Rice, Tea, Corn

Fujian province is a far cry from the flat lands of Suzhou and the Yangtze River flood plains.  There is a saying:

"If we divided Fujian into ten parts, then eight parts are mountains, one part is water, and one part is farmland".

As you move back from the beach-side village near XiaPu, away from the beach, there is a ribbon of that rare farmland that is flanked by the hills.  The villagers, I assume, must farm this land.  Maybe they split their time between fishing and farming, or maybe some fish and others farm.  Close to the houses there are patches filled with corn and squash and other vegetables. (Kitchen gardens I suppose.)  Beyond those are acres and acres of rice.

The climate is sub-tropical, which means that the winters are pretty mild.  For the rice farmers, this means a nearly perpetual growing season that yields multiple harvests.  The rice fields near the beach had crops in all stages of growth.  In the top photo, you see in the foreground some newly planted shoots (stalks, seedlings, whatever you call them).  Behind are plots at different stages of maturity.  The photo above shows a plot that was recently harvested.

The photo above....it shows one of the garden plots I mentioned.  (Just to prove I wasn't making stuff up.)  In the center are stalks of corn that would make any Indiana boy homesick.  The Chinese love corn on the cob, especially as a street food that can be eaten on the run.  The cobs are impaled on a wooden stick which serves as a handle, first for the preparer to retrieve the ears from the boiling pot and then for the consumer to munch on the ears like a Popsickle.

But more than anything, the Chinese love their rice.  All Asians, for that matter, love their rice.  They can talk for hours about the different types of rice and how each type requires different preparation and has different texture and is suitable for different dishes.   Asians know rice like the Irish know potatoes.

The husband of Betty, my guardian angel, was excited to be going to dinner in Fujian.  The rice in Fujian, he educated me, is of longer grain and fluffier than that grown to the north.  Not like the basmati rice of India, he said, but more like the Jasmine rice of Thailand.  (I felt like a beer drinker listening to a Frenchman talk about wine.)  Delicious and sweet, he said the rice is.  "The best in China?", I asked.  He thought hard for a few seconds and then answered that, in his opinion, the best came from the Northeast of China, at the northern limit of the growing range.  Because the rice there can not grow as fast, it has longer to concentrate the flavors of the sunshine and the sea breezes.  So he tells me.

The photo above shows newly harvested rice, drying on the asphalt road that leads to the village.  Fishing nets, rope, rope fibers, rice straw, and  rice - everything that the villagers needed to dry was laid out on that road.

Some of the surrounding hillsides are terraced to create additional land for crops.  At the lower levels of the hillsides, the terraced plots are filled with rice.  Higher up the hillsides, it is more valuable to grow tea  The photo above shows a plot of tea plants.  (My colleagues call them trees, but I think it would be more accurate to call them bushes.)  Fujian province is famous for "white tea", and I would guess that is what we see above.  My understanding is that the white tea is consumed mostly because of its medicinal reputation rather than its flavor. 

Of the teas from FuJian, the most prized is the Fuding White Tea.  Fuding is a city just a few miles away from the beach side village near XiaPu.  So it's a reasonable guess that these terraced hillsides are Fuding-White-Tea-in-the-making.

In China, the local palates are highly discriminating in their tastes for tea and rice.  When it comes to corn-on-the-cob, though, not so much.  There is no such thing as sweet corn as we know it.  No tender, sweet, milky kernels of white or gold.  All of the corn is field corn, with no-parking-yellow kernels matured to the point of being tough and fibrous.  It is bland, it is starchy, and it is most definitely not sweet.  I hope that, with time, capitalism will fix this.  Surely there are millions to be made growing and selling real sweet corn here.