What are the five grains and six animals?

The five grains:rice, millet (now called yellow rice), millet (now called sorghum), wheat and beans.

Six Livestock:Pigs, Cows, Sheep, Horses, Chickens, Dogs

The "Six Livestock," i.e., cows, sheep, horses, pigs, dogs, and chickens, were domesticated by humans for economic or other purposes.

In the traditional Chinese concept, "six animals" represent a prosperous and lucky family. People usually mention "six animals prosper" during the Spring Festival

Su, beans, hemp, wheat, rice

Gu historical words

Wanguo Ding

One of the five grains

What are the five valleys

Gu is a simplified form of the word "grain," which originally referred to the shells of the grain. The simplified Chinese character "谷 "originally referred to grain with a shell; like rice, jíji (jì计, i.e., grain), millet (also known as yellow rice) and so on have a layer of shells on the outside, so they are called grains. The sound of the word "grain" comes from the sound of the shell.

The earliest record of the term "grains" is found in the Analects. According to the Analects of Confucius, more than 2,400 years ago, when Confucius was traveling with his students, Zi Lu fell behind and met an old farmer carrying a bamboo basket with a staff and asked him, "Have you seen Fu Zi?" The old farmer said, "Who is Fu Zi when his limbs don't work and he can't tell the grains apart?"

Dear reader, can you tell the grains apart?

Five grains means five kinds of grain. In books older than the Analects, such as the Book of Poetry and the Book of Books, there are only "a hundred grains", not "five grains". Is it true that the number of food crops has been reduced from one hundred grains to five grains? No, it is not. In the beginning, people often put a crop of several different varieties of a one on a moniker, so that the list up more. Moreover, the word "hundred" is used here to mean more than one, not really a hundred kinds. The emergence of the term "five grains" signifies that people already have a clearer concept of categorization, and at the same time reflects the fact that there were five major food crops at that time.

When the term "five grains" was first coined, there was no record of what it actually referred to. The earliest explanation we can see now was written by the Han dynasty. There are two main interpretations of the Han and post-Han people: one is rice, millet, jik, wheat, beans (i.e., soybeans); the other is hemp (refers to marijuana), millet, jik, wheat, beans. The difference between these two accounts is only that one has rice without hemp and the other has hemp without rice. The hemp seed, though available for consumption, was used primarily for weaving with its fibers. Grain refers to grain, and it makes more sense that the former statement did not include hemp in the grains. But on the other hand, the economic and cultural center of that time was in the north, and rice was a southern crop with limited cultivation in the north, so it is possible that there was hemp in the five grains but not rice. The crops mentioned in the following part of the Shiji - Book of Heavenly Officials (史记-天官书), "Where to wait for the year's beauty and evil" (predicting the year's abundance and failure), are the five kinds of crops, namely, wheat, millet, beans, peas and hemp, which belongs to the latter theory. Probably because of these reasons, so the Han people and people after the Han have two different interpretations of the five grains.

Taking these two statements together, *** there are six main crops: rice, millet, grain, wheat, beans and hemp. The famous book of the Warring States period "Lu Shi Chun Qiu" (works of the third century B.C.) contains four articles devoted to agriculture, in which the article "Review of the time" talks about the advantages and disadvantages of planting grain, millet, rice, hemp, beans and wheat in the right time and wrong time. Grain is millet. These six crops are exactly the same as the six mentioned above. These are the same six crops mentioned in Lüshi Chunqiu (The Spring and Autumn Annals of Lu Shi) - The Twelve Periods of the Spring and Autumn Annals of Lu Shi.

It is clear that rice, millet, jik, wheat, beans and hemp were the main crops of that time. The so-called five grains refer to these crops, or to five of these six crops. But with the development of socio-economic and agricultural production, the concept of the five valleys is constantly evolving, and now the so-called five valleys, in fact, is only the total name of the food crops, or a general reference to food crops.