What is the difference between kiwi and kiwifruit?

Kiwifruit is a native species that has grown in Taiwan since ancient times; there are five native species

Kiwifruit - in Taiwan, many people may not be familiar with it, but if you say "kiwi", everyone should know it well. Yes, the Chinese name for kiwi is mihoutao, and the name "kiwifruit" is a direct translation of its foreign name, Kiwifruit.

Thanks to the powerful marketing push of the New Zealand kiwifruit company Zespri, many people think kiwifruit originated in New Zealand, but in fact it is a native that has grown in Taiwan since ancient times, with a range from Keelung to Pingtung - you could say it exists from the northern tip of Taiwan to the southern tip.

Besides Taiwan, China is even more its main native region. According to the current classification, there are 54 species of kiwifruit in the world, and the vast majority are distributed in China. What about Taiwan? Of course Taiwan does not fall behind; it also has 5 native species of kiwifruit.

Why did mihoutao become kiwifruit?

Seeing this, everyone must have a question: since kiwifruit is mainly distributed in China and Taiwan, why are most of the kiwifruit bought on the market today imported from New Zealand, and why did it even get a foreign name, kiwifruit?

This story begins in 1904. That year, a New Zealand female teacher (Isabel Fraser) visited her sister Katie Fraser, who was doing missionary work at a Scottish church in Yichang, Hubei Province, China, and obtained a bag of kiwifruit seeds from her. She brought this bag of seeds back to New Zealand and eventually passed it to a nurseryman, Alexander Allison, who cultivated the bag of seeds into saplings.

Afterward, many excellent varieties were successively selected and bred from this batch of kiwifruit saplings, causing New Zealand's kiwifruit cultivation area to continuously expand. To enhance export competitiveness, local fruit growers jointly established Zespri in 2000, creating a kiwifruit industry in which New Zealand dominates the globe and becoming the main exporter of kiwifruit.

In fact, the English name of kiwifruit was originally not Kiwifruit but Chinese gooseberry. After kiwifruit was introduced to New Zealand, local farmers found that its fuzzy fruit looked very much like a bird unique to the area, the Kiwi bird, and in order to open up the American market, New Zealand changed Chinese gooseberry to Kiwi fruit in 1959.

The late Professor Ni Cheng-chu of National Chung Hsing University persisted in researching kiwifruit cultivation techniques, making it possible to grow them on the plains