Lord Millet

Millet is a grain that, thousands of years ago, grew wild along the banks of the Yellow River. Over millennia, it has been a cherished staple and a sought-after delicacy; at other times it was scorned as animal fodder and a famine food. In the dimmest reaches of memory, a certain Lord Millet entered the Chinese pantheon. Was he a god? A wise administrator? Karen Kao imagines different avatars of this elusive figure with six vignettes, starting in the neolithic times and carrying through to the present day.

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Hunter-gatherers live along the shores of Lake Baiyangdian. They are the seeds from which the Chinese people will spring. But they don’t know that. Their minds are focused on survival.

Picture an open field at the cusp between winter and spring. A man clears a space in the crusted earth. He places into that warm crevice all he has been able to forage. His sacrifice is three black walnuts, the seeds of a sea buckthorn, and one chicken egg, still warm. It’s not much but all he needs is a hint.

Should he plant his millet today or next month? Will it grow better in the shadow of his home or close to the reeds where the wild millet grows? He is the first in his family to try to tame the millet that runs wild along the banks of Lake Baiyangdian. Who can he ask but the gods?

“Oh mighty Hou Ji, lord of the millet grains, guide my faltering hand. Show me the best place to plant my seed and I will worship you forever.”

Hou Ji wakes. He hears his name being called. Is one of the other gods laughing at him? He lost at mahjong three times in a row and now he cannot show his face in the Heavenly Palace. If only he had a temple to which he could retreat. But there are no temples to Hou Ji, not even a household altar like that mealy-mouthed kitchen god and his nosy wife. From far below, he hears the mewling of a mortal. He sees the paltry gifts and flies into a rage. What sort of a god does this mortal take him for?

Down in the field, the man stamps his feet. It’s cold. The daylight will die soon. The man has traps to set and greens to forage. Maybe he’ll get lucky and startle a muntjac in the foothills. He has wasted enough of his day praying to a sleeping god. He looks down at his sacrifice. Dare he sneak the chicken egg back into his pocket?

The wind rises. It blows hard across the icy river, sending flakes of frost into the man’s eyes. The reeds are frightened. They release their unearthly moan. Finally, the man hears his god speak.

“Go ahead and snivel. You peasants are all alike. You bring these measly offerings and expect abundance in return. What do I care that the ox has died or that your wife may soon follow?”

The man falls to the ground and knocks his head three times.

Hou Ji continues: “If you had brought me a goat, even a dozen squirrels, I would have rewarded you richly. Millet would sprout beneath your feet. Yellow-green stems would dance for your wife and in due course, those stems would bear you seeds.”

The man wrings his hands. He mumbles excuses but Hou Ji will not listen.

“Tell me your name, peasant!”

The man stutters. “M-my name?” he says. “Call me Yao.”

“For your insolence today, I curse you, Peasant Yao. I lay a drought upon your land. The dust will rise to choke you. Cracks will open and your children will tumble in. You will go hungry this winter, Peasant Yao.”

Once again, the man knocks his head on the ground three times. The wind dies down. A watery sun appears to warm his knees. It must be a sign.

He takes his millet seeds out of his pocket. Hard and round, smaller than a baby’s toenail, each grain as yellow as old teeth. He’ll plant half of his seeds this week and the other half later. His mouth waters at the prospect of millet.

His wife will steam the millet in her three-legged pot until the grains are light and fluffy. He will keep his promise and offer a small portion to Hou Ji. Then he and his wife will dip their fingers into the communal bowl and eat their millet with the cabbage and bamboo shoots his wife has preserved in precious salt.

After they’ve eaten their fill of the harvest, the man will visit his neighbor Yao to tell him of the misfortune that awaits.

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© GIAHS Conservation and Management Office of Aohan, China (Flickr)

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From huts to straw houses, the villages of the Wei River grow. Their millet stalks wave gaily in the summer breeze. A nascent city-state emerges from the cradle of the Yellow River Valley, fitful and always hungry.

The tax collector sits in the village square. To his right lies a heap of millet stalks, heavy with tightly beaded seeds. To the left, a long line of peasants waits to pay their taxes. A set of copper scales stands on the table but no one in this village pays in cash.

The collector has been here all day. Beaters have gone into the fields one last time to flush out the delinquents. The mood in the village is surly but his beaters are surlier still. Tax collection can be a dangerous business. The beaters hoist their poleaxes a little higher on the shoulders.

Village women busy themselves inside a hut. A glorious aroma fills the air. First, the sweetness of well-dried oak as it kindles a fire. Then, underneath it, a pinch of the nose that is one part sour to two parts bitter. The ash of an incense stick? The beaters smell it, too. Their poleaxes clatter to the ground as they head towards the women’s hut. Beer!

This must be the famous village on the Wei River. The tax collector has heard the rumors of men who will trade their millet for barley brought by barbarians from the far west, of women who forage in the foothills for roots and plants to add sugar to their mash.

The tax collector looks at the peasant before him. The man has a reasonably intelligent aspect. So the tax collector asks, “What do you put into the mash?”

The peasant shrugs. “That’s women’s work.”

The tax collector waves away the last of the taxpayers. Their sun-beaten faces crack into disbelieving grins. They rush back into their hiding holes in the fields while the tax collector hurries in the opposite direction, where the beaters are now tossing back cups of beer.

Back home, the tax collector is known as something of a gourmand, though not in the novelty foods beloved of the nobility. Where would a minor government official like a tax collector get the money to afford dog liver or wolf fat? No, what the tax collector loves is beer.

At home, he has his own kiln buried inside a deep pit. He has wide-mouthed clay pots for heating his mash and narrow-mouthed vessels with pointed ends to store the brew. The tax collector, of course, has his own secret recipe but he’s always in search of something new to add.

He pushes his way to the front of the line. Unlike his uncouth beaters who are now red in the face, the tax collector sips his beer. He dips his tongue into the foamy head. He closes his eyes as the alcohol punches through the bitter broth. This recipe he must have!

The tax collector knows better than to ask a woman for the recipe outright. The last time he tried that, the beaters had to save him from being run out of town. But this time, they can barely save themselves, lolling on the ground in a drunken stupor, too stupid even to stay out of the sun.

Instead, the tax collector sneaks around back to rummage through the trash. He’s not surprised to find the stalks of the lily or the lacy white flowers of the snake gourd. But there’s something else in this moldering mass that the tax inspector didn’t expect to find. The leaves are shaped like grass, though as wide and long as a sword. An unripened pod droops mournfully from one stalk. The tax collector bites gingerly into its flesh. The taste is vegetal, tangy, deeply sweet.

“Assemble the peasants,” the tax collector orders. “There’s new southern millet in this village and I want it.”

The beaters grumble. They scratch their bellies and burp. As their heads clear, their desire for mayhem returns. Happily, they ransack the village. They uncover a stockpile of regular old tribute millet. It’s not what the tax collector wants but he confiscates it anyway, every single beaded beard of grain buried inside a barrel of sand.

The farmers claim this is the seed for the next season’s crop. The tax inspector ignores their pleas.

“Where is your southern millet?”

A tiny bunch of pods appears on the tax collector’s table. The leaves are still firm and dark. If he rides through the night, he might be able to plant this treasure in his garden in the capital. The tax collector nods at the beaters.

They destroy the brewery. They smash the kiln and all the empty pots, tossing the shards into the pit. The beaters take away the tribute millet and all the five-grain beer. The road home to the capital will be a merry one.

But the southern millet doesn’t survive the journey. The tax collector curses the villagers for giving him a taste of heaven. He will try for the rest of his life to recreate that brew and die with its memory on his unslaked lips.

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© GIAHS Conservation and Management Office of Aohan, China (Flickr)

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The palace of King Tang is small but fortified. The court lives inside its thick walls while the peasants huddle in its shadow. Three times this year the Yellow River has flooded. Famine may follow. Measures must be taken to prevent a peasant revolt but who knows which one?

King Tang opens his fan. Counselor Xi rises to speak.

“The river will flood again this year. It will be a flood unlike any other we have seen in this generation. The villages along the riverbanks must be evacuated. Bring the oxen to higher ground and the pig wheat, too.”

The other counselors scoff. No inauspicious signs have appeared in the heavens. The oracle bones predict no such disaster. They jeer, “When did you become a soothsayer, Counselor Xi?”

They all know Counselor Xi is mad. Every morning, he gets into his sedan chair to be carried into the fields. Not only does he watch the peasants work, he speaks to them, too. Such a breach of propriety has never before been witnessed in an imperial court.

Counselor Xi bows. The pearl strands on his headdress jangle as he keeps his neck bent. If the king should choose to take his head now, so be it.

But King Tang is not inclined to behead Counselor Xi. To the king, the counselor’s headwear looks like a dagger between heaven and earth. To King Tang, it seems like such a clear sign. If famine comes, heaven’s favor will be lost. Dare he take the advice of Counselor Xi?

King Tang counts noses. Eleven counselors to one. He tugs on the cuff of his silk outer robe and then on the inner one, too. He calls for a bowl of plain steamed millet and the counselors know they have been dismissed.

That winter many villagers die when the Yellow River breaks its banks.

King Tang convenes a new council. Will the spring rains bring new floods? The wise counselors sit in silence and suck their teeth. One suggests calling in the services of a famous necromancer. Another proposes a grand sacrifice.

“And you?” the king asks. “What say you, Counselor Xi?”

Xi says, “It’s time to sow the millet.”

The king so decrees.

The peasants don’t want to leave their dwellings. Their animals keep them warm and their preserved vegetables keep them fed. But Counselor Xi insists. The peasants emerge into the frosty air. They scrape open the earth with their wooden sticks to turn up the soil, raw and steaming. They cut rows into the warm land and drop the grain they so carefully saved. Then they close each wound and wait.

Just eight weeks later and the millet stalks hang heavy with tiny yellow seeds. Women cut the stalks and carry them away from the fields, as proud as any peacock dragging its heavy tail across the shorn earth. The women spread the stalks onto the ground to dry.

Then the men come to thresh the grain. They use pestles as tall as they to crack the inedible hull. Counselor Xi can hear the pounding from the palace ramparts, the faint sound of singing and the plaintive notes of a pipa. He wants to see the men at work, measure their mettle against the grain, but by the time he reaches the threshing ground, the men’s work is done.

Now is the time for women and children. Carefully, they sweep the millet into finely woven baskets. Tossing, swirling, shaking and stomping until every last bit of chaff is removed. Counselor Xi holds the winnowed grain in the long palm of his hand. The seeds are firm. He sees no blemishes, no sign of rot. This basket of millet that has cost so much human labor will go to the palace tonight. This millet will be served to the king.

King Tang waits alone on his throne. He knows Counselor Xi has called for a feast. He knows of the army of cooks mobilized: the inner court chef and the outer court chef, the butcher, the jerky maker, the turtle catcher.

It was King Tang’s father who had hired all these cooks. The old man was a glutton and everyone knew it. He died with a carp bone lodged in his throat. King Tang vowed to lead a simpler life. Millet was good enough for him.

And yet, a king must keep up appearances. The tables fill with banquet dishes. The pig stuffed with dates, coated in mud and straw, then baked until rich and crackling. The Pounded Delicacy, fashioned from the finest cuts of cattle, sheep, moose, deer and muntjac. The dog liver roasted in caul fat. King Tang refuses them all.

“Bring me my smothered millet,” he orders. It arrives covered in its paste of grilled meats and fat. A servant lifts the imperial spoon to drop a few morsels into King Tang’s waiting mouth.

Counselor Xi eats nothing. He watches his king instead. His imagination is sufficient to taste what the king tastes, chew what the king chews.

King Tang looks up. He sees his counselor watching. It is a terrible breach of court etiquette, worthy of execution, but this time the emperor smiles.

“Henceforth,” King Tang declares. “You shall be called the Lord Millet, the wisest of my advisors.”

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© GIAHS Conservation and Management Office of Aohan, China (Flickr)

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For two thousand years, millet graces the imperial table. Then the court moves south where it finds the rice to be plentiful, sweet and fragrant. Noblemen and their families flock to the new capital, eager to taste its new foods: Citron, pomegranate, snow pear and quince. The tongue of lamb, the feet of the suckling pig, the fish’s swimming bladder.

Lin Hong likes his food as much as any nobleman. But he yearns for a simpler life. So he hires the best cook in town, Madame Wu, and takes her to live in his mountain eyrie. There, he amuses himself by collecting recipes gleaned from the peasants who forage and farm in this place. He’s learned, for example, how to sun-dry his water chestnuts and grind them into flour, which will soak in a jar of cool spring water until the smooth sweet starch settles at the bottom.

From time to time, Lin Hong returns to the capital for the city has its charms, too. There, he discovers abacus sticks, thumb-long strips of pork rubbed in sugar, Sichuan pepper, and cardamom. These, too, can be sun-dried to make the perfect snack for a woodland walk or steamed for a delectable lunchtime dish. Of all his gentleman-scholar friends, Lin Hong is clearly the best cook, though this won’t stop a friend from making a suggestion now and then.

But as good as Lin Hong is, Madame Wu is better. Her pickles are famous. Bamboo shoots, chives, eggplant and ginger, melon and cucumber. When Lin Hong invites his fellow gentlemen-scholars to dine, his steamed abacus sticks grow cold as the guests clamor for Madame Wu’s slippery noodles tossed in six kinds of pickled vegetables.

This is intolerable to Lin Hong. From that moment on, day and night, he tries to extract from Madame Wu her very best recipes. He bribes her first. Offers her a pair of oxen, a roll of silk and, finally, a doubled salary, enough cash for many fields of millet. Madame Wu will not yield. And so, regrettably, Lin Hong turns to threats.

He’ll turn her out of his house. Muddy her name. Ensure that she will never work again as a cook. He’ll sell her to a cathouse where she can live out the rest of her days as a fourth-class courtesan.

Madame Wu wails. She rends her garments. She beseeches all the gods to save her from her fate. In the end, she yields her mother-in-law’s recipe for strong spring wine. Tears fall from her cheeks as Lin Hong’s brush swirls down the page.

She says, “Collect the water after the mulberry leaves have fallen but before the lake has frozen. Brush the magic yeast cakes clean and pound them in a pestle. Mix the yeast with the lake water until bubbles the size of fish eyes appear. Then pour the wine into jugs and seal well with mud.”

“How will I know when it’s ready to drink?”

“The liquid will turn dark, the color of sesame oil.”

“And what kind of yeast?”

Madame Wu bows her head. She betrays the family’s secret ingredient. “Early harvest millet, finely ground.” She promises to show Lin Hong how to make Oak Bark Eggs. He follows her into the kitchen. She leads the way into the yard.

“The secret to Oak Bark Eggs is feeding the ducks well. If you keep the males away, the females can lay one hundred eggs a day.”

They go into the woods to harvest bark from the oak trees. They wash, chop, and boil the bark until the liquid turns a deep red. Madame Wu adds salt. Lin Hong wants to immerse his duck eggs right now but Madame Wu says no.

“The eggs will spoil if the water is still warm. Wait until it is cooled to add the eggs and then another month for the eggs to float to the top. Boiled Oak Bark Eggs go well with the strong spring wine.”

Lin Hong chuckles to himself. His guests will be so jealous. They’ll demand to know how to make these eggs but he’ll never say. Instead, he’ll write a cookbook. Something elegant and learned, befitting a man of his standing, maybe embellished with a bit of poetry.

His cookbook will include the customs of the mountain folk, his own concoctions, the well-meant suggestions of his friends and, yes, of course, Madame Wu’s recipes. This cookbook will be famous and Lin Hong will live forever.

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© GIAHS Conservation and Management Office of Aohan, China (Flickr)

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The years go by. Emperors come and go. Not every year is bad. Some years, there is no war. Some years, the drought is brief. This year is the year of rain.

The Yellow River moves swiftly past villages, oxen, fields of grain. At first, it sends fingers of water to massage the swollen earth. Then the water pours, fist over fist, until the topsoil is swept away. The land drowns, slowly but surely, under the weight of the Yellow River.

The roots of the millet plants dissolve. The stalks grow tofu soft. Their heads lower in submission to the water, releasing their seeds into the mighty stream. The Yellow River takes it all and gives back nothing.

When the floodwaters finally recede, a bucket of rice is worth a fine silk coverlet. But who ever heard of eating silk?

There are spring floods and winter floods. Six times a year or not one for a generation. Who knows what lives in the mind of a river? Certainly not this farmer, the one whose fields once burst with millet. The one his friends once teasingly nicknamed Lord Millet.

Those friends are now gone to other villages, other river valleys, in the hope that the water will stay in its banks. These days, the village is all but deserted. There’s no one left to call this man a lord or his drowned millet field a kingdom.

Lord Millet’s skin is burnt black by the northern sun. His hands are large and his knees are knobby. He crawls through his field in search of seeds he can salvage. All he finds are weeds for the soup pot: ragwort, cat-thistle, and chaff-flower.

His children are hungry. Their bellies are distended and their eyes empty. Lord Millet cannot bear their wailing. If only he were a good farmer. Then he could let them wail. He could wait until the animals were fattened. They would fetch more money at the market.

But Lord Millet is a father and so he slaughters his animals to feed his family. First, the pig, the two mandarin ducks, the last of the chickens. With the animals all gone, the family is now free to eat their grain.

When the grain is gone, too, Lord Millet sends his children into the hills to look for knotweed and coltsfoot, bitter leaves that will eventually become edible if boiled long enough. His wife can turn anything into a meal these days.

The children return with a bucket of bark: oak and elm and apricot. The nuts and fruit of course were taken away long ago. The children had to climb high into the crown of those trees to find a bit of the trunk that hadn’t already been scraped clean.

Lord Millet doesn’t know that Oak Bark Egg was once a delicacy. And even if he did, he has no eggs. His wife takes the bark the children found. She boils and mashes and mixes it with the last of her millet flour to make noodles that night.

The noodles lie limply at the bottom of the pan in a broth that is ten parts water and one part imagination. These noodles taste like hunger.

But the family eats them gratefully. Quickly.

Lord Millet works his fields in vain. He goes into the village in the hope of help. Instead, he’s lectured about all the things a man can eat in times of famine. Does the government think that a farmer doesn’t already know? That these weeds and berries, nuts and seeds, have long been consumed by farmers like him? Where is the help he needs to feed his wife and children?

His family obeys the time-honored hierarchy of famine foods. First, the pig wheat and the rice bran, then bark and leaves, roots and wild greens, dirt, the dead. Lord Millet’s children wail no more.

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© GIAHS Conservation and Management Office of Aohan (China)

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A new wind blows from Beijing, bringing revolution to Aohan County. China is on the rise! Few remain in the countryside where millet once grew wild. Money is made in the cities.

Little Bo’s parents move to Beijing, leaving Bo in the care of her grandfather. Her parents send money for Bo to attend school. Every day after class, she goes to her grandfather’s field. The old man is stubborn. He’s cheap, too. He says there’s nothing wrong with tilling the land with a wooden plow. Nothing shameful about storing his millet seeds in a pair of nylon panties tied across his chest.

Grandfather only likes the old foods. Sweet and sticky millet cakes. Thick porridges he gives to Bo every morning for breakfast. On good days, there might be pumpkin or yak milk to add some taste. But most of the time, Bo’s millet zhou is plain.

Every morning, she begs Grandfather, “Buy me the soft white bread that children in Beijing eat.”

To which he always replies, “Do I look like a princeling to you?”

The millet porridge is supposed to balance the qi, harmonize the stomach, and improve sleep. It’s true that Bo sometimes has trouble sleeping at night. Her dreams are filled with visions of fast cars.

Bo refuses to eat the millet. She’d rather go hungry than choke down another spoonful of that insipid pap. Bo sulks in the doorway of Grandfather’s one-room house. She’s marking the progress of the multi-lane overpass now under construction. Day by day, it inches closer to Grandfather’s field. Soon, it will overshadow the tender millet blades. Grandfather curses his concrete nemesis while Bo dreams of escape.

When Bo turns sixteen, a letter arrives from Beijing. Her hands tremble as she opens the envelope. She’s waited so long for the call to join them.

“Buy land,” the letter says. “Wherever millet can be grown.”

Tucked inside the envelope is a newspaper clipping. It’s an advertisement for the opening of a millet restaurant in Beijing. There’s a money order, too, in an amount Bo never knew was possible.

Bo’s parents return to Aohan County to run the first millet factory: a lean-to hammered to the back of Grandfather’s house. Baba operates the bicycle-powered pestle while Mama works the fields. Grandfather surprises them all with a talent for marketing. He calls their product “genuine authentic tribute millet”. He unearths an old photograph of Bo as a child and turns it into their logo. Bo’s ruddy cheeks and springy pigtails scream good health.

But Bo is no longer a child. She has a good head for numbers and a knack for squeezing suppliers. With the profits of the first crop, Bo buys a machine line. The sheaf of millet goes in one end and magically appears from the other, the yellow seeds neatly wrapped in shiny plastic packages. They’ll soon be shipped to restaurants far beyond the borders of Aohan County.

Her cell phones ring, both at the same time. She reaches into the back pockets of her designer jeans and whips them out like a movie cowboy, ready to fire. She hopes it’s a new order or another offer to joint venture. Anything but another desperate man trying to hitch his sorry self to her rising star.

It turns out to be another restaurant opening: Can Bo attend? The marketing people think it’s a good idea. Bo travels to Beijing in her chauffeur-driven limousine. She arrives at the restaurant festooned by red balloons and sheafs of artificial grain – not millet, wheat. Before Bo can point out the error, the make-up crew descends upon her. They loosen her hair. They give her a silly black hat and a shapeless gown, the kind of costume you’d see in a made-for-TV period drama. Someone tries to paste a straggly-haired beard onto her chin. That’s where Bo draws the line.

The photographers arrive. They beg Bo to smile, to fondle the grain, to take a sip from the bowl of steaming millet porridge someone has thrust into her hands. This porridge is adorned with salted eggs, fermented tofu, and fried peanuts. It’s not bad as millet goes.

But even now, as an adult, Bo still won’t eat millet. It’s only when she’s sick and her stomach will tolerate nothing other than the food of her childhood. Then she toasts the millet in a dry pan until the grains turn nutty. Boils them gently until the grains swell. Mixes in a little yak milk for old time’s sake and a generous handful of black sugar just because she can. The mouthfeel of those tiny yellow grains as they caress her tongue, slip down her throat, nourish her soul, ease her pain.

A photographer shouts, “Give us a smile, Lord Millet!”

Bo sneers. “That’s Lady Millet, you fool.”