Jia Sixie Scribe of guide to farming

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Jia Sixie was a famous agronomist in the Northern Wei Dynasty（386-534 AD）.He was also the author of“Qiming Yaoshu”or”Essential Techniques for the Welfare of the Peo-ple，”a book widely deemed as China’s first agricultural ency-clopedia and one of the five top agriculture books in ancient China.

Jia was born into a scholar’s family that engaged in agricultural production for several generations in today’s Shandong Province in eastern China.During his childhood，Jia’s family wasn’t wealthy，but boasted a rich collection of books on agriculture.This provided the young Jia an opportunity to read extensively ancient Chinese literature on farming, animal husbandry, fishery, forestry and other fields of farming. As a result, when he began to write”Essential Techniques for the Welfare of the People”in later years, he was able to quote from more than 160 ancient agriculture books and treatises.

When he was grown up, Jia was once appointed by the imperial court to be the magistrate of Gaoyang or today’s Linzi in Shandong Province. But later, he returned to his home to concentrate on farming and writing the book on agriculture.

Apart from being conversant with ancient Chinese liter-ature on agriculture, Jia paid great attention to practical ex-periences in farming and rural production. He traveled to many places to observe the agricultural production there and talk to numerous local farmers to note their experiences in farming.

Once Jia traveled to Bingzhou in today’s Shanxi Province in northern China. He found that a kind of turnip was growing particularly well there. He asked local farmers why the turnip was growing so well there and was told that it had always been that way there.”Even if you introduce turnip seeds from other places, it will grow better here,”Jia was told.

However, Jia was also told that garlic could never grow well in Bingzhou and was much smaller than garlic from other places. Even if good garlic was introduced from neighboring areas, the plant could never yield the same results as in their places of origin.

After carefully studying the unique phenomena in Bingzhou, Jia came to understand the environmental influence on heredity of species.

He also tried to accumulate experience in animal husban-dry by raising sheep and farming chickens.

Later, Jia included the practical experiences he had col-lected into”Essential Techniques for the Welfare of the Peo-ple,”which he completed around 533-544AD.

The book, as the first agricultural encyclopedia in the country, contains 10 volumes and 92 chapters. It comprehen-sively recorded the farming techniques, agricultural product processing and storage procedures, horticultural and sericulture methods and animal husbandry and fishery practices of ancient Chinese farmers living along the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River in northern China.

The book has been regarded as an official guide on Chinese agriculture for more than 1,300 years. It was later translated into several foreign languages and provided refer-ence for Charles Darwin when he studied the theory of evolu-tion.