On May 30, the world celebrates International Potato Day — honoring the humble tuber that has been fried, stewed, stir-fried, and mashed across countless kitchens. In China, the potato goes by dozens of names, including “foreign taro” and “mountain egg.” Interestingly, three cities — Tengzhou, Dingxi, and Ulanqab — have long competed for the unofficial title of “China’s Potato Capital.” Yet despite its current popularity, the potato is not native to China. It originated in the Andes Mountains of South America, where indigenous peoples domesticated it thousands of years ago. In the 16th century, during the Age of Exploration, Spanish colonizers brought the potato to Europe, from where it rapidly spread to Asia, Africa, and Oceania. Scholars generally agree that the potato reached China in the late Ming Dynasty (late 16th to early 17th centuries) via two main routes: a maritime route from South America to the Philippines (then a Spanish colony) and then to Fujian, Guangdong, and Taiwan, and a land route along the Silk Road or through the southwestern border from India and Myanmar into Yunnan and Guizhou.
The earliest reliable Chinese record of the potato appears in the 1700 edition of the Songxi County Gazetteer in Fujian, which describes it as “black, round, with a bittersweet taste.” For a long time, the potato was dismissed as “inferior food” due to its strange appearance and bitter flavor, and wealthy families considered eating it embarrassing. Yet precisely this “lump of earth” thrived in poor, mountainous lands where rice and wheat could not grow, silently saving countless people from famine. In 1848, Qing Dynasty botanist Wu Qijun provided the first professional description of the potato in his Illustrated Catalogue of Plants, calling it “sunny tuber” and emphasizing its value as “the poor man’s storage grain.” In 2015, China’s Ministry of Agriculture officially launched a strategy to make potatoes a staple food, placing them on equal footing with rice, wheat, and corn. Today, China leads the world in both potato production and cultivated area. The foreign crop that once crossed the Andes and the oceans, despised for centuries, ultimately took its deepest roots in China’s most barren soils.
