Source: CCTV.com

10-11-2007 10:25

Peanuts have been popular in China since they were introduced some five hundred years ago. Now there is evidence that the tasty legumes played a role in the Chinese diet at a much earlier time. Conventional wisdom has held that the peanut was introduced to China from elsewhere. But recent archaeological findings show that there were peanuts in China more than 15-hundred years ago, earlier than previously believed.

The discovery emerges from a subordinate pit to the Hanyang Tomb in Northwest China's Shaanxi province. The tomb itself is the mausoleum of the fourth emperor of the Western Han Dynasty and his queen. At the secondary site, more that twenty food items were discovered. The samples had carbonized after over 2,100 years underground. But archaeologists discerned the unmistakable shape of the peanut.

Foodstuff always have been discovered in company with royal tombs or tombs of the nobility. The practice reveals the reverence that was held toward the dead by the people of that era. This is the first time however that peanuts have been found at such a site.

 

Editor:Liu Fang