In the early seventeenth century, China was introduced to a host of new crops and practices via the same trans-Pacific routes that shipped Spanish silver from the Americas. Chief among these imported curiosities was tobacco, Nicotiana tabacum, which arrived through Manila and Macao. Soon, this New World plant, along with maize (Zea mays) and sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas), began reshaping Chinese agriculture and social life, helping to fuel population booms and vast ecological challenges.
Below, we’ll trace the unexpected path of tobacco’s entry into China, how American crops spurred demographic change, and how China’s attempts to manage its growing population and degraded ecosystems shaped the country for centuries—even up to modern times.

Tobacco Takes Root
When Portuguese traders plied the seas in the mid-1500s, they spread more than just silver and gold. Archaeological records in Guangxi province date the local manufacture of tobacco pipes to 1549, indicating that Chinese smoking began earlier than many realize. By the 1570s, the Nicotiana tabacum plant had reached Fujian—very likely through a Spanish “silver ship” from Manila.
To many in Fujian, the new habit was as perplexing and alluring as it was to Spaniards and Englishmen in the West. “You take fire and light one end [of the pipe],” wrote the poet Yao Lu, “and put the other end in your mouth. … It can make one tipsy.” This everyday ritual of lighting a pipe caught on with startling speed. A decade or two after tobacco first appeared, merchants in Fujian were not only growing enough for themselves but exporting it back to the Philippines!

From Curiosity to Cultural Passion
Almost no corner of Chinese society proved immune to tobacco’s allure. Soldiers, perpetually bored on garrison duty, took it up as a welcome respite. One physician reported how an entire regiment in Yunnan who smoked pipes avoided the “miasma” of malaria—a hint at possible (if minor) protective benefits from smoke. By the early 1600s, provincial chroniclers were amazed: “all the people, even boys not four feet tall, were smoking.”

Soon enough, smoking became a social and aristocratic display. Wealthy men carried elaborate pipes, while fashionable women used elegant, extra-long stems to avoid the “harsh spirit” of the plant. Poets devised entire sub-genres praising bluish smoke tendrils, while certain aristocrats insisted they could not think, converse, or dine without a lighted pipe. Another sign of tobacco’s swift embrace: treatises like Yancao pu (Tobacco Manual) and Yan pu (Smoking Manual) published etiquette guidelines—defining, for instance, ideal times to smoke (after meals, before reading) and times to refrain (during zither performances or while worshipping ancestors).
Sweet Potatoes and the Poor Man’s Staple
Yet tobacco was not the only American crop to enthrall China. Ipomoea batatas, the sweet potato, arrived in Fujian through similar routes, likely in the late 1500s. One story credits merchant Chen Zhenlong, who smuggled cuttings out of Manila. Spanish customs officials did not realize the twisted, rootlike vines in Chen’s basket were contraband. In Fujian’s impoverished hills, the newcomers planted fanshu (foreign tubers) in infertile soils—an act that helped avert famine.
Local authorities saw immediate potential. By the 1590s, sweet potatoes spread widely in Fujian, producing bumper harvests in once-barren plots. Entire villages that had been on the brink of starvation now thrived. Soon the tuber advanced across southeastern China, providing a sturdy backup when floods or poor weather ruined the traditional rice harvest. Where Zea mays (maize) thrived best in thin soils, sweet potatoes positively flourished in acidic, sloped ground. Such adaptability permitted farmers and migrant families to explore terrain once deemed hopelessly unproductive.

Feeding Millions: American Crops Fuel a Boom
Maize, Peanuts, Chili Peppers, and More
Beyond sweet potatoes, a suite of other New World species—including maize, peanuts, and chili peppers—took hold in various Chinese provinces. Each found a niche: chili peppers lit up Sichuan cooking; peanuts contributed to pressing oils; maize grew in the drier northern hills. Over time, these imports yielded substantial harvests in areas unsuited to irrigated rice, unlocking marginal lands from Fujian to Yunnan and letting people settle slopes and semi-arid plateaus once deemed worthless.
It’s no coincidence that China’s population soared from perhaps 150 million in the mid-1600s to around 300 million by the century’s end. By letting farmers feed themselves on rugged slopes and in newly claimed western regions, American crops reshuffled the nation’s agricultural map. The Qing emperors encouraged migration into highlands and distant frontiers, where maize and potatoes thrived better than paddy rice.
Government Support—and Unintended Consequences
Just as the Song dynasty had once promoted new strains of rice, certain Qing officials recognized the advantages of sweet potatoes and maize, especially in disaster relief. They sometimes gave out cuttings, disseminated manuals, or offered tax breaks for opening mountainous land. When famines struck, these crops offered a crucial safety net.
But the ecological costs were steep. Migrants often practiced slash-and-burn on forested hillsides to quickly plant maize or sweet potatoes, rarely bothering with long-term soil management since they lacked secure tenures. In a twist reminiscent of earlier deforestation and erosion, these new expansions led to bigger floods downstream, and major rivers like the Yangzi and Huang He (Yellow River) became more prone to overflowing their banks. Even so, short-term profits and bigger harvests enticed both peasants and landowners—no one halted the mounting environmental pressure.
Hong Liangji and Malthusian Insights
By the late 1700s, China’s population and farmland were at a crossroads. One scholar-official, Hong Liangji (1746–1809), quietly foresaw a critical problem: the nation’s population was exploding faster than farmland could keep pace, even with new crops. Observing how mountainous Guizhou Province’s population had multiplied, he worried that Heaven-and-earth would redress the imbalance with floods, droughts, or plagues.
Remarkably, Hong’s ruminations on population appeared just a few years before Thomas Robert Malthus published his own famous Essay on the Principle of Population in England (1798). Though neither man influenced the other, both wrestled with how rising populations might outstrip food resources. Malthus concluded society was doomed to perpetual hardship—yet historically, humanity has often circumvented his “trap” via improved methods and technologies. Hong’s version, however, included a key ecological dimension: once farmland and forests were overcleared, floods and erosion might undercut the productivity gains, triggering social unrest.
His insight proved prophetic for the Qing. As landless peasants crowded the hills and deforestation soared, the once-flourishing empire struggled under repeated ecological blows. Numerous floods battered central and eastern provinces, disrupting the delicate rice economy. Combined with a host of other issues—bureaucratic corruption, peasant uprisings, foreign military conflicts—the strain contributed to the dynasty’s eventual collapse in the nineteenth century.
Mao-Era Echoes
The Dazhai Model
Flash forward to the 1960s, when communist leader Mao Zedong launched a dramatic slogan: “In Agriculture, Learn from Dazhai!” Dazhai, a tiny Loess Plateau village, had self-recovered from flooding by terracing its steep hills. Hailed by the state press, it became the blueprint for Chinese agriculture, with officials ordering peasants throughout the rugged northwest and elsewhere to emulate its practice of carving farmland from marginal slopes.
Farmers labored day and night, slicing earthen terraces out of rocky inclines, determined to wring cereal grains where only scrub once grew. The Loess Plateau, formed of loosely packed silt from ages of windblown dust, is notoriously susceptible to erosion. Nonetheless, the political fervor of the time demanded planting grain. The results were devastating: terraces constantly collapsed in rains. Each time a strong downpour struck, vital nutrients washed away, dooming harvests and requiring new clearings. Erosion soared, and farmland yields remained poor.
Attempts at Reversal
From the 1980s onward, post-Mao China tried to tackle the ecological fallout. Planting thousands of saplings across barren slopes, a “Green Wall” aimed to slow desertification. Grain-for-Green (or “3-3-3”) programs compensated farmers to replace steep cropland with forest or orchard. In places, these shifts helped reverse soil loss. Yet implementing them often ran afoul of local bureaucracies or short-sighted incentives (saplings suitable for a particular hillside were not always planted, as local officials focused on raw numbers rather than survival rates). Even so, these modern reforestation efforts echo older Ming and Qing struggles to contain the damage unleashed by overexpansion into fragile land.
Conclusion: A Tale of Two Transformations
Over the centuries, Nicotiana tabacum gave the Chinese a habit as addictive as it was profitable. Tobacco spread through the empire, shaping the daily rituals of scholars, soldiers, and aristocrats. At the same time, other transplanted American crops—maize, sweet potatoes, and potatoes—fed millions across harsh, mountainous frontiers. China’s population soared, thriving on farmland once deemed too marginal for staple grains.
Yet these booms carried a steep price. As more peasants (including the so-called “shack people”) cleared slopes for American crops, massive floods tore through major watersheds, devastating downstream farmland and undermining dynastic finances. The Qing government—wedded to contradictory policies of population expansion, tax revenue, and stabilizing the environment—proved unable to break the vicious cycle of deforestation and flooding. By the nineteenth century, repeated disasters, combined with foreign aggression and internal rebellion, contributed to the empire’s eventual decline.
Strikingly, traces of this history survived into Maoist China, where grandiose calls to “open the wastelands” repeated old mistakes of hillside farming. Twentieth-century campaigns in the Loess Plateau further confirmed that carving terraces from fragile soils can produce more ecological harm than agricultural benefit.
Ultimately, the mosaic of tobacco pipes and fanshu vines—plants that had once crossed the Pacific on ships laden with silver—reshaped a nation as large and diverse as China. Embracing these crops sparked new human settlements and population gains, while inadvertently unleashing floods and degraded lands. It is a cautionary tale of how global exchanges can bring life-saving boons and crippling challenges, often at the same time. Four centuries later, echoes of that environmental gamble still reverberate in China’s reforestation campaigns, water-management dilemmas, and relentless push to feed its ever-growing population on land that often looks more precarious than ever.