Agriculture In Field And Paddy

One could garden any crop one pleased, but traditional field agriculture in T'ai-ho, dry or wet, was limited to a narrow range of plants (rice, wheat, millet, taro, etc.) that can be seen to have certain features in common, foremost among these being an amenability to "mass production" techniques, including an ability to give satisfactory results despite relative neglect. If whatever was grown in gardens was worked at intensively (one plant at a time), then whatever was grown in fields was something that could be handled extensively (many plants at a time).

The greater the number of individual plants needed to produce a given amount of food, the greater is the likelihood of that species being made an outfield crop in a subsistence landscape. And plant for plant, even rice yields little. Thus as long as enough space is available in the landscape, rice along with the other grains will be exiled some distance from the homesite, where the plants and their fruits (kernels) will be handled in the greatest possible quantities on the fewest possible occasions. For the T'ai-ho literati, the location and nature of the staple crops clearly reduced their aesthetic interest. The literati also looked distantly upon the episodic, massed labor that was commonly expended upon such crops.

Dry, that is, nonirrigated, field crops known to have been raised in T'ai-ho in Ming times included spring-ripening wheat, buckwheat, and millet and fall-ripening soybeans. These were planted in any arable land that could not be turned into paddy, or, as occasionally in the case of soybeans, in harvested and drained paddy. In T'ai-ho, these crops provided common local foods (millet gruel, buckwheat cakes, bean paste,

bean curd, etc.), and they probably also served to reduce dependency on the main staple, which was rice. Taro is also mentioned as having been grown in fields, and it must have been an important source of starch for some families.

A few fleeting glimpses of dry field crops are available. A peasant hamlet, nestled against the march, is described in enough detail by Liu Sung that field crops can be distinguished from garden fairly sharply: "In the pass between the hills they grow wheat, and at the head of the pass, hemp. The door of the earthen hut is dark, no stir within. The neighbor's yard is fenced against tigers, and in it, children feed a pet crow. Fine mountains, like green jade, rise on either side; flowing streams lace the garden plots, spilling white foam. Late in the day the adults come home with their hoes in the light rain; poppies have dropped their petals all over the courtyard."^[29] In Nan-chüan (South Drain Ward, township 56) there is broad level upland and "fruiting millet, thick in the fields."^[30] Along a twisting path that approaches a mountain hamlet, wheat has been planted in ridges of soil; by fall, these ridges will be weed covered, and peasants may snare rabbits there. At Liu Sung's home in Chu-lin Ward, some of his wheat seems to be gardened, i.e., planted in "continuous beds," near mulberry, while the rest of it is planted out on "high ridges" beyond the reach of irrigation water, where, later perhaps, after the wheat is harvested, soybeans will be sown. A bondsman delivers Liu the report that "sunshine in the irrigated fields has made the rice dark green; rain on the hill-ridges has made the soybeans flower profusely."^[31]

Because of severe population and livestock losses in the wars of the mid-fourteenth century, much agricultural land in T'ai-ho was temporarily abandoned. In these circumstances a truly extensive mode of field management was here and there adopted as the wars ended, creating for a time a sharp contrast between outfield agriculture and intensive, homebound horticulture. Ancient words for fallow fields appeared in the poetry; weeds and scrub were burned to provide an initial fertilizer of ash when the fallow was brought back into production. In a "three-or-four family hamlet" somewhere in northwest T'ai-ho, "the young children are looking for mandarin oranges; the peasant wives have been planting melon since daybreak. At midday they eat their fill of rice, then away they go to burn off the fallow fields."^[32] In T'ao-yuan (Peach Spring Ward, township 12), "eight or nine families live by the green mountain; they set fires and then cultivate, and so are accustomed to using the. weeding spade (hao-ch'an )."^[33] Such fields might lie far from the home-

stead: "the peasants are taking lunch in the newly-opened fallow, so their wattle-gated yards are quiet; a dog sleeps in the fallen flowers at the base of the fence."^[34] The burning of weeds and brush, accomplished during the fall or winter, made a notable spectacle. "The wind tosses the bright hot fire all about, and the mountains front and rear reflect the conflagration. When spring comes, the rains will break up the black ashes, and the wheat fields below the mountain will be loose and fertile."^[35] How long into the Ming the technique of fallowing and burning was continued is not known.

It was surely rice, however, that was the primary field crop in the landscape and economy of T'ai-ho in Ming times. This, the most productive of the earth's staple grains, could be treated more and more as a horticultural item whenever population pressure on the land grew intense enough, as it did in some parts of China. In Ming T'ai-ho, such pressures apparently were seldom felt. Rice plants in T'ai-ho appear to have been germinated in thick seed beds prior to their transplantation into the paddy, so there was something of an early horticultural phase in the life cycle of rice. But, by and large, rice belonged to the realm of extensive grain cropping, although it stood in its own rather peculiar domain, quite apart from the dry crops.

Essential to paddy rice in T'ai-ho were the diversion and manipulation of small streams running down from hills and mountains and the modification of valley floors into a gently cascading series of small, level water fields through the building of appropriately placed balks. Seasonal irregularities in water availability made it necessary to construct gravity-flow reservoirs along the upper and middle courses of small streams (big streams, like the Kan, were useless for irrigating rice). The reservoirs were commonly constructed by means of permanent lateral diking (pei ), which pushed a stream from one side and used natural formations on the other side to guide the flow into one or more holding pools, from which water could be released as needed. Along the lower courses of streams, it was often necessary to lift the water to field level, and this was sometimes done by meeting the stream head-on with permanent or temporary dams.

The laying out of the basic infrastructure, the continued need for upkeep and repair, and the perennial problems of water supply and distribution ensured that rice agriculture could not normally be accomplished by one family, or one hamlet. In Ming T'ai-ho, rice production was handled either through a landlord-tenant system or, alternatively, by bondsmen working under the close supervision of their master.

Among the T'ai-ho literati, only Liu Sung ever reflected aesthetically upon paddy as it lay in the larger landscape, and then but once, where he also inserted a slight down-note: "It's the third month of the year, and the sun and wind have just followed the rain; below the mountain, rice field after rice field is deep in rolling water. The sprouts make a single sheet, like green fabric; but when the wild spotted ducks come, they'll have no place to aligh.t.".^[36]

What accounts for the curious disproportion between the prominence of rice in the landscape and the paucity of references to it in the poetry and descriptive prose of the local literati? To the Western eye, the rice paddies of interior south China have a picturesque quality suggestive, at certain times of year, of lush green lawns, but in China they must nowhere have been considered particularly attractive, as witnessed by the rarity of their depiction in traditional Chinese landscape art.

Nor was rice-field labor at all discussed by the T'ai-ho literati; even though Wang Chih said that he once guided a plow through a paddy and Liu Sung, that he once helped carry sheaves. Why the omission, given that the literati did discuss garden labor in detail? The answer does not, apparently, lie in an aversion to physical labor as such. The omission may have had something to do with the cooperative, massed character of the labor conducted in rice fields, often under supervision, and to group singing or the beat of a gong.^[37] A literatus as gardener worked alone, or nearly so, and could see and think about the results of his own work. The paddy laborer was but part of a team, a worker whose individual effort was lost somewhere in the team's final product. It is probably for that reason that the literati regarded rice-field labor as socially beneath them.