Chapter 79: Not Sweet at All

The bundles Blackie had set on the field ridge were called "zhe cane." A few days earlier, while handling a case at Flat Lake Village by Cloud Dream Marsh, he had stumbled upon them growing wild.

At first he thought it was a small bamboo grove. Only when he got closer did he see the stalks were like bamboo, each wrist-thick, jointed, with a greenish-yellow skin, standing over ten feet tall.

The station runner, Fish Leung, was a local. Eager to please, he said the plant was called zhe cane, very common in the wild, and that fishermen often used it to quench their thirst.

With that, Fish Leung promptly hacked one down and handed it to Blackie. Beneath the tough skin was pure white pith, carrying a faint sweet fragrance. Blackie put it to his mouth and tasted it — his face lit up at once.

"Isn't this just sugarcane!"

It turned out the shores of Chu's Cloud Dream Marsh were one of sugarcane's original habitats. The plant had once been a favorite of the Chu nobility, grown in their gardens and pressed for juice as a summer drink. The Chu poet Song Yu even mentioned it in his "Summons of the Soul": "Stewed turtle, roast lamb, with a cup of cane juice..."

In his past life, Blackie had loved chewing sugarcane, often treating it like fruit to slake his thirst — he could polish off two whole stalks by himself! But the cane he'd eaten was mostly dark purple-skinned, a little different from the greenish-yellow "zhe cane" before him now.

His mouth watering, Blackie grabbed a stalk, peeled off the skin, and held it in his hand. He ate the stuff the same way Gu Kaizhi did — starting from the tip and working down to the base, so the flavor would gradually improve.

He tried the tip first: only a faint hint of sweetness. Then he tried the base: not very sweet either, and even a little bitter...

He thought maybe it was just this one stalk, but after hacking down several more in that wild cane patch, every one was the same — the taste as bland as water, and a few were even bitter.

Blackie couldn't hide his disappointment. He'd thought he'd found a perfect raw material for sugar-making, but who'd have guessed these canes had such low sugar content.

"If sugarcane isn't sweet, what's the point of calling it sugarcane!" he grumbled to himself.

But after thinking it over, Blackie let it go. He'd simply been spoiled. Most crops of later eras were actually the result of thousands of years of artificial selection.

Not only livestock were domesticated — plants were too. Wheat, rice, and the like all began as wild barnyard grass and wild grain, slowly bred into crops with higher cultivation value. The ancestor of millet was nothing more than the foxtail grass you see everywhere on field ridges!

Under deliberate cultivation by farmers, they gradually underwent survival of the fittest — larger grains, easier husking, higher yields, shorter growing periods, and even better and better taste. That is the result of artificial selection.

Cash crops are no exception. The sugarcane of later ages was the descendant of over a thousand years of painstakingly selected sweet cane, its sweetness increased dozens of times over. These wild canes before him were like children without parents — thick-skinned, bitter-tasting, thin-stalked, hard-fleshed. How could they compare? Blackie recalled reading Robinson Crusoe as a child in his past life; the book seemed to mention wild sugarcane too. Because it was wild and uncultivated, it didn't taste very good. He hadn't understood back then, but now it seemed he'd run into the same thing.

Blackie tossed aside the half-chewed cane in his hand. But after a moment's thought, he had Fish Leung help him gather up all the zhe cane they could find around Flat Lake Village and hire an ox cart to haul it home.

In the previous tomb-robbing letter case, thanks to Blackie, Fish Leung had also received a reward of over a thousand coins, which had improved his family's life considerably. Fish Leung now followed Blackie's every word. Although the station chief's order to collect worthless wild cane sounded odd, he didn't ask questions and immediately carried it out...

Beyond Flat Lake Village, Blackie also asked everyone at the station to bring him the sweetest wild zhe cane they could find from around their own homes.

So when Blackie returned home on leave a few days later, the people at sunset stared dumbfounded as he hauled back an entire cartload of cane...

Which led to this scene at spring planting time — Blackie and his eldest brother Zhong arguing in the field...

Zhong couldn't understand why his younger brother had dragged a whole cart of zhe cane home. "This zhe cane is everywhere along Cloud Dream Marsh. If you want to eat some, just pull up a stalk. Why on earth plant it in the field..."

In all his years of farming, Zhong had never seen anyone plant cane in the fields. To him, these good fields, so painstakingly reclaimed, should of course be planted with millet, rice — grains that could save lives, stave off hunger, and pay the rent and taxes. At most, you might add some beans or hemp. How could you waste them on wild cane!

"Eldest Brother, just ten mu, only ten mu!"

Blackie couldn't explain it all clearly in a short time. With great difficulty, he finally persuaded Zhong to set aside ten mu of land that was supposed to lie fallow this year for him to plant sugarcane.

Blackie knew full well the marvelous uses of high-sugar-content sugarcane. It could be eaten, becoming a fruit the children of the household would love. It could be pressed for sugar — maybe only brown or red sugar at first, but later perhaps white sugar, even rock sugar. It could even be used to brew liquor!

Of course, that last one was illegal. But Qin's alcohol prohibition was precisely out of fear that brewing would waste grain. What if you could brew relatively strong liquor without consuming grain?

As heart-stirring as those prospects were, they were still distant. What Blackie had to do now was complete the first round of artificial selection.

He had to plant the canes that still had a faint hint of sweetness into the ground. Perhaps with careful fertilizing and tending, they would grow sweeter. After a few rounds of selection, maybe he could get the true sugarcane he wanted.

Perhaps, maybe... Farming was just this frustrating. Unless you used the science and technology of later ages, you could never do more than play the odds. But weren't all the fine foods people ate in later ages grown by generations of farmers playing the odds?

That was the greatness of agriculture. Toiling hands, spring planting and autumn harvest, silently reshaping our taste buds, reshaping our stomachs, even reshaping the world — and on that foundation, human civilization could climb ever higher.

Following the sugarcane-planting methods he'd seen in villages in his later life, Blackie had Startled help him chop the zhe cane into one-foot sections. After soaking them in water for half a day, they laid the cane cuttings horizontally in the muddy water of the field furrows and covered them halfway with soil... Over and over, like scattering seeds, they spread that whole ox cart of zhe cane across the ten mu of land...

While they busied themselves over here, Zhong was still driving the yellow ox Blackie had newly bought, treading the plow and turning over the family's several plots one by one.

Speaking of which, with Blackie becoming a Second-Rank Officer and Shuttle becoming a First-Rank Commoner, they had both been granted new land. Since Shuttle and Elder Sister had moved to the county seat, the family land was entrusted to Zhong's care. As a result, the family's land had quadrupled, reaching over four hundred mu.

Zhong was the family's farming expert, skilled at growing all five grains and handling the plow ox well. But Blackie, afraid his eldest brother would overwork himself, still spent money to hire four hired laborers from the left side of the hamlet, paying them one-third of the harvest as wages to help the family work for a year.

It was just a pity — none of them happened to be named "Chen She."

Others had originally suggested the family buy a few male and female slaves, but Blackie couldn't accept that. His mother and Zhong were also kind-hearted and felt their family truly didn't need slaves.

"Good thing we bought the plow ox. Otherwise, with this much land, people alone could never plow it all."

Resting for a moment, Zhong couldn't help but sigh. Their family had once owned an ox too, but it had later fallen ill and died.

Blackie questioned Zhong and the neighbors closely and learned that Anlu County had originally had very little ox-plowing. The hamlet folk hadn't even seen a plow before. It was only after Qin took control of Anlu that it was forcibly popularized.

This was precisely what made Qin so fearsome. Its extreme emphasis on agriculture meant the authorities would spare no effort to spread advanced techniques. Special agricultural officials were assigned to townships and hamlets to manage plow oxen and iron farm tools, even lending them to ordinary households — their function much like the production brigades of later eras. Official power was always far faster than gradual, subtle diffusion.

But only Qin could do this; the six other states could not. It was said that back when Zhao officials debated whether to fight Qin at Changping, one argument against it was that Qin used oxen to plow, doubling their grain yield, while Zhao lacked such conditions...

Because only Qin could extend the government's tentacles down to the township and hamlet level. In states like Zhao and Chu, the countryside was still controlled by enfeoffed lords and nobles, extremely closed off, impenetrable as watertight walls.

The same was true of the treadle pestle Blackie and the others had made. In just a single month, the Anlu County granary had already replaced all its mortar-and-pestle sets with treadle pestles. Not only did the convict laborers beam with joy at the lighter work, but the rice output had also increased considerably.

"Perhaps in a few more years, the treadle pestle will spread across the north and reach Ba and Shu, just as Qin once spread farming techniques to Southern Commandery."

Thinking this, Blackie felt in his heart that he really had done something rather remarkable. He had not only boosted productivity considerably in the matter of grain-pounding but had also indirectly liberated half the women of Qin...

Idle chatter in the fields always passed quickly, and the farming men soon had to rise and get back to work.

Zhong said that since Blackie had already planted the zhe cane in the ground, they couldn't just leave it untended — it still needed proper care. With that, he told Blackie and Startled to go shovel up the dung their family ox had produced over the past few days.

As far back as over a hundred years ago, using animal dung as fertilizer to increase yields was already something every farmer knew. Mencius said, "In famine years, even dunging the fields is not enough." Xunzi also said, "Covering the land and marking the furrows, pulling weeds and planting grain, applying ample dung to enrich the fields — these are the tasks of the farmer and the common people."

But Blackie watched as Zhong scooped up a bit of that fresh cow dung with a wooden shovel and placed it right beside the newly buried sugarcane cuttings. He looked back at the neighbors' fields — they were also using fresh cow, horse, and human dung as fertilizer.

So Blackie called out to Zhong, "Eldest Brother, you're fertilizing just like that?"

"How else would you dung a field?" Zhong looked at his younger brother strangely, suspecting that all these days as station chief had made him forget how to farm.

"I did hear a traveling merchant from the north talk about a method of farming and fertilizing fields used in Guanzhong. They say it can increase the yield per mu quite a bit!"

Blackie was spinning tales again. He had clearly seen it when visiting the countryside in his past life — and because of that smell, he'd never forget it.

But that didn't matter. He smiled and said, "Would Eldest Brother like to give it a try?"

"A method learned from Guanzhong? Tell me about it." Zhong was immediately interested. Guanzhong was Qin's famous granary, where yields per mu could reach two or three times those of Southern Commandery.

"It's very simple."

Pointing at the dark, fresh cow dung in the shovel, Blackie said, "Compost it!"

(End of chapter)