Liu Qing Ri Za also describes the shape of corn: dry leaf millet, flower-shaped rice ear, its bract is as long as a fist, its grain is like red velvet, its grain is like Gordon Euryale, it is big and white, and the flowers bloom at the top, which is really different from the valley.
Tian Yiheng is from Qiantang. At that time, there were plants in Qiantang area. He said, "There are many of these in my hometown."
There are abundant records about corn in the county annals of China's provincial capitals. After maize was introduced, it was planted in mountainous areas at first. By the end of Ming Dynasty 1643, maize had spread to Hebei, Shandong, Henan, Shaanxi, Gansu, Guangxi, Yunnan and other provinces 10. There are Zhejiang and Fujian provinces. Although it is not recorded in the local chronicles of the Ming Dynasty, there are other documents that prove that corn was planted in the Ming Dynasty.
The spread of corn in China can be divided into two periods, from the middle of Ming Dynasty to the end of Ming Dynasty, which is the beginning of development. In the late Ming Dynasty, this crop had spread to nearly half of the provinces and regions in China. By the early Qing Dynasty, many provinces and counties in China had planted them.
In Qing Dynasty, corn concentrated areas were in the mountainous areas of Shaanxi, Hubei, Sichuan, Hunan and Guangxi in the middle, Guizhou and Yunnan in the southwest, and some mountainous areas of Anhui, Zhejiang and Jiangxi in the southeast. Corn concentration areas in North China and Northeast China were mainly formed from the late Qing Dynasty to the Republic of China.
In the first 50 years of the Qing Dynasty, until 1700, there were more records about corn in the local chronicles of Liaoning, Shanxi, Jiangxi, Hunan, Hubei and Sichuan than in the Ming Dynasty. After 170 1 year, there were more records of maize, and by 17 18, Taiwan Province Province and Guizhou Province were added. According to records, in less than 200 years from 153 1 to 17 18, corn has spread all over 20 provinces in China. According to the earliest literature records of various provinces in China, chronological order can not represent the actual introduction order of corn, because local chronicles and other literature records often contain omissions and delays.
For example, the recorded corn planting in Guangxi is about 30 years earlier than that in Gansu or Yunnan, more than 60 years earlier than that in Shaanxi, more than one and a half centuries earlier than that in Sichuan and almost two centuries earlier than that in Guizhou.
The recorded corn planting in Jiangsu was earlier than that in Gansu and Yunnan, and Zhejiang, Fujian and Guangdong were earlier than that in Shaanxi, Sichuan and Guizhou for 20 years or even more than a century.
After maize was introduced into China, it became an important food crop in China. The introduction and popularization of this new crop mainly depends on the trial planting and expansion of production by farmers. People benefit from hard-working farmers, and once they see that corn is a high-yield crop suitable for dry land and mountainous areas, it is quickly absorbed and utilized. For example, Anhui Province 1776' s Huoshan County Records records that forty years ago, people accidentally planted only one or two plants in the garden for their children to eat, and now it has extended to the vine valley, and it is used as food for the whole year in the place 200 miles southwest.
Another example is 1886 in Zunhua County, Hebei Province. During Jiaqing period of Qing Dynasty, some people brought some corn seeds from Shanxi to Zunhua, which were planted in the vegetable garden at first, but it became a widely planted field crop in Guangxu period. It can be seen that the development is rapid.
China has a fine tradition of intensive cultivation, and its agricultural technology has reached a fairly high level. Therefore, after introduction, we can quickly master and improve the cultivation techniques according to the characteristics of crops and local conditions, cultivate many varieties suitable for the local area, and create a variety of edible methods.
When corn was first introduced for cultivation, it was generally used as a non-staple food except in mountainous areas. Because of its strong adaptability and easy cultivation and management, spring corn matures earlier than other spring sowing crops, and can be cooked before it is fully mature, which is conducive to solving the problem of different green and yellow grains and will soon become the staple food of farmers in mountainous areas.