Corn from the North

Beside the road up to Shandong, in China, a cake stall caught the eye of a traveler from the south. The stall held small cakes, their tops dotted with jujube seeds and melon seeds. He looked closely, and thought at once of the millet dish back home. The two were hardly different.

They were only a few roadside cakes, but he remembered them.

The traveler had come far on the business of his country. He was Lê Quý Đôn, a renowned Vietnamese scholar. In 1760, he and Trần Huy Mật led a party of envoys to the court of the Qing. The Qing were the dynasty then ruling China. The envoys set out at the end of the first lunar month and kept heading north. At Lạng Sơn, in the border country of their homeland, the whole party stopped to prepare before crossing the border.

Beyond the border, the road was still very long. He passed through Guangxi and climbed several of the famous peaks of that region. Then he reached Huguang and Shandong, and stood gazing at the foreign land spread out before him. He kept notes along the way, and later gathered them into a separate book called Bắc sứ thông lục. The stall with its seed-dotted cakes lay somewhere on that long road.

More than two years after setting out, the envoys finally came back to the border. Lạng Sơn, where they had stopped to prepare, now welcomed them home.

Back home, Lê Quý Đôn went on reading and writing. In 1773, the year Quý Tỵ, he finished the preface to a book called Vân đài loại ngữ. It was just after the full moon of the seventh lunar month. In that book he wrote about the roadside cakes on the way to Shandong. And just before the cakes, he described a plant that every family knows well today.

To describe the plant, he borrowed the words of a Chinese book of medicine. Halfway up the stalk swells a pouch, and from its tip rises a tuft of white silk. The plant grows tall, some three or four thước by the old measure. Only when the pouch splits open can the kernels be seen. Some are yellow and some are white, packed tightly side by side. Roasted, they burst into fluffy white puffs that look just like popped sticky rice.

People in his own country, he wrote, call it lúa ngô.

The name belonged to his country, but the plant had come from very far away. It was a plant of the Americas, on the far side of the ocean. The Spanish and the Portuguese carried it on their merchant ships to Asia. By the late 17th century at the latest, corn had reached Đàng Ngoài, the north of the country.

Scholars of language believe that in the north, people called the plant lúa ngô, or simply ngô, because it came from the land of Ngô, away to the north. In the south, people call it by a completely different name, bắp.

Growing it took little plowing or harrowing. In the old days, a farmer went out to the field, pushed the tip of a knife into the soil, and turned it once around. Then a kernel of corn went into the hole.

Then Lê Quý Đôn tells of a man who had gone north as an envoy before him. He was Trần Thế Vinh, from Tiên Phong district. That was in Sơn Tây, part of the old xứ Đoài. In the early years of the Kangxi emperor's reign, he was sent as an envoy to the Qing court. The book does not describe the road he took. Lê Quý Đôn records that the envoy brought the seed of lúa ngô back home.

In the same passage, he adds that all across Sơn Tây, people had corn to eat in place of rice. About children, he writes one line: a good helping of corn fills the belly too. He also noticed that the corn of two places was not the same. In Nghệ An, most of what people grew was white corn. But in Lạng Sơn, the land that had welcomed his embassy home, the kernels came in as many as five different colors.

In the village of Bùng, in Thạch Thất, now part of Hanoi, people tell of a different road to the north. It was traveled long before Lê Quý Đôn set out. The man on that road was Phùng Khắc Khoan, a son of the village. He was born in 1528, on that very ground. In the old days the village too lay within Sơn Tây. Folk tradition calls him by the name of the village itself: Trạng Bùng. He passed the royal examinations with the rank of Hoàng giáp, not as Trạng nguyên, the title of the top graduate. Still, people honored him with the title of Trạng.

In 1597, Phùng Khắc Khoan was chosen as chief envoy, at the head of a whole party of envoys bound for the land of the Ming. The Ming were the dynasty then ruling China. He was already close to 70. The mission carried a weighty task. It was to ask the Ming to recognize the Lê emperor of his own country.

At the border, the mission met with obstacles. He had to argue his case with words alone. In Yên Kinh, where the Ming emperor held court, the envoys waited and waited, day after day. There, once again, he had to argue with Ming officials over the throne of the Lê emperor.

For the Vạn Thọ festival, the birthday of the Ming emperor, he presented a collection of 30 poems wishing the emperor long life. The Ming emperor praised the collection. In the same capital, he met an envoy from Korea. The two traded poems, one writing a verse and the other answering in kind.

The histories of the royal court record the birthday poems in some detail, along with the debates with Ming officials in Yên Kinh. But those histories say nothing about him bringing corn home.

According to the village tradition, he learned to grow corn and sesame in the north, and to weave a thin gauze called lượt. When he came home, he taught these skills to the people of his village. The villagers honored him as the founder of those crafts.

One story says that on the way home, he hid corn kernels in his topknot. The men who followed him carried chests, and the handles of the chests were plaited from sweet potato vines. And the walking stick for the road turned out to be a cassava stem. That tale lives on in the stories of the common people. Whether the corn came home with Trần Thế Vinh or with Trạng Bùng, no one can yet say for sure.

If the language scholars have guessed right, then the tiny word ngô, spoken every day by the people of xứ Đoài, still carries the name of the land of Ngô, far away in the north.