Research Of Dates In Ancient China

Dates have a long history of cultivation,processing and application in China.They were important cash crop and have been playing great role in history,and still own large economic,cultural and social value today.Many famous agricultural books summarized the cultivation of dates in detail,such as land selection,seed selection,transplantation,management and harvesting.To lengthen refreshing time of fresh dates and make them easy to store,people in ancient times made them into various date products by drying,ripening and liquidating.A large number of famous date brands had appeared in the history of cultivation and processing,which could be divided into four types: famous for place of origin,famous for appearance,famous for taste and famous for culture.Dates could be used in many ways.The most commonly seen edible method was direct eating fresh dates.Unpalatable or immature dates needed to be boiled.Date fruits and leaves were good for allaying hunger,even could be used as army provisions in lack of food.Some famous dates or date products were sold across the country as important commodities.Dates had functions of preserving health,such as nourishing spleen and stomach,aiding sleep and building body.Dates were also a major material or supplement material of many kinds of nourishing formulas,nourishing soups,nourishing porridges,as well as formulas of hair-nutrition and health care.Dates were one kind of the most frequently applied materials in traditional Chinese medicine,whose leaves,flowers,roots and fruits could be used as medicine in various prescriptions of pediatric department,such as gynaecology,internal medicine and surgery department.Dates also had special culture connotation and figurative meaning.In ancient China,they had been applied in many cultural activities like wedding,worship ceremony and immortality cultivating of Taoism,besides,dates also had been used in many spice manufacturing formulas.Dates had attracted great attention of ancient governors because of various applications and values.Written materials show that “policies on date” was first issued in the Northern Wei Dynasty,which distributed fields for planting dates,and many later dynasties issued a series of similar policies to support matters on lands and growth.At the same time,the actions destructing date trees were strictly prohibited,and violators would be punished severely.To encourage date planting,governments rewarded meritorious local officers and civilians,issuing preferential policies like tax reduction.High-quality dates must be tribute to imperial courts,which was called paying tribute of dates.Along with the development of date's sector,date tax had become an important part in traditional revenue.In the Ming Dynasty,the tax was collected in two ways: according to date plants or paying tax instead of rice.