[Sca-cooks] Re: Blown Sugar is Chinese Apparently

[Volker Bach]

Am Donnerstag, 27. Oktober 2005 01:06 schrieb Elise Fleming:
> Greetings!  I've been skimming the digests because I've been substitute
> teaching for two weeks and it's using up what energy I have.  However, I
> had a question today about this Chinese business... When was sugar cane
> developed and grown in China?  When did they have whatever passed for
> refineries?  You can't make blown sugar without having some type of sugar
> production and I will admit that I know virtually nothing about China.  I
> know that the Arabic sugar production from cane supposedly started around
> the time of Mohammed.  Did the Chinese have "processed" cane sugar prior to
> the Arabs?

Very probably. Sugarcane originally comes from Southeast Asia (the last thing 
I read was actually New Guinea, but research keeps going on) and the earliest 
references to processed sugar come from India. China and India were linked by 
active trade networks as much as India and the Middle East were, and much of 
Southeast Asia was intermittently under Chinese overlordship. I don't read 
Chinese, so i can't name any sources for sugar's arrival, but I'd be very 
surprised if it had taken longer to get there than it took to get to Persia 
or Egypt. 

As an aside, economic historians have estabnlished that until the 18th 
century, per-capita sugar consumption in both China and India was higher than 
in Europe. That may or may not reflect a long-standing tradition, but it 
shows that sugar could be sourced regionally in quantity.

Giano


	

	
		
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