a diplomatic mission was sent by him to the royal court of the Devaputra (Tang Taizong) with as a present the palà÷a(?), a sort of tree like white poplar. And Taizong also sent a mission later on with the duty to get the sugar extracting technology.”

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Qi Min Yao Shu’s book

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It is also recorded in vol. 4 of Continuation of the Biographies of Eminent Monks that “Tang Taizong sent Wang Xuance and 20 other persons in search for craftsmen skilled in making gritty-honey among the monks in Mahàbodhi Monastery. Two craftsmen and eight monks came to Eastern Xia (China) and were soon despatched to Yuezhou (nowadays Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province) where they successfully made sugar from sugarcane”. Here the gritty-honey was the ancient name of granulated sugar. By acquiring the Indian technology, China made considerable progress in sugar-making. Also can be found in books like Tangshuangpu by Wang Zhuo is a well-known tradition of Tang Dynasty about a monk named Zou who taught the sugar-making technology to the people in Suining, Sichuan province.

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Song Yingxing made his comment on this matter in his famous book Tiangongkaiwu published in Ming Dynasty, saying, “China knew nothing in ancient times about the fact that sugar could be made from sugarcane. It was Western monk Zou who imparted the technology to the local people when living in Suining during Dali Era (766 CE-779 CE) of Tang Dynasty. Sugarcanes are widely planted now in Sichuan and they are actually introduced from Western Regions gradually.” It is clearly indicated that the cane sugar has its origin in Western Regions including India. Another example, a Dunhuang fragment found in the early 20th century, is still more concrete. It is about the sugar-making process written in Chinese and a kind of high quality cane sugar called Shageling is mentioned here. According to Prof Ji Xianlin, this curious word is the transliteration of Sanskrit ÷arkarà meaning granulated sugar. This is good evidence that Indian sugar making technology spread widely and had a remarkable influence in ancient China.

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However, having mastered the technology learnt from India, Chinese workers exerted their effort for generations and achieved excellent progresses including invention of the method to decolourise the granulated sugar. In the light of the evidences in books such as Minshunachanzhi and Wulixiaoshi, it can be sure that, at least, before Ming Dynasty (1368 CE-1644 CE), China had been able to produce high quality white sugar on a grand scale. In India, on the other hand, two new names of sugar, *puùpasità* and *sitopalà*, appeared in a well-known medical book, *Bhàvaprakà÷a* of 16th century. Both of these compounds had the same word sita meaning white. And in Bengal, at the same time, *puùpasità* was also called *padma-cãnã* or *phul-cãnã*. Since cãnã had the meaning of Chinese, it implies that Chinese white sugar had been imported and its relevant making technology introduced into India before 16th century. Therefore, it seems to be able to conclude that China and India had learnt from each other to make high quality sugar and through this kind of exchange, they both contributed much to the improvement of sugar-making technology in the world.

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(Ge Weijun)

Tea Cultivation

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Indigenous tea plants have been growing in the hilly areas of Assam and Northeast India for a very long time. The use of the leaves for brewing and drinking by local people has also been practiced. However, systematic cultivation of tea in India, based on Chinese tea plants and Chinese tea cultivation and processing methods, began in the 19th century. Given the enormous quantities of tea that Britain purchased from China, the British were very keen to find a way to cultivate tea within their own empire. The “discovery” by British botanists that a variety of tea plants was flourishing in Assam, led them to decide on the hills of Assam and north Bengal as a suitable region for beginning the systematic cultivation of tea. During the visit of the British envoy, Lord Macartney to China in 1793, tea plants were smuggled out of China to India but these failed to flourish. Initially, the British East India Company was reluctant to jeopardise its monopoly of trade with China by smuggling out tea plants and trying to undercut its own profitable trade in Chinese tea. However, with the end of the Company’s monopoly in 1833 and faced with financial difficulties in its administration in India, it began to actively encourage the cultivation of tea in India. In 1834, it set up a Tea Committee and sent G. J. Gordon to China for this purpose. Apart from acquiring Chinese tea seeds and tea seedlings, the company’s representatives were charged with recruiting Chinese tea growers and persuading them to go to India. In this venture,

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*Classic of Tea* they faced many difficulties as actual tea-growers in China were reluctant to emigrate. Efforts were then directed to recruiting Chinese labourers from Penang and Singapore, even though many of them were not at all familiar with tea cultivation. A total of about 300 Chinese were sent to Assam to engage in tea cultivation. The first Chinese tea-grower came over to Assam in 1832 and worked in the Chubwa tea estate. The first export of tea to Britain made in India by Chinese cultivators took place in 1838. The Assam Tea Company was formed in 1839. With the invention of airtight Wardian cases, it became possible to transport hundreds of thousands of Chinese tea seedlings by sea to Calcutta via Hong Kong.

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Song Dynasty (Picture of dou cha)

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The British made two innovations to the process of tea cultivation. One was the cultivation on a large scale in huge tea estates. The other was mechanisation of the processing of tea leaves including withering, rolling, breaking, drying and sifting. Together with the introduction of new methods of cultivation and plucking, these enabled the tea industry in India and Ceylon where tea cultivation on similar lines was introduced to forge ahead. The reliance on skilled Chinese tea growers was virtually eliminated by the plantation method of cultivation which could be operated with large numbers of unskilled labour sourced in India itself. From forming 91.4 per cent of tea imports into Britain in 1866-70, the share of Chinese tea exports to Britain steadily decreased to just 4 per cent in 1905 with most of the tea imported into Britain coming from India and Ceylon, instead. By the 1880s, tea planters in India also gradually came around to the view that the indigenous variety of tea plant was more suitable for cultivation than the hybrid tea plant based on Chinese seeds and seedlings that had been used earlier.

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(*Madhavi Thampi*)

Zhu Kezhen

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Zhu Kezhen (March 7, 1890-February 7, 1974) was a Chinese meteorologist, geographer and an educator. He was styled Ou Fang and born in Dongguan Town, Shaoxing County, Zhejiang province (present-day Shangyu County, Zhejiang Province). He used to be academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences.

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In 1908, Zhu Kezhen began to study in Shanghai Fudan Public School. In 1910, he went to the United States and studied at the College of Agriculture, University of Illinois at public expense. In 1913, he obtained the Bachelor's degree in Agronomy. Afterwards, he studied meteorology in the Department of Geography of Harvard University Research Institute and obtained the doctoral degree in 1918. In 1927, he became the dean of the Department of Geosciences of the National Southeast University. In 1928, he served as the head of the Institute of Meteorology of Academia Sinica. He also used to teach at Wuchang Higher Normal School, the National Southeast University and National Central University and took part in the founding of the Geographical Society of China. In April 1936, he became the President of Zhejiang University. In 1948, he was elected as academician of Academia Sinica. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, he successively worked as the Vice President of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Vice President of China Association for Science and Technology, Director General and Honorary Director General of Chinese Meteorological Society and Director General of Geographical Society of China.

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He published an article, Southeast Monsoon and Rainfall in China (Acta Geographica Sinica, Edition 1, 1934), in which he compared the similarities and differences between Indian monsoon and Southeast

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Zhu Kezhen

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Asian monsoon by quoting the historical data about the journey of an eminent monk, Fa Xian in Jin Dynasty to India by sea. He also compared the similarities and differences between Chinese and Indian constellations in *The Time and Place of the Origin of the 28 Lunar Mansions* (Thought and Times, Edition 34, 1944) and pointed out that Chinese and Indian 28 lunar mansions were of the same origin while Chinese 28 lunar mansions were originated from the Shang and Zhou Dynasties. In November 1946, he went to Calcutta India and visited Visva-Bharati University and University of Calcutta, and was received by Tan Yunshan and Zhou Dafu et al.

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(*Liu Lei*)

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