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Gourmets in the Land of Famine

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Chapter One

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE PEARL RIVER DELTA

By the turn of the twentieth century, the urban residents of Canton did not rely on getting their daily rice supplies from the rural hinterlands of Guangdong province. Rice shortages were prevalent in the surrounding rural districts of the Pearl River Delta. Since rice production in the delta was insufficient to meet local demand, Canton had come to rely largely upon imports from external provinces and the overseas market in order to maintain an adequate rice supply for the local population. The acting commissioner of China Customs at Canton, R. De Luca, remarked: "Even in ordinary years the local production of rice in the province is never equal to local requirements, and large imports are always necessary to supplement the deficiency. The greater part of the rice thus imported comes from abroad—principally Saigon—whilst the balance is brought from the Yangzi." These supplementary rice imports had to come first to the port of Canton, after which they were redistributed at market towns in the rural districts. Instead of relying on its rural hinterlands for its food supply, Canton acted as a gateway and redistribution center for external rice supplies and provisioning the surrounding rural districts.

Despite its chronic rice shortages, however, Canton never met with any disastrous food crisis in the turbulent decades of the late Qing and early Republican transition. Many contemporary observers were struck by the local rice insufficiency. At the same time, they were equally fascinated with the commercial prosperity in the city of Canton because in spite of chronic rice shortages Canton maintained its reputation for wealth and flamboyant urban commercial culture. As early as 1902, one foreign observer summarized the stereotypical image of Canton: "Even the wealthiest of inland Chinese cannot match Cantonese. In the variety of cultural and customary experience, there is a huge gap between coastal Chinese and inland Chinese. Daily requirements in foreign goods are enormous. The foreign goods consumed daily in Canton and Fuzhou, only two cities, might match the total consumption of Yunnan province." Although rising rice prices "often caused considerable distress among the poorer classes," it is true that no serious famine occurred. Rice relief efforts, operated competently by the Cantonese mercantile elite and local authorities alike, stabilized rice prices. Year after year in Canton, soaring rice prices and the consequent rice relief efforts were common features of everyday life. Once the "[local] crop was doomed to failure and fears of famine and disorder were entertained, the local authorities and a few of the well-known charitable institutions of Canton came to the rescue," and rice imports "were sold at low rates to the urban poor." Indeed, significant portions of food supplies for Canton were facilitated much more by the Cantonese commercial networks, which extended far beyond provincial boundaries and were interwoven throughout the coastal China and the South China Sea, than by local supplies from nearby rural districts. Why did the Pearl River Delta fail to provide enough rice to feed the local population? Why did such a rice-starved city never lose its reputation for commercial prosperity? Why did external rice supplies come from as far away as the Yangzi and Saigon? Why did they not come from Hunan, Jiangxi, Fujian, or Guangxi, which not only shared administrative borders with Guangdong but were also dominantly agricultural provinces?

To answer these questions, this chapter will examine how Guangdong happened to become China's largest food-deficient province and how local inhabitants coped with the region's chronic rice shortages. As a matter of fact, nothing characterized the social world of Canton better than the chronic coexistence of rice insufficiency with commercial prosperity. To understand this state of affairs, we must start from the geography of the Pearl River Delta. This does not mean that rice trade routes were determined solely by topography. Geography in and of itself does not completely explain the complicated structure of Canton's rice supply. Rather, we will trace the human efforts that developed and transformed the structure of the rice supply in the given environment.

The Topology of Guangdong: Waterways and Mountains

The topographic conditions of the Pearl River Delta primarily defined Canton's location: rivers and mountains. The delta provided excellent river ways to the city, but ground transportation routes were severely hindered, since the delta was surrounded by chains of hills and mountains on three sides: north, east, and west. The Nanling mountain ranges (also called Dayuling) separated the rest of China from Guangdong and Guangxi provinces. The two provinces were thus known as Lingnan (literally, south of the mountains). The mountains also contained the watersheds of many rivers that flowed south into the South China Sea. The West River, the most significant waterway flowing from the mountains to the south, ran entirely across Guangxi and down to the delta. Two more rivers—the North and East rivers—whose confluence was immediately next to the city of Canton, provided principal waterways for the inhabitants of the delta by merging after Canton into the Pearl River. Most commodities transported back and forth between Canton and other market towns had to pass along these waterways. Yet the perimeters of trade were obviously limited, simply because they could not extend further north, east, or west beyond the mountains. Only Canton, then, connected the hinterlands of the delta to the south to the outside world, namely, the maritime world. For the hinterland population, the waterways that reached Canton were a lifeline on which they solely relied, since what the inhabitants of the "South of the Mountains" could not produce—or could not sufficiently produce—had to be purchased in Canton. One prominent commodity of this sort was rice. In the 1820s, the local population had to find significant supplies of rice in the Canton rice markets where external rice imports were primarily handled. One local account notes: "In 1825, many districts of the Lingnan were struck by famine. However, the only thing they could do was to rely on Canton and Foshan, where rice from all directions was shipped and stocked."

However, this is not to say that rice insufficiency hindered the economic development of the delta. Rather, the local rice insufficiency was an unexpected consequence of significant social and economic changes. In the eighteenth century, when the Qing empire had reached its height, the Pearl River Delta had become densely populated and intensively commercialized. In terms of urbanization, many scholars unequivocally rank the Pearl River Delta second after the Jiangnan region as the empire's cultural and economic heartland. However, the delta's population density far exceeded Jiangnan's, since only the delta—about 30 percent of the provincial terrain—provided arable plains in a province surrounded largely by mountains. On the West River alone, for example, on average three thousand people were squeezed into one square mile of land. The dense population gave rise to economic development, because it provided a massive workforce for the thriving local economy. Yet such an economic shift was accompanied by the decline of rice production, because an increasing number of rural households abandoned grain cultivation and sought more profitable commercial crops. The rice insufficiency that Canton faced at the turn of the twentieth century, then, stemmed from the rapid commercialization of the local economy.

CANTON AND THE "SILK DISTRICTS"

What boosted the prosperity of Canton was the commercial agriculture of the delta, the major products of which were consumed much more in the overseas markets than in the local markets: silk, sugar, and handcrafts. Of particular prominence was the silk industry that flourished near Canton. Canton's silk industry developed a unique system of raw silk production called "sericulture combined with pisciculture" (sangji yutang: literally, dikes of mulberry trees and fish ponds); it entailed planting mulberry trees on the dikes surrounding fish ponds, with the fish eating the silkworms' wastes. The practice, widespread throughout the counties of Nanhai and Shunde, astonished Ruan Yuan, the new governor general and a native of Jiangnan, when he was first appointed to the empire's southernmost province. In 1819, he noted: "These mulberry farms extend to one hundred li in diameter. Farming households in the hundreds of thousands raise mulberry trees and rely on sericulture. Indeed, this area is the most fertile land for sericulture in Guangdong."

To understand such changes of land use patterns, the ecological condition of the lower delta should be taken into account. From the viewpoint of the rural inhabitants in this region, it was a smart choice to give up rice cultivation and switch to sericulture. Not all parts of the region were suitable for grain cultivation. Despite being excellent waterways, the countless rivers and creeks carried huge amounts of sediment. As sediment was deposited over and over again on the alluvial plains, the height of the water tended to rise quickly, and the direction of the waterways frequently changed. In a chain reaction, such environmental pressures often caused the overflow of waterways and floods. In this environment, nothing would have been better than planting mulberry trees and building pisciculture, which required a certain degree of high water levels. The huge amounts of sediments brought by waterways could also be used for dike building. Massive plantings of mulberry trees along fish ponds were one way by which the local population tried to forge a local ecosystem as much as they adjusted themselves to it. Moreover, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when steam-powered silk filatures were introduced and constructed around suburban Canton, the silk industry blossomed further. Such a transformation of the rural landscape was noticeable throughout the lower delta, with such counties as Nanhai, Shunde, and Xiangshan, which foreign observers nicknamed "Silk Districts," particularly prominent. Yet the increasing sericulture asymmetrically transformed the crop rotation patterns of the Silk Districts; rice cultivation was quickly supplanted by these new commercial developments. A local account noted: "The mulberry trees are so close together that it looks like a forest. Silkworm markets and raw silk markets are everywhere. Calculating these mulberry farms, it is no less than thousands of qing.... Most of the arable land is filled with mulberry farms, with rice paddies only about one or one-and-a-half out of ten." This transformation not only diminished the amount of arable land available for rice cultivation but also took huge numbers of workers away from rice cultivation. By the 1920s, approximately 70 percent of the arable land in the Nanhai County had become mulberry land, and nearly 80 percent of the working population was involved in some part of sericulture.

Soon, however, widespread sericulture and silk filatures turned out to be a double-edged sword. Although the local economy thrived, the rural districts of the delta could no longer provide an adequate rice supply for the population. Increasingly, cultivable lands were being converted into sericulture and commercial planting. At the turn of the twentieth century, tens of thousands of rural dwellers flocked into Canton and its outskirts to seek work in such new industries as silk filature, sugar refining, and kerosene oil production, to name a few. How was this new urban workforce to be fed? Where would Canton find additional rice supplies? The rising urban population and decreasing local rice supplies became the greatest focus of Cantonese public concern:

The silk export of this prefecture reaches over twenty million [units were not identified]. The population continues to be concentrated in Canton, the provincial capital (shengcheng), as well as its suburbs, and exceeds four million. Most counties, including Nanhai, Panyu, Dongguan, Shunde, Xinhui, and Xiangshan, have populations numbering in the several millions each. Thus, twenty million shi of rice needs to be shipped from Annam and Siam, three to four million shi each also from Zhenjiang, Wuhu, and Guangxi. As a result, living costs have increased, firewood has become as valuable as laurel, and, in this way, rice has become as valuable as pearls. There may never be a day when the poor do not sack the stores of rice.

In short, the dearth of rice stemmed from this thriving commercial agriculture, led mostly by the silk industry. Yet some questions still remain. Why did the Cantonese find their supplementary rice supplies in such places as Zhenjiang (in Jiangsu province) and Wuhu (in Anhui province), and even foreign places like Saigon and Siam? Geography cannot give a complete answer, but it is a good starting point.

Mountain Barriers to Trade

In stark contrast to the myriad waterways of the delta, the conditions for ground transportation over the mountainous northern hinterlands, through which one had to travel to reach the inland provinces, were severely underdeveloped. Trade and travel could be conducted only on foot or by sedan chair. The local population had developed a few travel paths, but they were "only a few feet wide and paved only with large stones." An eyewitness account by a British geographer noted:

This is not a land of carts or pack animals. South China is so densely crowded that there is no space for agricultural land, pasturage or for raising hay. Man has replaced all transport animals and carries the burdens of commerce by means of long poles borne on his shoulders. The only wheeled vehicle is the wheel of row, the use of which is much less common than north of the Yangtze.

It was not until the provincial authorities launched road construction programs in the late 1920s that topographic conditions for interprovincial trade with Hunan and Jiangxi over the Nanling mountain ranges improved. And then, there were only a few ground trade routes connected Canton with the north, but they were not suitable for the grain trade by any means.

MEILING PASS

The most prominent of these routes was the Meiling Pass. This route ran along the North River up through the Meiling Pass to Jiangxi province, connecting Canton to Nanchang, and ultimately leading to Beijing via the Yangzi River and the Grand Canal. This route was also known as the "Imperial Highway," or the "Envoy Path" (Shijielu), since British envoys George Macartney and William Amherst had taken it to reach Beijing. Many merchants walked back and forth over this mountain path. However, they had little choice but to shoulder their cargo going over the hilly pass, because the pass was at most a "bit of foot wide and steep stone-made stairs." Needless to say, transporting heavy cargo was by no means feasible along this trade route. Typical commodities transported over the pass were mostly such light items as tea, paper, and silk. Some sacks of grain might have been included. Workers could shoulder and carry grain over the pass, simply because grain was much lighter than such heavy items as timber or wooden goods, but this required higher transportation costs. Although a few scholars have found scattered documents proving that local merchants traded grain over the pass, such cases could have been non-regular trade of small volume, largely limited to local consumption. One Japanese observer's account from the 1910s notes that one worker could carry only one or two sacks of rice, which contained five to six sheng, equivalent to about ten pints. This hilly terrain did not allow for a long-distance grain trade.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Gourmets in the Land of Famine by Seung-joon Lee Copyright © 2011 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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