If you travel to Indonesia today, you will definitely notice the colorful pastries on the streets - various colorful plants that are abundant in tropical areas make them far richer in color than most Chinese pastries. If you are attracted by these pastries and ask the vendor, you will learn that these pastries are generally called kue, plus another word.
is different from Chinese. In Indonesian , the modifier is placed after the center word, so kue is the general name for this type of pastry. The name of a single type of pastry is kue plus the type, such as Yogyakarta, which is famous for its Borobudur ruins. , a local specialty kue filled with bean paste is called kue bakpia, while kue lapis is a colorful layered layer cake.
On the surface, kue is nothing more than the Indonesian name for pastry. In fact, this kue is an authentic Chinese product. In Zhangzhou, Fujian, Chaozhou, and Shantou, Guangdong, there are various snacks called certain cakes, such as red turtle cake, onion cake, and red peach cake. The pronunciation of "ku" in the local dialect is kue.
An Indonesian kue platter
In fact, Indonesian kue is the Chinese kueh. The production techniques of various snacks in Nanyang today come from the early overseas Chinese who came to Nanyang called "Baba Nyonya".
As far as overseas Chinese in Indonesia are concerned, they mainly come from areas where today's Min dialect is spoken, such as southern Fujian, Chaoshan, and Hainan. Especially in the area around Jakarta , the early overseas Chinese who went to Southeast Asia were mainly from southern Fujian.
When the Dutch colonized Indonesia, they built the city of Jakarta and named it Batavia, that is, Batavia . This word was gradually introduced into the Indonesian language as the original name of the city of Jakarta. After its founding, Batavia developed rapidly and soon became the largest city on Java and the center of the Dutch East Indies. Immigrants came in droves from all over the Indonesian archipelago and even beyond.
These people called Betawi can be regarded as an outlier on the island of Java. Java has traditionally had two major ethnic groups, the Sundanese who occupy about one-third of the western part of Java, and the Sundanese who occupy the eastern two-thirds and the western and north coast. Javanese. But the Badawis are neither Sundanese nor Javanese. They speak a Malay that is mixed with a large amount of Hokkien dialect elements. The reason is that after the Dutch established Badawi City, many Chinese came here to do business. They were mainly men, and many of them married local women. Some of their descendants converted to Islam, integrated into the local area, and Other ethnic groups living in the Badawi area together form the Badawi group, and some maintain a certain degree of Chinese identity and retain many Chinese customs and habits.
Compared with the Chinese who came to Nanyang in the 19th and 20th centuries, these early overseas Chinese were much more deeply influenced by the local Nanyang culture and language. Because these Chinese men are called baba and women are called Nyonya, the kitchen is traditionally the domain of women, and the dishes they cook are called Nyonya cuisine. The characteristic of Nyonya cuisine is that it uses more sophisticated food processing techniques brought from China to process the rich local products of Nanyang. Pastries are an important part of Nyonya cuisine. Although many Baba and Nyonya speak Malay/Indonesian on a daily basis (Malay and Indonesian can actually be recognized as one language), they still retain a large number of Chinese words brought from their native China in their language. The ancestral home of the Babas and Nyonyas in Southeast Asia is generally in southern Fujian and Chaoshan. When they make pastries, they name them after the "kue" of their hometown, that is, kue. Moreover, the Chinese component of Yogyakarta’s famous product kue bakpia is not just kue. bakpia is the pronunciation of Hokkien “meat cake”. Some sugar, wax gourd strips, sesame and peanuts are indeed added to the making process of Hokkien meat cake. Such accessories have completely evolved into sweets in Yogyakarta.
It is actually not uncommon to use "粿" to represent food names. The "guozi" in Tianjin's famous snack "pancake fruit" refers to fried dough sticks. In some places in Shaanxi, fried twists are called "fried fruit". There is a fried sweet in Jiangsu and Zhejiang called "youguoguo". Japan has the famous "Wagashi", with hundreds of varieties to say the least, which are used to accompany tea and food.
Although this character is sometimes written as 馃, sometimes as Kueh, and sometimes as guo, in fact they all come from the word "fruit".As late as the Tang and Song Dynasties, the Chinese had already called snacks fruits. At this time, fruits were no longer limited to fruit products, but also included snacks such as sugar threads, dense cakes, fried dumplings, etc., which were clearly in the category of sweets.
Due to the return of Indonesian overseas Chinese, if you want to taste Indonesian-style kue today, you do not necessarily need to go to Indonesia in person. In places where returned overseas Chinese are concentrated, such as Xinglong in Hainan, many varieties of Nanyang kue can still be seen.
There is no certainty as to what materials the kue is made from. Fruits in central and northern China are often made from wheat flour. In Indonesia, which is located in the tropics, kue is generally made from rice, and those made from wheat flour are often inherited from the West. Here comes the Western pastries.
If kue is the product of the Chinese's voyages to Southeast Asia in recent hundreds of years, the rice used to make kue is the result of the ancestors who came from the East Asian continent thousands of years ago.
The earliest existing cultivated rice is located at the Shangshan site in Pujiang County, Zhejiang today, about 9,400 years ago. In the following thousands of years, rice agriculture appeared in the Pearl River Basin, Southeast Asia, northern China, the Korean Peninsula, and the South Asian subcontinent. In ancient times, the distribution of in wild rice and in wild rice was quite widespread. However, according to the existing genetic evidence, several key mutations in the domestication process of wild rice, such as the mutation of the sh4 gene that causes rice seed degranulation, only occur in Asian cultivated rice. Once. These key mutations make cultivated rice fruits less likely to automatically thresh, making harvesting easier for humans. It is crucial to the development of rice agriculture.
Therefore, today’s cultivated rice, whether from East Asia, Southeast Asia or the Indian subcontinent, all have a common ancestor, and their current differences are, on the one hand, the result of long-term cultivation, and on the other hand, due to hybridization with wild rice. Characteristics are improved. Just like in China today, wild rice still grows in a vast area from southern China to Dongxiang, Jiangxi in the north, Sanya, Hainan in the south, Yingjiang, Yunnan in the west, and Taiwan in the east. Chinese agriculturists are still searching for wild rice everywhere, hoping to use wild rice genes to continue improving existing rice varieties.
Wild rice
The domestication of wild rice, which changed the history of the world, can be said to be the greatest contribution of Chinese ancestors to the world. Among the major food crops in the world today, rice is the only crop native to China. Growing rice is a very hard job, and the entire process requires a lot of labor using a variety of tools. Accompanying the spread of rice seeds is a set of agricultural tools and technologies, as well as a set of discourse closely related to rice agriculture.
The Indonesian archipelago is one of the biggest beneficiaries of rice cultivation. The hot climate near the equator and the abundant rain brought by the warm waters of the Pacific Ocean have made the Indonesian islands densely covered with jungles and lush vegetation. When viewed from a high altitude, they look like emerald beads of varying sizes scattered in the blue ocean. Such climatic conditions are suitable for the growth of rice, and in islands such as Java, Bali, the volcanic ash erupted from time to time by ubiquitous volcanoes makes the soil on the islands extremely fertile, which is different from the barren leaching that is common in other tropical areas. earth. Extremely suitable natural conditions allow rice to be grown year-round in some areas of Java. The terraces developed to grow rice in the mountains are an important landscape in Bali, attracting countless tourists every year.
In Indonesian, rice is called beras, more precisely, it refers to rice that has been shelled. Due to the importance of rice in Indonesian people's life, the distinction between rice in Indonesian is quite detailed. In addition to beras, rice that has not yet been shelled is called padi, which is the origin of the paddy field in English; and rice that has been cooked Rice is called nasi, and the famous Indonesian fried rice is called nasi goreng.
If we calculate the life cycle of a grain of rice, the padi stage after harvesting and before shelling and the nasi stage after cooking and before being put into the mouth are relatively short. Let’s put padi and nasi aside for the time being and focus on the normal life first. The beras occupy the longest life span of a grain of rice.
Indonesian, as the official language of Indonesia, is actually a variant of Malay. Malay originated in today's Borneo, and later migrated to the westernmost part of the Indonesian archipelago, Sumatra, and the Malay Peninsula. .But throughout the Indonesian archipelago, the main languages on many islands almost all use similar words to refer to "rice". For example, the Lampung language of Sumatra Island is bias, the Sundanese language of western Java is beas, and the Javanese language of central and eastern Java is wos. , Balinese is bahas, Lombok Salak is beras, Sulawesi Bugis is wereʔ, Flores Mangalay is weras, Timor Tetum It's wos.
Bali rice terraces
If you look beyond the Indonesian archipelago, similar titles are distributed far beyond Indonesia, Philippines Luzon's Tagalog is bigás, Cebuano is bugás, Guam Chamo rakugo It's pugas, the Ami language of the Alpine people in Taiwan is felac, the Huihui language of the Hui people in Hainan Island is phia, and even the Malagasy language on the island of Madagascar off the coast of East Africa, rice is called vary. There are many similar-looking words like
in these languages. "二" in Indonesian is dua, New Zealand thousands of miles away is rua in Maori, Malagasy in Madagascar is roa, and Ami in Taiwan is tosa. "Eye" is mata in Indonesian, mata in Maori, maso in Malagasy, and mata in Amis.
If a word has the possibility of coincidence, so many similar words cannot be the result of pure coincidence. In terms of modern distribution, these languages stretch from the sea off East Africa to Oceania, halfway around the world, and are scattered on thousands of islands from Madagascar to Easter Island. Although many of these people who rely on the sea have extremely advanced navigation skills, the sea still plays a significant blocking role. It is almost impossible for Maori in the South Pacific and Malagasy in East Africa to have close contact with speakers of Indonesian and Taiwanese Amis and borrow a large number of vocabulary words. There is only one explanation for the large number of similar words in these languages, and that is that their ancestors lived in the same area, or even the same group of people.
Research on these languages shows that the languages spoken by people from East Africa to Madagascar across the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean are closely related and have homologous relationships. Due to their geographical location, these languages are called Austronesian . Further research on the Austronesian language family shows that the area with the highest diversity and the most complex differentiation of the Austronesian language family is Taiwan. In other words, the most likely place of origin for the thousands of Austronesian languages that span almost half the world is the tiny island of Taiwan. The ancestors of the Austronesian language family moved south from Taiwan to the Philippines, and then spread from the Philippines to the Indonesian Archipelago, and finally reached today's range after a series of ocean voyages.
Taiwan is an island in the Pacific Ocean. It does not have the conditions to independently evolve modern humans, and there is no evidence that Taiwan’s agriculture originated independently. Taiwanese residents thousands of years ago still immigrated to Taiwan from mainland East Asia.
In fact, thousands of years ago, it was almost inevitable that the ancients from the coast of Fujian would land on the island of Taiwan. Although the Taiwan Strait is quite wide at hundreds of kilometers, far exceeding the limit of sight for people of normal height at sea level, there are many mountains on the island of Taiwan. The highest peak of Central Mountain Range is Yushan Mountain, which is nearly 4,000 meters high. The highest peak in East and South China. On the mountains of Pingtan Island and Nanri Island, which are closest to Taiwan in Fujian, you can see the central mountain range of Taiwan Island with excellent visibility.
For the residents of the ancient southern coast, the mountains that appeared and disappeared in the distance were always calling them to cross the sea and explore the new world. Of course, adventure requires not only courage, but also sophisticated planning. When the ancestors of the Austronesian people landed on Taiwan Island from South China, rice had become an indispensable crop in the lives of the Austronesian people. A shrewd adventure team will definitely not Forget to take this important food crop with you.
Zanba, made from highland barley flour, is the staple food of the Tibetan people.
What is strange is that similar words also appear in the Tibetan language. The vast Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is arid and cold, and is not suitable for the growth of rice. The main food crop on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is a special locally cultivated barley variety, highland barley.
However, in Tibetan, there is the word འབྲས (mbras) that means "rice" (which can also refer to "fruit"). It is unlikely that Tibetans on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and Austronesian people on the oceanic islands have any intersection, and there is no need to cross thousands of mountains and rivers to borrow this word. The origin of this word is also very ancient. The Mizo language of Mizoram, located at the southern foothills of the Himalayas and at the junction of eastern India and Myanmar, is a distant relative of Tibetan. In the Mizo language, there is the word raʔ (ʔ means the sound of throat tightening and obstruction). , used to represent fruit.
Like the Austronesian language family, Chinese, Tibetan, Mizo, Burmese, Yi and other languages belong to a large language family, the Sino-Tibetan language family. For example, "six" is drug in Tibetan, khrok in Burmese, ruk in Mizo, and kruʔ in Jingpo in western Yunnan and Myanmar. At first glance, these are not very similar to the liu of Mandarin . But this is just an appearance. Drastic phonetic changes over thousands of years have produced a huge difference between the pronunciation of Mandarin and ancient Chinese. If you compare the pronunciation of Cantonese "six" with luk, you can clearly see the similarities. . Similarly, "three" is gsum in Tibetan, sum in Burmese, sum in the Achang language of Longchuan County, Yunnan, sɔ in the Yi language of Liangshan, Sichuan, and thum in Mizo, all of which have been compared with Mandarin. san is quite close. If compared with saam in Cantonese, the close kinship is even more obvious.
When we look back at beras and mbras, we will find that an important link seems to be missing.
Both the distribution of wild rice and the archaeological and genetic evidence of rice domestication point to the origin of cultivated rice in the humid areas of southern China. Even more accurately, it is in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River today. This is the birthplace of the famous Liangzhu Culture. Large-scale rice field sites dating back more than 5,000 years have been discovered, and it is even an important rice producing area to this day. If we continue to think along this line of thinking, if the "rice" on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is related to the "rice" on the Pacific Ocean, the geographical area between these two "rices", the birthplace of cultivated rice, will be beras and mbras of common origin. The middle area of
, namely and South China , is mainly the distribution area of Chinese. Just think about the common words related to "rice" in Chinese. Whether it is "rice" or "rice" or "grain" or "rice", they have nothing to do with beras or mbras. But if the scope is expanded, a suspected object appears - Sui.
粝 is not a very rare word. It is just commonly used in modern Chinese for the word "rough", which means "rough". However, the word "rice" next to the shape clearly shows that many people are no longer familiar with it. Its original meaning - brown rice. The origin of this word is very ancient. It was written in the "Han Feizi·Wuzhe" written in the Warring States Period: "Yao was the king of the world, and the grass was not cut, the colorful rafters were not cut, the food was rice, the soup was the soup of quinoa, and the winter was not the same. "Qiu, summer ge clothes." In order to express the simplicity of Yao's life, he said that he ate only rice. "Pian Hai", a calligraphy book of the Jin Dynasty, also defined "粝" as "the rice is not refined". In Mandarin, the pronunciation of "粝" is li, which does not seem to have much to do with beras. In Cantonese, it is pronounced as "lai", which is not similar. However, the previous example of "six" shows that the Chinese l comes from the r of the Sino-Tibetan ancestor. There is also other evidence that Chinese tones are derived from the final consonants of the original Sino-Tibetan language, in which the falling tone of "粝" comes from -s.
Unlike Tibetan, Burmese and other texts, Chinese characters are not purely phonetic characters, but the phonetic characters, which account for the largest proportion of Chinese characters, play a role in the pronunciation of a word. Open China's earliest dictionary "Shuowen Jiezi", in which "粝" is written as "䊪", which uses "wan" as the sound symbol. Although "wan" is pronounced wan in Mandarin today, it is maan in Cantonese. Not only that, in Korean, which borrows a lot of medieval Chinese vocabulary, the word "만" is pronounced as man, which shows that the ancient initial consonant of this word is related to m.
The ancient initial consonant of Manjushri Bodhisattva is also m, so Qianlong once claimed that "Manzhou" came from "Manjusri"
The pronunciation of "粝" in ancient Chinese. Among the two main ancient Chinese construction systems, Zheng Zhang Shangfang's system believed that the pronunciation m·rads, Bai Yiping- Shagar system thinks it is pronounced mə-rat-s. This pronunciation is quite close to the ancient Tibetan pronunciation mras. “粝” can be the missing link between beras and mbras.
People living in the world, eating is one of the most basic needs. Therefore, words like beras and kue can often become magical words that spread widely across extremely long geographical distances and language differences. Indonesia is one of the main destinations for Chinese people visiting Southeast Asia in history, and this phenomenon is particularly obvious. For example, fried wontons are called pangsit in Indonesian, which means "flat food" in Hokkien, and meatballs are called bakso, which means "meat crisp" in Hokkien. In turn, pandan, a fragrant leaf plant originating from Southeast Asia, has also become a raw material for making cakes in some places in southern China, and is transliterated as "pandan". Compared with architecture, art, religion, etc., although food exchanges are not very eye-catching, they involve all walks of life and have a wide range of contacts. Behind the superficial inconspicuousness are the daily life patterns formed during the cultural exchanges between the two parties. Deep changes. Whether it is the beras of thousands of years or the kue of the past few hundred years, it is better to be like this.
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