Salt Water Margin: Red Rice, Reclamations, and Restaurateurs along the South China Coast (An Ethnographic Puzzle)

James L. Watson (Fairbank Professor of Chinese Society and Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, Harvard University)

Abstract

How did residents of an impoverished, hard-scrabble village in Hong Kong’s New Territories succeed in dominating the Chinese restaurant trade in the U.K., Belgium, Holland, and Canada?  For an answer we must look to the history and ecology of the Pearl River Delta, one of China’s most productive agricultural zones.

Salt Water Margin: Red Rice, Reclamations, and Restaurateurs along the South China Coast (An Ethnographic Puzzle)

In the chaotic aftermath of the Manchu conquests, 1644-1672, pioneers from central China settled on the fringe of the delta, near salt-water marshes that no one else wanted.  Over the next two centuries they and their descendants – founding members of the Man lineage – reclaimed over a thousand acres of mudflats and built brackish-water enclosures that grew a special variety of red rice.  The entire crop – only one per year – was sold to distilleries that produced medicinal wines and livestock feed.  Unlike neighboring lineages that thrived on fresh-water, double-crop white rice, the Man always lived on the edge.  They had no choice but to engage in entrepreneurial ventures, both legal and illegal.  This lecture traces the social history of the Man from the rice fields in the early 20th century, to the European restaurant trade in the 1950s and 1960s, to remarkable affluence and global enterprises in the 21st century.  The heart of the story is red rice and the long-term consequences of life in a marginal ecosystem.

Organiser: SOAS Food Studies Centre, Centres & Programmes Office

Contact email: centres@soas.ac.uk

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