A Roundup of the Latest Sugarcane Producing Regions and Places of Origin
Sugarcane originated in India and is now widely grown in tropical and subtropical regions. The country with the largest sugarcane planting area is Brazil, followed by India, with China in third place; other countries with large planting areas include Cuba, Thailand, Mexico, Australia and the United States. China's sugarcane regions are mainly distributed across Guangxi (accounting for 60% of national output), Guangdong, Taiwan, China, Fujian, Sichuan, Yunnan, Jiangxi, Guizhou, Hunan, Zhejiang, Hubei and other provinces (autonomous regions). In some parts of northern China, sugarcane can also be grown; it has been successfully cultivated only in parts of Liaoning, Hebei, Shandong and Tianjin.
The place of origin of sugarcane may have been New Guinea or India, and it later spread to the Malay Archipelago. It was introduced to southern China around the time of King Xuan of Zhou in the Zhou Dynasty. In the pre-Qin era, “zhe” referred to sugarcane; the character “zhe” meaning sugarcane did not appear until the Han Dynasty, and the pronunciations of “zhe” (cane) and “zhe” (sugarcane) may come from the Sanskrit word sakara. From the 10th to the 13th century (Song Dynasty), sugarcane was widely grown in the provinces south of the Yangtze River; sugarcane was also widely grown and made into sugar in the Indochinese Peninsula and various places in the Malay Archipelago such as Chenla, Champa, Srivijaya and Sujidan.
When Alexander the Great campaigned eastward into India, one of his generals said that India produced a kind of grass that could yield honey without bees. In the 6th century AD, Khosrow I (the immortal soul), king of the Sasanian Empire in Iran, introduced sugarcane to Iran for cultivation. From the 8th to the 10th century, sugarcane cultivation spread throughout Iraq, Egypt, Sicily, the Iberian Peninsula and other places. Later, Portuguese and Spanish colonists brought sugarcane to the Americas.
By use, it can be divided into fruit cane and sugar cane; by outward shape, it can also be divided into sugarcane “Black King Kong” and sugarcane “Black Green Kong”. Fruit cane is sugarcane intended specifically for fresh eating; it has the characteristics of being relatively easy to tear, low in fiber, moderate in sugar content, crisp in stem, juicy and delicious, good in taste, as well as thick in stem, long in internodes and attractive in stem shape. Sugar cane has a relatively high sugar content and is the raw material used for making sugar; it is generally not sold for fresh eating on the market. Because its skin is hard and its fiber is coarse, its taste is relatively poor, and it is only occasionally eaten fresh in the producing areas.