What regions are kiwifruit mainly grown in?

New Zealand is renowned worldwide for the kiwi, and its people love this fruit so much that they named it after their national bird, the kiwi (Kiwi Bird), calling it Kiwi Fruit, which, translated into Chinese, became "qiyiguo" (kiwifruit).

As early as the pre-Qin period, the Classic of Poetry already contained records of the kiwi: “In the low wetlands grows the changchu (the ancient name for the kiwi), its branches trailing gracefully.” When Li Shizhen described the shape and color of the kiwi in the Compendium of Materia Medica, he said: “Its shape is like a pear, its color like a peach, and since macaques delight in eating it, it has these various names.”

It is the country with the greatest distribution of Actinidia plants, with as many as 52 species of wild Actinidia, most of whose fruits are edible and taste sweet and tart and delicious. Among them is one kind of kiwi whose fruit is large and tastes good, with the scientific name “Actinidia chinensis,” which is the original variety of the kiwifruit we eat today.

In China, although wild kiwis come in many varieties, most people were unaware of the existence of this delicious fruit. It was not until 1904 that the fate of the kiwi turned thanks to a foreigner. A New Zealand woman teacher, Isabel, went to China to visit her missionary sister, and in Hubei she tasted this wild fruit and brought the seeds back to New Zealand. She planted the seeds she brought back, and three of the seedlings grew up and successfully flowered and bore fruit; it was these three seedlings that turned the originally wild kiwi into a fruit that swept the globe——the kiwifruit.