Five Cereals (China)

The Five Grains or Cereals (Chinese: t , s , p Wǔ Gǔ) are a grouping (or set of groupings) of 5 farmed crops that were all important in ancient China. Sometimes the crops themselves were regarded as sacred; other times, their cultivation was regarded as a sacred boon from a mythological or supernatural source. More generally, wǔgǔ can be employed in Chinese as a synecdoche referring to all grains or staple crops of which the end produce is of a granular nature. The identity of the five grains has varied over time, with different authors identifying different grains or even categories of grains.

The name is typically translated as the "Five Grains" or the "Five Cereals", and less often as the "Five Sacred Grains" or "Crops". Some context is important to understanding the concept, however.

First, this use of "five" predates modern botanical notions and is better understood as part of the symbolic use of numbers in Chinese culture. From a very early date, Han culture understood the world as composed of five elements and many corresponding pentads were ennumerated, including the Five Directions (south, north, west, east, and center), the Five Colors (red, black, white, , and yellow), and the Five Tones (a pentatonic scale).

Second, the character 谷 consists of water (水) coming from (or creating) an opening (口) and also means (and originally meant) "valley". This sense of "food grown in the valleys" is rather broader than most of 谷's English translations and permits the Five "Grains" to sometimes include such members as soybeans and hemp. Within Chinese culture, the idea of 谷 includes many domesticated seeds and is distinguished from fruits (果), vegetables (菜), herbs (草), and wild plant foods.

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