HIST5516 Special Topics in Public History (Chinese Heritage): Food and Crop in China, 14th -21st Centuries

This course is on the history of crops and daily foods in China from the 14^th to the 20^th centuries, with a special emphasis on soybean, one of the five main Chinese food crops, and soy sauce, the most common Chinese condiment. Their history reflects milestones in Chinese political, economic, social and cultural history from the late imperial to the modern periods. Traditional foods are also playing key roles in the construction of Chinese cultural heritage in the 21^st century.

Students will learn:

1. important aspects of Chinese agricultural history and its contemporary implication.
2. the methodology of the history of things.
3. the methodology of the social history of technology

1. Introduction: Food and Crop in Chinese History
2. Agricultural treatises and recipe texts since the Song/Yuan Period
3. Food and Medicine: their shared origins
4. Knowledge construction of things and their commodification: theoretical approaches
5. Crops: the example of Chinese soybean since the 17^th century
6. Food and crop: how soy sauce became an everyday food in China
7. The traditional crafting of soy sauce
8. The technoscientific industrialization of traditional foods
9. Crop and food: soybean and Chinese vegetarianism
10. Food and memory 1: the construction of cultural heritage
11. Food and memory 2: rural reconstruction in 21^st century China
12.  Seminar on the preparation of term paper
13. oral presentation of term paper

課堂參與10%

口頭報告20%

學期論文(5000-7000字) 70%

1. Anderson, E.N. “Traditional medical values of food”, The Food of China. New Haven: Yale University Press 1988: 229-261.
2. Bray, F. The Rice Economies: Technology and Development in Asian Societies. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986.
3. Brulotte, R. & Giovine, M. eds, Edible Identities: Food as Cultural Heritage. Ashgate: 2014.
4. Chang, K.C. Food in Chinese Culture. Anthropological and Historical Perspectives. New Haven: Yale University Press 1977.
5. Dove, Michael, “The Agronomy of Memory and the Memory of Agronomy” in V. Nazarea ed, Situated Knowledge/Located Lives. University of Arizona Press 1999: 45-69
6. Hobsbawn, E., “Introduction: inventing traditions”. The Invention of Traditions. Hobsbawn and T. Ranger eds. Cambridge University Press 1983.
7. Huang, H.T., Fermentations and Food Science. Science and Civilization in China (J. Needham ed.) 6: V. Cambridge University Press 2000.
8. Klein, J., “Heritagizing local cheese in China: opportunities , challenges and inequalities”, Foods and Foodways. 2018:16/1: 53-83.
9. Kopytoff, Igor, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commodification as Process.”, in Appadurai ed., The Social Life of Things.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986: 64-91.
10. Leung, Angela K.C., “ To build or to transform vegetarian China? Two republican projects” , in Leung, K. and Caldwell, M. eds., Moral Foods. The Construction of Nutrition and Health in Modern Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2019: 221-240.
11. Leung, Angela K.C. “Becoming an Everyday Food: Soy Sauce in Modern China (ca. 1800–1930)” in Modern Chinese Foodways. Fu, J-C, King, M. & Klein, J. eds, Cambridge: M.I.T. Press 2024.
12. Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power. The Place of Sugar in Modern History. Viking 1985.
13. Mintz,S. et al, eds., World of Soy. Singapore: University of Singapore Press 2015.
14. Oxfeld, E, “The moral significance of food in reform-era rural China”, in Jung, Klein & Caldwell eds, Ethical Eating in the Postsocialist and Socialist World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.
15. Schmalzer, Sigrid. Red Revolution, Green Revolution. Scientific Farming in Socialist China. University of Chicago Press, 2016.
16. 石聲漢 從齊民要術看中國古代的農業科學知識. 北京科學出版社1957
17. 黃應貴編 物與物質文化 中央研院院民族學研究所2004
18. 范金民 明清江南商業的發展 南京大學出版社
19. 衣保中, 中國東北農業史
20. 刁書仁, 衣興國 近三百年東北開發史, 1994
21. 雷慧兒, 東北的豆貨貿易1907-1931. 台北: 國立師範大學歷史研究所專刊, 1981.
22. 林漢明, 一豆一世界. 從大豆歷史、食品文化到現代經濟科研. 香港三聯書店
23. 王連錚, 郭慶元, 現代中國大豆. 北京: 金盾出版社2007
24. 洪光住, 中國食品科技史稿. 北京: 中國商業出版社. 1985
25. 杜新豪 （編） , 播厥百谷. 中國作物史研究. 中國農業科學技術出版社. 2022.
26. 杜新豪 , 農桑本務: 明代中後期日用類書中的農學知識. 山東科學出版社
27. 台灣醬油誌 台北: 常常生活文創 2016
28. 趙榮光 中國飲食典籍史. 上海古籍出版社
29. 高橋太郎, 黑島慶子著 (衛宮紘譯) 醬油本   台北: 智富出版有限公司2017
30. 蔣高明 鄉村振興: 選擇與實踐 北京: 中國科學技術出版社2019
31. 邱建生 鄉建手記- 一個鄉建工作者的實践與思考. 北京: 人民東方出版社2022

Attention is drawn to University policy and regulations on honesty in academic work, and to the disciplinary guidelines and procedures applicable to breaches of such policy and regulations. Details may be found at http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/policy/academichonesty/.

With each assignment, students will be required to submit a signed declaration that they are aware of these policies, regulations, guidelines and procedures.

• In the case of group projects, all members of the group should be asked to sign the declaration, each of whom is responsible and liable to disciplinary actions, irrespective of whether he/she has signed the declaration and whether he/she has contributed, directly or indirectly, to the problematic contents.
• For assignments in the form of a computer-generated document that is principally text-based and submitted via VeriGuide, the statement, in the form of a receipt, will be issued by the system upon students’ uploading of the soft copy of the assignment.

Assignments without the properly signed declaration will not be graded by teachers.

Only the final version of the assignment should be submitted via VeriGuide.

The submission of a piece of work, or a part of a piece of work, for more than one purpose (e.g. to satisfy the requirements in two different courses) without declaration to this effect shall be regarded as having committed undeclared multiple submissions. It is common and acceptable to reuse a turn of phrase or a sentence or two from one’s own work; but wholesale reuse is problematic. In any case, agreement from the course teacher(s) concerned should be obtained prior to the submission of the piece of work.