The History of Rice, From the Yangtze to Carolina

The history of rice starts in the Yangtze River basin of China, where farmers domesticated Asian rice (Oryza sativa) roughly 9,000 years ago, though dates vary by source. A second, separate species was domesticated in West Africa about 3,000 years ago. From those two beginnings rice spread across continents and now feeds roughly half the world's people.

Where the first rice farmers worked

Scholars widely place the first domestication of Asian rice in the Yangtze basin, from wild rice known as Oryza rufipogon. The lower Yangtze cultures that grew it include Kuahuqiao, Hemudu, Majiabang, Songze and Liangzhu. Further upriver, the middle Yangtze produced Pengtoushan, Daxi, Qujialing and Shijiahe.

The dating depends on whom you ask. Britannica puts the earliest archaeological evidence in central and eastern China between 7000 and 5000 BCE. Other summaries of the research say about 9,000 years ago. Both agree on the region, and neither supports the tidy "8000 BCE" that gets repeated online.

India is harder to pin down. Claims for rice at Lahuradewa from about 6000 BCE are disputed, and the archaeobotanist Dorian Fuller has warned that early radiocarbon dates from the Ganges plains need caution. Unambiguous domesticated rice there turns up around 2000 BCE.

One domestication or two? What the genes say

A 2011 genetic study linked all Asian rice to a single domestication from wild rice. Later work added a twist. A 2017 genomic study by Choi and colleagues suggested the short-grained japonica group came first. Indica, the long-grained rice of much of South and Southeast Asia, arose when japonica reached India about 4,500 years ago and crossed with a local wild or proto-indica rice.

Then the story doubles back. A 2020 study led by Rafal Gutaker found that indica was brought back into China from India between 2,000 and 1,400 years ago. So the rice in a Chinese bowl today is partly the descendant of a grain that left China, changed, and returned.

A second species from the Niger

Asian rice is not the only rice people domesticated. In the inland delta of the Upper Niger, in present-day Mali, farmers domesticated African rice (Oryza glaberrima) about 3,000 years ago from a wild relative, Oryza barthii. Between 1500 and 800 BC it spread to Senegal, but it never travelled much beyond West Africa.

It lost ground slowly. Asian rice reached West Africa in the late 1800s and had largely displaced the local species by the late twentieth century. West Africa's best-known rice dish has its own story in jollof rice. The African species has a flaw that farmers know well: about half its grains shatter and fall before harvest, which cuts yields. A 2006 survey found villages typically grew 25 varieties of it.

How rice reached Japan, Persia and Europe

Dry-land rice reached Korea and Japan sometime between 3500 and 1200 BC. Wet paddy farming came to Korea around 850 to 550 BC and to Japan around 300 BC.

Westward, grains of Asian rice were recovered from a first-century AD grave at Susa in Iran, and farmers in Gilan later bred many indica varieties. Rice appeared in Roman military camps in Germany in the first century AD, but Europe took it up slowly (the Silk Road foods story covers other crops that moved west). It reached the Iberian Peninsula in the eighth century and Sicily in the ninth, and was a staple in Greece only from the tenth. In Italy it moved onto the plains of the north by the late 1400s, with the date given as 1468 to 1475.

The Americas got it in the 1500s, a crop that, like sugar, ended up tied to plantation labor in the colonies. Spanish colonists brought Asian rice to Mexico in the 1520s, and the Portuguese and enslaved Africans brought it to Brazil at about the same time. Researchers also report that a separate rice was domesticated from Amazon wild rice before the fourteenth century.

Carolina Gold and the people who knew how to grow it

Rice arrived in South Carolina in 1694, probably from Madagascar. A story credits a pirate, John Thurber, with handing seed rice to a doctor named Henry Woodward. That tradition may be apocryphal, and the records do not settle it.

What the records do show is who made the crop work. Enslaved Africans brought the skills of rice cultivation, which made them highly valued in the Lowcountry; Charleston handled about 40 percent of American slave imports. The historian Judith Carney built her book Black Rice (2009) around this transfer of knowledge. The dominant strain, Carolina Gold, was of African origin, and the variety was popularized in South Carolina in the 1780s. Jonathan Lucas added waterpower to rice mills in 1787.

By the start of the Civil War, Carolina Gold made up about 3.5 million of the roughly 5 million bushels of rice grown in the United States. Its popularity then fell, and the last commercial crop was harvested in 1927.

The seed survived anyway. In the 1980s Dr. Richard and Patricia Schulze, restoring rice ponds on their land in Hardeeville, South Carolina, learned that a USDA research center in Texas had kept seed stock. They planted 14 pounds and harvested 64 pounds in the first season. Carolina Gold went back on sale to the public in 1998.

Miracle rice in the 1960s

The International Rice Research Institute opened in 1960 at Los Baños in the Philippines, backed by the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Philippine government. In the 1960s its scientists developed IR8, a high-yield, pest-resistant variety soon called "miracle rice." Britannica reports yields rising about tenfold for farmers who used it and credits higher output with reducing famine.

India was the test case. After the Bengal famine of 1943 the country depended on imported food, and in 1964 Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri asked Indians to cut back on parties and extravagant weddings. Rice followed wheat into the high-yield era, and in 1971 India became self-sufficient in food production.

The costs came with it. The heavy use of fertilizers and pesticides brought pollution, soil degradation and biodiversity loss, and large irrigation schemes depleted groundwater. Miracle rice itself did less than hoped where soils were poor.

Today more than 90 percent of the world's rice is grown in Asia, mostly in China, India, Indonesia and Bangladesh, and 95 percent of the crop is eaten by people. Carolina Gold, last cut for the market in 1927, went back on sale in 1998.

Questions people ask

Where did rice originate?

Asian rice (Oryza sativa) was first domesticated in the Yangtze River basin of China, from wild rice, with dates ranging from about 9,000 years ago to between 7000 and 5000 BCE depending on the source. African rice (Oryza glaberrima) was domesticated separately in the Niger delta of Mali about 3,000 years ago.

When did rice come to the Americas?

Spanish colonists brought Asian rice to Mexico in the 1520s, and the Portuguese and enslaved Africans brought it to Brazil about then. Rice reached South Carolina in 1694, probably from Madagascar, and enslaved West Africans supplied the skills that made Carolina Gold a major export crop.

What is miracle rice?

Miracle rice is the nickname for IR8, a high-yield, pest-resistant variety developed in the 1960s at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines. It was used in India's push for food self-sufficiency, reached in 1971, though heavy fertilizer and pesticide use brought environmental costs.

Is African rice the same as Asian rice?

No. African rice (Oryza glaberrima) is a separate species, domesticated from wild Oryza barthii in the Niger delta about 3,000 years ago. Asian rice (Oryza sativa) came from the Yangtze basin. Asian rice arrived in West Africa in the late 1800s and largely displaced the local species.

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