From October 21 to 23, the 2024 China Archeobotany Conference took place in Zhengzhou, Henan Province. In an interview, attendees shared that researchers in China have uncovered evidence of prehistoric rice cultivation at the Haheren site in Xinjiang through phytolith analysis. This discovery suggests a potential early route for the westward spread of rice that traveled first through Xinjiang before reaching the western regions of Central Asia.
Rice is one of the world’s most essential food crops, and its domestication and expansion into new areas have profoundly influenced the development of ancient societies and global ecological changes. Archaeological findings indicate that China is the birthplace of rice domestication, and researchers both in China and abroad have been seeking the path through which Chinese rice made its way to the west.
The Haheren site, located in the northern foothills of the Yanqi Basin in Xinjiang, features a settlement of mixed agricultural and pastoral communities that dates from the late Warring States period to the Han and Jin dynasties. The site is notable for its extensive stone irrigation systems, which are believed to have supported large-scale agriculture in the region’s harsh, arid conditions.
According to Dr. Li Yuqi, an associate professor at Nankai University, a research team comprising experts from several universities, including Fujian Normal University and Nanjing Agricultural University, collected soil samples from two profiles at the Haheren site. They discovered various phytoliths from both crops and weeds, which are specific silicon particles formed during the growth of higher plants.
“The most exciting aspect of our findings was the discovery of a small but diverse array of rice phytoliths, including fan-shaped, double-peaked, and those resembling spikelets,” Dr. Li explained. By measuring the ratio of the lengths of the fan arms and stem of the fan-shaped phytoliths, the team concluded that the rice cultivated at the Haheren site likely originated from the japonica rice found in China’s lower Yangtze River region.
But how did this japonica rice make its way to the Haheren site? Was it grown locally, or was it transported from elsewhere?
“If the locals had only imported rice, we wouldn’t find such diverse phytoliths from different parts of the rice plant,” Dr. Li said. “Transporting food over long distances is not an easy task either.” The researchers hypothesized that there must have been small-scale rice cultivation locally. “Given the extremely arid conditions, if rice was indeed cultivated as early as the late Warring States period, it indicates that farmers at the time had effectively developed irrigation techniques to manage such environments. This expertise could have facilitated rice cultivation in similarly arid regions of western Central Asia and the Middle East.”
In 2021, foreign scholar Spengler and others proposed, using limited data, that the westward spread of rice to Europe might have occurred through two routes: one passing through the southernmost regions of Central Asia and another along the Indian Ocean coast. Subsequently, dated rice grains found at a site in northern Iran and another in Xinjiang posed challenges to Spengler’s hypothesis but didn’t significantly contradict it.
“In light of the aforementioned research and archaeological findings from abroad, our team has outlined an alternative westward route for rice through Central Asia, starting from the earliest japonica rice remains found in eastern Gansu, passing through the eastern Tianshan, reaching the Haheren site in the central Tianshan, and further spreading to the Fergana Valley in Central Asia, eventually making its way to Iran, thereby laying the foundation for its further westward journey,” Dr. Li noted.
This proposed route differs from Spengler’s suggestions by emphasizing the significant role of Xinjiang and other western regions of China in the spread of rice, leading Dr. Li and his team to label it the Xinjiang corridor for rice westward migration.
Dr. Li emphasized that this finding not only provides the earliest evidence of rice cultivation in the broader Central Asian region but also reconstructs the pathway of rice dissemination across the Eurasian continent. The research results have been published this year in the international journal “Archaeological Science: Reports.”
