Potatoes in China: The Endnotes

How potatoes brought down two Chinese dynasties. An endnote for our Potato video

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Transcript:

Welcome to the Endnotes, where I put all the fun facts I can’t fit into the main videos! Today, an extra bit of information from my video about the Potato — and if you haven’t seen that yet, click on the card.

The potato didn't just have an impact on European civilization but also on the places that the European traders visited. It could even be argued that this Columbian exchange helped to bring down two Chinese dynasties. You see what the Spanish really wanted was Chinese silk, which they were able to purchase with all that South American silver mined by potato-powered workers. The silver was, initially, the answer to the hyperinflation of the Chinese paper currency, and so China came to rely on the Spanish silver. When that supply was eventually cut off due to shifting trade policies there was an economic collapse that contributed to the fall of the Ming dynasty in the 17th century.

But the Chinese were also quick to adopt the sweet potato, which they called fanshu literally “foreign tuber” (a bit of a botanical misnomer since a sweet potato isn’t actually a tuber but a modified root, unlike the actual potato), which was able to solve food shortage issues. Sweet potatoes could be easily grown in the mountainous areas in China, but unfortunately this led to excessive land clearing for farming, which meant that the soil could no longer hold the rainwater, and the soil nutrients washed away leaving the land depleted, so more land had to be cleared. This feedback loop devastated the countryside, and also led to flooding of the more low-lying arable land. And this was a contributing factor to the fall of the Qing dynasty in the early 20th century. Even today though, China is the leading producer of sweet potatoes.

As always, you can hear even more etymology and history, as well as interviews with a wide range of fascinating people, on the Endless Knot Podcast, available on all the major podcast platforms as well as our other YouTube channel. Thanks for watching!