100 Fun Facts About Ancient China

Zhuang Zhou woke from a dream unsure whether he was a man or which creature now dreaming that it was him?

A butterfly. Zhuangzi used the dream to ask whether waking life is any more real, and he is said to have lived as loosely: he turned down the king of Chu's offer of high office to stay free of court life.

Qin minister Zhao Gao tested which courtiers dared contradict him by calling what animal a horse in open court?

A deer. Courtiers who called it a deer were later executed, and 'point at a deer and call it a horse' is still the Chinese idiom for a brazen lie nobody dares challenge.

After the First Emperor died on tour in 210 BC, his chancellor masked the smell of the corpse with carts of what?

Rotten fish was carted before and behind the emperor's wagon so the court would not learn he was dead before the succession was fixed. The secrecy let the plotters forge an edict that put the younger son Huhai on the throne.

In Zhang Heng's 132 AD earthquake detector, a bronze ball fell from a dragon's jaws into the mouth of which animal?

A toad sat under each of the eight dragon heads, and the one that caught the ball showed the quake's direction. The device once fired when nobody in the capital felt a thing; days later a courier reported an earthquake in distant Longxi.

The Records of the Grand Historian's entry for 240 BC is the earliest certain sighting of which comet?

Halley's Comet. Chroniclers went on recording its visits, yet nobody knew they were one comet until Edmond Halley matched three sightings in 1705 and predicted the next return, which he did not live to see.

Which device, claimed as a 5th-century BC Chinese invention called the 'muyuan', later carried military signals and lifted men aloft?

The kite is claimed for the carpenter Lu Ban and a rival philosopher, who flew wooden ones. It became the ancestor of the aeroplane: the Wright brothers tested their biplane designs as kites.

Which board game, mentioned in the Zuo Zhuan and one of the scholar's four arts, is over 2,500 years old?

Go (weiqi). Its true origin is unknown, so legend fills the gap: the sage-emperor Yao is said to have devised it to improve his unruly son Danzhu.

The jade burial suit of the Han prince Liu Sheng, unearthed at Mancheng in 1968, was stitched with wire of which metal?

Gold. Jade was believed to keep a corpse from decaying, and later Han rules kept gold thread for emperors, a rank this prince never held.

Qin's Ban Liang, the first coin used across a unified China, was a bronze disc with a central hole of what shape?

Square. The hole let coins be threaded on a string and carried in bulk, and the Ban Liang's pattern of a round coin with a square hole stayed the shape of Chinese cash for some two thousand years.

Which Homo erectus fossils, dug from a cave at Zhoukoudian from 1921, vanished in 1941 while being shipped to safety?

Peking Man's bones left a Beijing medical college in December 1941, bound for the United States, and were never seen again. Science knows them today only because Franz Weidenreich had plaster casts made first.

Warring States and Han books were strips of which material, tied side by side with cord and rolled up?

Bamboo. Strips buried with their owners outlasted the books above ground, and a tomb library opened at Yinqueshan in 1972 gave back military classics, one of them thought lost for over a thousand years.

The Qin dynasty fell within 15 years, yet its First Emperor began which landmark by linking the works of earlier states?

The Great Wall. He joined the older states' frontier walls into one line and boasted that his house would rule for ten thousand generations; it outlived him by only a few years.

The Han's 108 BC conquest in the northeast planted Lelang, one of its Four Commanderies, on which peninsula?

The Korean Peninsula's northwest held Lelang, centred on modern Pyongyang, for four centuries, until Goguryeo conquered it in 313. North Korean historians deny it was ever on the peninsula, despite the Han tombs dug up there.

Which seashell served as money in Shang China and survives as the character radical for 'money'?

Cowrie shells were glossy, even in size and easy to thread on a string, and they reached inland China from distant seas, which made them precious. The First Emperor abolished them as money when he standardised the coinage.

Which legendary sovereign, the 'Divine Farmer', is said to have tasted hundreds of herbs and discovered tea?

Shennong is said to have tested plants on his own body, poisons included. In the best-known telling he found tea by accident, when leaves blew into the water he was boiling, and the oldest Chinese herbal bears his name.

One legend says Leizu, wife of the Yellow Emperor, discovered silk when what fell into her hot tea?

A cocoon. In the legend the hot tea loosened it into one long thread, and she is credited with inventing the loom to weave it; China then kept silk-making a closely guarded secret for centuries.

Which legendary flood-tamer passed his own door three times without going in, then founded the Xia?

Yu the Great let the flood drain away through dredged channels, where his father Gun had spent years piling up dams that failed. The work made his name, and he was handed the throne.

At which 208 AD river battle did fire ships wreck Cao Cao's chained fleet and set up the Three Kingdoms split?

Red Cliffs turned on Huang Gai's fake surrender: his 'defecting' ships were packed with kindling and oil and sailed blazing into Cao Cao's line. Sun Quan and Liu Bei's win kept the south out of Cao Cao's hands for good.

Which peasant-born rebel won the Battle of Gaixia in 202 BC, founded the Han dynasty and reigned as Emperor Gaozu?

Liu Bang was among the very few dynastic founders born into a peasant family, having begun as a minor law officer in Pei County. His dynasty's name stuck so well that China's majority ethnic group still calls itself Han.

At the Feast at Swan Goose Gate, the host's cousin staged what performance as cover for killing the future Han founder?

A sword dance by the host's cousin was meant to end with a thrust at the guest of honour, but an uncle joined in and kept blocking the blade. The guest escaped on a latrine break, and the idiom 'aimed at the Duke of Pei' was born.

On which eastern peak, foremost of China's five sacred mountains, did the First Emperor hold a 219 BC summit ceremony?

Mount Tai is where the First Emperor proclaimed his empire's unity in a summit inscription. Caught in a storm on the way down, he sheltered under a tree and gave it an official rank; climbers are still shown a 'Fifth-Rank Pine'.

Which two commodities did Emperor Wu's Han government turn into state monopolies, prompting the famous court debate of 81 BC?

Salt and iron monopolies funded Emperor Wu's expansionist state, and the 81 BC debate pitted Confucian scholars against the ex-merchant Sang Hongyang. The monopolies survived the debate; only the state liquor monopoly was scrapped.

Wang Zhaojun, one of China's Four Beauties, left the Han palace in 33 BC to marry the ruler of which steppe people?

Xiongnu. The story goes that she refused to bribe the court painter, so the emperor saw her true beauty only once she was promised away, too late to keep her, and had the painter executed.

The Han census of 2 AD, which counted close to 60 million people, was run from which capital near modern Xi'an?

Chang'an. The count survives in the Book of Han and was no idle curiosity: the registers told the state how many households it could tax and how many soldiers it could raise.

Shang diviners questioned their ancestors by heat-cracking which inscribed materials?

Bone and shell. Diviners heated ox shoulder blades and turtle shells until they cracked and read the cracks as the spirits' reply; the inscriptions on them are the earliest known body of Chinese texts.

Which consort of the Shang king Wu Ding led armies in person and lies in the only unlooted royal tomb at Yinxu?

Fu Hao's tomb was found intact in 1976 by the archaeologist Zheng Zhenxiang and identified by the name cast on its bronzes. Its 130 weapons bore out the Shang divination records that show her commanding campaigns.

Which site near Chengdu, whose pits workers found in 1986, yielded masks with protruding pupils and a 2.6 m bronze statue?

Sanxingdui's pits revealed a long-forgotten Bronze Age kingdom, thought to be early Shu, and showed that a rich civilisation had grown up in Sichuan quite unlike the Yellow River's.

Legend says four-eyed Cangjie made the sky rain millet and ghosts wail by inventing what for the Yellow Emperor?

Writing. The millet shower is remembered in Guyu, 'grain rain', the solar term around 20 April, which is why the United Nations chose that date for its Chinese Language Day.

Shang Yang, the Qin reformer refused an inn room under his own identity-papers rule, pioneered which philosophy?

Legalism. His harsh code of rewards and punishments made Qin the strongest of the warring states, and it outlived him: after his patron died his body was torn apart by chariots, yet the new king kept his laws.

What collective name covers the rival philosophies that flourished amid Warring States conflict?

Hundred Schools of Thought is the later label for an age when warring rulers competed for advisers, so thinkers carried their ideas from court to court. Unification ended the market: in 213 BC their books were ordered burned.

Which assassin smuggled a poisoned dagger inside a map scroll in 227 BC, then was cut down after missing the Qin king?

Jing Ke carried the severed head of a Qin defector as a gift to get close to the future First Emperor, who dodged the blade and stabbed him eight times. Prince Dan of Yan had sent him with a dagger refined with poison.

Which Han historian was castrated after defending general Li Ling, yet lived on to complete his history?

Sima Qian was finishing a history his father, Sima Tan, had only begun, and by his own account that unfinished work is why he bore the disgrace. The result, the Shiji, runs from the Yellow Emperor down to his own day.

Which usurping regent founded his own Xin dynasty, splitting the Han into its Western and Eastern halves?

Wang Mang, an empress dowager's nephew, named his dynasty Xin, 'new', then tried to nationalise farmland and ban the sale of slaves. The great families resisted, revolt spread, and he was killed in 23 AD.

Which first known female Chinese historian helped complete her brother's Book of Han and wrote Lessons for Women?

Ban Zhao took up the Book of Han after her brother Ban Gu died in prison in 92 with it unfinished. She went on to teach the palace women, and the regent Empress Dowager Deng sought her advice on matters of state.

Which philosopher of 'impartial caring' walked ten days to Chu and beat Gongshu Ban in nine mock sieges to save Song?

Mozi's followers, the Mohists, were the era's experts in fortification and siege defence, which made his anti-war stance practical. Their school rivalled the Confucians as the most prominent of the age.

Which stuttering prince, whose essays the Qin king adored, was forced to drink poison by a jealous former classmate?

Han Fei's essays so impressed the Qin king that he said he could 'die without regrets' after meeting their author. When the prince came as an envoy, his old classmate had him jailed and sent poison; the king's regret came too late.

Xunzi called human nature evil, in answer to which earlier sage's teaching that people are born good?

Mencius argued from the alarm anyone feels on seeing a child about to fall into a well. He won in the long run: later Confucians ranked him second only to the Master and treated Xunzi as a black sheep.

Which Qi strategist, crippled and branded on a jealous rival's charge, fooled a pursuing Wei army by cutting his camp stoves?

Sun Bin had fewer cooking fires lit each night, so his pursuers assumed mass desertion and rushed into his ambush at Maling. His own Art of War, long thought lost, resurfaced in a Han tomb opened in 1972.

Which Qin irrigation works, begun around 256 BC by Li Bing without a dam, still waters the Chengdu plain?

Dujiangyan splits the Min River with a fish-mouth levee and lets the current itself sort floodwater from irrigation water. It ended the plain's yearly floods, and the farmland it waters became known across China as a land of plenty.

Which strategist is said to have beheaded two of the King of Wu's favourite concubines to prove he could drill anyone?

Sun Tzu. When the palace women laughed at his orders he executed their two leaders over the king's protests, saying a general in the field need not obey every royal command; the rest drilled in silence, and he got his army.

Which merchant befriended the future King Zhuangxiang, then a hostage prince, became Qin's chancellor and took poison in 235 BC?

Lü Buwei's household compiled the Lüshi Chunqiu, an encyclopaedia of the age's philosophies, while he ran the state for the boy who became First Emperor. Banished to remote Shu after a palace scandal, he feared execution and killed himself.

Which Qin chancellor penned the 213 BC book-burning edict, made small seal script the standard and died by waist-chop?

Li Si's edict ordered the destruction of histories and literature outside the Qin archives, a purge remembered alongside the burying of scholars. Zhao Gao, his partner in the succession plot, had him put to the Five Punishments in 208 BC.

Which find did farmers make near Xi'an in 1974 while drilling a well?

The Terracotta Army. Some 8,000 life-size soldiers stand in battle order facing east, and the earth-brown figures were once brightly painted: the pigment starts to flake within minutes of meeting dry air.

Which idea did the Zhou kings use to justify overthrowing the Shang?

The Mandate of Heaven held that a bad ruler forfeits the right to rule. Floods and other disasters were read as signs that Heaven had withdrawn its favour, so every later rebel who won could claim the mandate had passed to him.

Legend says the sorcerer Xu Fu, who sailed away to find the First Emperor an elixir of immortality, settled in which country?

Japan. He sailed first with thousands of children and found nothing, blamed a giant fish and asked for the emperor's archers, then sailed again and never came back; a monk later wrote that he had settled in Japan.

Which self-styled 'Hegemon-King of Western Chu', rival of the Han founder, cut his own throat beside the Wu River?

Xiang Yu lost heart when songs of his homeland rose from the enemy camp on every side. A ferryman offered to row him to safety, but he refused: he could not face the families of the 8,000 men he had led away.

Legend says which sage wrote down his teachings only because a frontier gatekeeper asked him to before he rode off west?

Laozi, an archivist weary of the declining Zhou court, was stopped at the pass by its keeper, Yinxi. He left behind a book of some five thousand characters, the Tao Te Ching, and nobody knew what became of him.

Which Han court eunuch is traditionally credited with inventing paper, which he presented to the emperor in 105 AD?

Cai Lun made his paper from bark, hemp, rags and old fishing nets, cheap enough to spread across the empire. A palace intrigue he had served later caught up with him, and he killed himself rather than face trial.

Qin's Lingqu canal of 214 BC, dug to supply its southern armies, joined the Yangtze river system to which other?

Pearl River. The canal crosses the watershed near Guilin, so boats could pass from north China to the southern coast, and for two thousand years it was a key water route between the two.

Which widow of the Han founder ruled as regent through three young emperors and made her kinsmen princes?

Lü Zhi mutilated a rival, the concubine Qi, and displayed her as a 'human swine', a sight that so shocked her own son, the emperor, that he left her to rule. Soon after she died in 180 BC her whole clan was massacred.

Archaeologists reported in 2005 a 4,000-year-old helping of which food, found under an upturned bowl at Lajia?

Noodles from Lajia are the oldest known anywhere: thin strands preserved when a sudden disaster buried the village about 4,000 years ago; the site is nicknamed the Pompeii of the East.

Cuju, a ball game that Han soldiers played for fitness training, is recognised as an early form of which sport?

Soccer's governing body, FIFA, cites cuju as one of the earliest kicking games on record, pointing to a Han military manual that describes it as an exercise.

Ancient accounts say model rivers and seas in the First Emperor's unexcavated tomb flowed with what?

Mercury was said to be pumped mechanically to mimic the Yangtze and the sea, and soil tests over the burial mound have found unusually high levels of it.

Which sage from the state of Lu, born around 551 BC, described himself as a transmitter who invented nothing?

Confucius's sayings were compiled in the Analects by later followers, many years after his death, rather than set down by the sage himself.

Which trade network linking Han China to the Mediterranean had its name popularised by a German geographer in 1877?

Silk Road translates the German Seidenstraße, a label Ferdinand von Richthofen spread after seven expeditions to China, some 2,000 years after the caravans first set out.

Chinese legend credits Liu An, a Han prince who died in 122 BC, with inventing which food now eaten worldwide?

Tofu's link to Liu An rests on legend alone; it did not become a popular food in China until the Song dynasty, more than a thousand years after his death.

Which Han invention began as a spoon-shaped fortune-telling device on a bronze plate and only later guided ships?

The compass grew out of the lodestone 'south-pointing spoon' that geomancers used for divination; Chinese sailors took up magnetic navigation only in the 11th century.

In Chinese myth, the hero Hou Yi saved the world by shooting down nine of ten what that filled the sky?

Suns used to cross the sky one at a time, the myth says, until all ten came out together and scorched the earth. The last one was spared because the world still needed it.

The earliest known examples of which utensils are six bronze ones, about 3,200 years old, from the Shang ruins of Yinxu?

Chopsticks began as kitchen tools: the first were used for cooking, tending the hearth and serving bits of food, not for eating.

Zhongguo, a name first seen on a Zhou bronze vessel and still China's word for itself, is usually translated how?

Middle Kingdom, or more literally 'central state', first appears in the inscription on the He zun, a ritual vessel cast in the early Western Zhou about 3,000 years ago.

Which waterway, nicknamed both China's Pride and China's Sorrow, is regarded as the cradle of Chinese civilization?

Yellow River floods come from the fine silt it carries off the Loess Plateau, which settles on the bed and keeps raising the channel until the water breaks out.

In Chinese thought, the words yin and yang first described the shaded and sunlit sides of what?

A hill gave the pair their first meaning: yin was the shaded northern slope and yang the bright southern one, and yang still marks the sunny side in many Chinese place names.

Which Chinese military treatise of 13 chapters first reached Europe in a French Jesuit's translation of 1772?

The Art of War insists that war is a grave matter for the state, never to be begun without due thought, and it prizes above all the victory won without a battle.

Which Daoist ideal, often translated as effortless action, also described a ruler who governs by not interfering?

Wu wei literally means not-acting. Applied to politics, it pictured a ruler who keeps power firmly in hand while leaving the details to his ministers.

Which foreign faith is said to have gained its first temple in China, the White Horse Temple, under Emperor Ming of Han?

Buddhism's arrival began, tradition says, with a dream: Emperor Ming saw a tall, glowing figure, sent envoys west, and they came back with two Indian monks and scriptures on white horses.

Which therapy, first set out as a system in a medical classic of about 100 BC, may have begun with sharpened stones?

Acupuncture got its first organised system in the Inner Classic of Huang Di, a text framed as the legendary Yellow Emperor questioning his ministers about medicine.

Han records call which distant power 'Daqin', noting that envoys of its ruler 'Andun' arrived by sea in 166 AD?

The Roman Empire's 'Andun' was either Antoninus Pius or, more likely, his successor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus; the visitors offered gifts at the court of Emperor Huan.

The Han annexation of Nanyue in 111 BC began a thousand years of Chinese rule in the north of which country?

Vietnam's historians date the era they call 'belonging to the north' from that conquest; with breaks for revolts, it lasted until 939 AD.

Which divination manual of the Western Zhou, later one of the Five Classics, is built on 64 figures called hexagrams?

I Ching readings were traditionally cast by sorting bundles of yarrow stalks, building up a hexagram one line at a time.

Which poet of the state of Chu drowned himself in the Miluo River, a death tied to the Dragon Boat Festival?

Qu Yuan waded into the water holding a rock after his homeland's capital fell to Qin; legend says villagers raced out in boats, with dumplings, to try to save him.

Which envoy of Emperor Wu escaped years of nomad captivity and brought the Han court detailed reports of Central Asia?

Zhang Qian came home with news of unknown kingdoms, of alfalfa and grape wine, and of the superb horses that Emperor Wu later sent two armies west to seize.

Legend says King You of Zhou kept raising which false alarm just to make his unsmiling queen Bao Si laugh?

Beacon fires sent the nobles racing to fight raiders who were not there. When a real attack came in 771 BC nobody answered the signal, and the king was killed.

Which goddess of Chinese myth shaped the first people by hand from clay and patched the sky with five-coloured stones?

Nüwa went on, the myth says, to cut the legs off a great turtle and stand them up as four pillars to hold the mended sky in place.

To ease road transport across the new empire, the First Emperor prescribed a standard length for which wagon part?

Axles of one length were part of the same drive that gave the empire a single script, a single coinage and one system of weights and measures.

Tradition credits the strategist Zhuge Liang with inventing which load carrier, though Han tomb art shows it earlier?

Wheelbarrow scenes appear in a Chengdu tomb mural dated to 118 AD, more than sixty years before Zhuge Liang was born.

Using red and black counting rods, the Han-era Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art made the first known use of what?

Negative numbers were set out with black rods and positive ones with red, the exact reverse of modern bookkeeping, where red marks a loss.

The 'guest star' that Han astronomers recorded in 185 AD may be the earliest written description of what?

A supernova is the usual reading of the record: the newcomer appeared near Alpha Centauri and stayed visible in the night sky for eight months.

The tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng, made around 433 BC, is most famous for 64 of which bronze instruments?

Bells from the tomb each give two distinct notes, depending on whether they are struck at the centre or the side, and the full set took five players with wooden mallets.

The Han bronze known as the Flying Horse of Gansu takes its popular Chinese name from which bird beneath its hoof?

A swallow is what the popular title says, though some scholars doubt the bird is one. Unearthed at Wuwei in 1969, the statue was later adopted as the national symbol of Chinese tourism.

Which weapon, a mainstay from the Warring States era on, armed up to half the soldiers in some Han armies?

Crossbow troops made up 30 to 50 percent of Han forces; trigger locks surviving from the period are cast in bronze, some of them inlaid with silver.

Which Han noblewoman, unearthed at Mawangdui in 1972, was so well preserved that her limbs still flexed at the joints?

Lady Dai still had melon seeds in her stomach and gut, a sign that she died in summer, within hours of eating the fruit.

Which Han physician is recorded as the first in China to operate on patients under an anaesthetic of wine and herbs?

Hua Tuo's recipe for the numbing powder, mafeisan, died with him: the warlord Cao Cao had him executed for dodging court duty, and his medical texts were lost or destroyed.

King Wuling of Zhao ordered his court in 307 BC to adopt which nomad garment so soldiers could shoot from horseback?

Trousers replaced the robes and court dress his commanders had worn even in the saddle; belts, boots and fur caps came with them in a reform copied from nomad raiders.

Which ceramic, developed in China by the time of the Eastern Han, gave English its everyday word 'china'?

Porcelain grew out of 'proto-porcelain' wares first fired under the Shang; English speakers took to calling it 'china' after meeting it in 17th-century imports.

Which sage, legend says, sat angling with a barbless hook or none at all until King Wen of Zhou hired him?

Jiang Ziya reasoned that his catch would come of its own accord when it was ready; he went on to help the Zhou kings overthrow the Shang.

Which general crawled between a bully's legs as a young man rather than fight, then won the wars that founded a dynasty?

Han Xin later tracked the bully down and, instead of taking revenge, made him an officer; the story gave Chinese its stock phrase for swallowing a humiliation.

Which conscript, delayed by floods in 209 BC and facing death for lateness, began the first uprising against the Qin?

Chen Sheng and his deputy Wu Guang decided they would rather fight than be executed for arriving late, and raised a band of 900 villagers against the government.

Which revolt, launched in 184 AD by followers of the faith healer Zhang Jue, left the Han dynasty fatally weakened?

Yellow Turban Rebellion fighters were named for the scarves on their heads; the regional commanders who put them down grew into the warlords of the Three Kingdoms era.

Which era of Chinese history, from about 770 to 481 BC, is named after a chronicle of the state of Lu?

Spring and Autumn was by then an everyday expression for 'year', so the chronicle's title simply meant 'annals'; it logs 242 years of accessions, funerals and battles.

Which city became the Zhou royal seat around 770 BC and, centuries later, the capital of the restored Eastern Han?

Luoyang means the north, or sunny 'yang', side of the Luo River, and it ranks among China's Four Great Ancient Capitals.

Which city on the Wei River, capital of the state of Qin from 350 BC, became China's first imperial capital?

Xianyang gained a replica of the palace of every state the First Emperor conquered, all rebuilt along the river beside his own.

Yinxu, the ruins of the last Shang capital, where official digs began in 1928, lies beside which modern city in Henan?

Anyang was affirmed as the site of the lost Shang capital by the scholar Luo Zhenyu in 1910, 18 years before the first official excavation.

Which horned, hairy giant of Chinese creation myth woke inside a cosmic egg and pushed the sky away from the earth?

Pangu's body became the world when he died, the myth says: his breath turned to wind and clouds, his voice to thunder and his blood to rivers.

Before the Qin standardised coinage, states such as Qi and Yan cast bronze money in the shape of which tool?

Knives were the model: one story says a prince short of cash let his troops barter with theirs and the habit stuck, and the coins look much like real blades of the Zhou era.

Which martial skill did Zhou students master as one of the Six Arts, alongside rites, music and chariot driving?

Archery doubled as ritual: Zhou nobles held formal shooting ceremonies in which proper form and conduct counted as much as hitting the target.

Which three-legged bronze cauldron so symbolised royal power that 'inquiring' about it meant coveting the throne?

Ding ownership was graded by rank, and a set of nine stood for rule over all China; the one the Zhou kings held was lost in the time of the First Emperor.

After which 260 BC battle is Qin's general Bai Qi said to have buried alive hundreds of thousands of Zhao captives?

Changping ended a two-year stalemate, and by the traditional account only 240 of the youngest prisoners were released.

The Zhoubi Suanjing, an early Chinese astronomy text, presents the 'gougu' rule, a form of which Greek's theorem?

Pythagoras gets the credit in the West, but in China the rule is called gougu, 'hook and thigh', after the two arms of a carpenter's right-angle ruler.

Astronomer Gan De may have spotted a moon of which planet with the naked eye in 365 BC, long before telescopes?

Jupiter was Gan De's speciality: he wrote a whole treatise on it, and his note of a small reddish star beside the planet has been read as Ganymede or Callisto.

Which staple grain was first domesticated in China's Yangtze River basin around 9,000 years ago?

Rice spread from the Yangtze across East Asia and beyond; a separate African species was domesticated independently only about 3,000 years ago.