Present-day soybean varieties (Glycine max), of which there are more than 20,000, can be traced to the wild soybean plant Glycine soja that grew in abundance in northeast China and Manchuria (Hymowitz and Newell 1981). Legends abound concerning the discovery and domestication of this food plant that today is the most widely used in the world (Toussaint-Samat 1993: 51). Around 2700 B. C.,the legendary Chinese emperor Shen Nung is said to have ordered plants to be classified in terms of both food and medicinal value, and soybeans were among the five principal and sacred crops (Shih 1959). This dating squares nicely with the judgment of modern authorities on Asian plants that soybeans have been cultivated for at least 4,500 years (Herklots 1972). But there are other sources that indicate that the domesticated soybean (G. max) was introduced to China only around 1000 B. C. perhaps from the Jung people who lived in the northeast (Trager 1995).
The court poems of the Book of Odes, sixth century B. C., also indicate that the wild soybean came from northern China and that its cultivation began around the fifteenth century B. C. Confucius, who died in 479 B. C., left behind writings that mentioned at least 44 food plants used during Chou times; they included soybeans. But they do not seem to have been very popular in ancient times. Soybeans were said to cause flatulence and were viewed mostly as a food for the poor during years of bad harvests. Nonetheless, soybeans were recorded in the first century B. C. as one of the nine staples upon which the people of China depended, and certainly there were enough people. The first official census conducted in Han China at about that time counted 60 million people, and even if such a number seems implausibly high - especially in light of a census taken in A. D. 280 that showed only 16 million - it still suggests that Chinese agricultural policies were remarkably effective, both in feeding large numbers of people and, one suspects, in encouraging the growth of large numbers of people (Chang 1977: 71). The famine in China in the year A. D. 194 may have been the result of too many mouths to feed and thus responsible, at least partly, for the discrepancy in the two censuses. But in addition, famine forced the price of millet to skyrocket in relation to soybeans, resulting in an increased consumption of the latter - often in the form of bean conjee or gruel (Flannery 1969).
Soybean
World History
