Exploring the Rice Cultivars in Large-Scale Chinese Local Gazetteers: A Computational Approach

Chinese local gazetteers have long been widely used by scholars to investigate the local products, culture, economy, and much more. Confronted with large-scale digitized resources nowadays, researchers can explore historical texts in a novel way. In this paper, we propose a computational approach in order to perform large-scale quantitative analysis of plant knowledge embedded in Chinese local gazetteers. We select the typical rice cultivars by their occurrences in the records, interpret their common features, and leverage the data clustering algorithm to investigate the inner connections among cultivars. We conduct a case study on a dataset of records of rice cultivars over 8 centuries in Jiangsu Province, China. We find that although planting early-season rice in Jiangsu province was the common practice, the local rice farmers cared more about the color, quality, and uses of cultivars than their sowing time. In addition, not all the rice varieties mentioned frequently in records are local plants. Plants imported from other provinces or countries were also highly recorded because of their good quality and special characteristics. Our study offers a practical guide and reference to history study as well as useful clues for modern agriculture.