Notes on Rice Growing in China

Abstract

ATTEMPTS have been made by Nyhus, Cressey, Buck and a number of other 9 authors, to show on maps the agricultural subdivisions of China. On these i Xmaps, and in the texts that accompany them, there is a fair degree of similarity in the location of the two great rice-growing subdivisions of China. These are: ( 1) the northern subdivision in which one summer crop of rice is grown, to be followed by fall-sown cereals, and (2) the southern subdivision in which two successive crops of rice is the prevailing practice. The first mentioned, or northern subdivision, is much the larger, and extends from about the Hwai river and Tsingling hills on the north to approximately the Nanling hills in the south. The double-rice-crop subdivision includes southernmost China south of the Nanling hills. As indicated above the exact location of the rice-growing boundaries varies somewhat with the several authors, but they all recognize the two great subdivisions. It was with the appearance of Professor Chi-Yun Chang's recent paper, Climate and Man in China' that geographers were presented with a very different type of subdivision of the rice growing areas of China. Chang has three principal subdivisions instead of two (Fig. 1). His southernmost one, south of the Nanling hills, is shown as growing three crops of rice annually. Between the Nanling and the Yangtze river he indicates that two successive crops of rice is the common practice while the single rice crop is characteristic of the district between the Yangtze and the northern limits of important rice growing at about the Hwai river and the Tsingling hills. Chang's analysis of rice growing in China differs fundamentally from all others in the following respects: (1) annual triple cropping of rice instead of double cropping is indicated for southernmost China; (2) double cropping of rice is carried northward as far as the Yangtze river. It is probable that Chang only intended to indicate that two crops of rice, by special intercropping and regenerative methods, are grown in a few restricted localities as far north as the Yangtze. This, to be sure, is the case, but the map in his paper, as well as the text, give another impression. Mr. Shou-Jen Yang, at present a graduate student in agronomy at the University of Wisconsin, was employed for ten years by the National Agricultural Research Bureau of China as a field expert on rice and rice growing. During this period he traveled extensively throughout South China observing methods of rice culture. The