Introduced Crops · FFET10402
Corn (yumi)
Boiled, steamed, roasted or ground for porridge, corn is an everyday grain in northern and mountainous regions.
Maize, sweet potato, potato, peanut, chili and other crops that came to China later.
Corn is a cereal grain historically known in Chinese as yushushu, yumai and fanmai. Its main growing regions in China include the Northeast, North China and the mountainous Southwest. Fresh corn can be boiled, steamed or roasted, and the grain can also be ground into meal for porridge.
What
Corn, or maize, is the cereal grain Zea mays. Historical Chinese names include yushushu, yumai and fanmai.1,2
When
Some accounts place corn's arrival in China in the 16th-century Jiajing era and describe wider planting from the mid-Qing onward; the early gazetteer passages behind them have not been checked against their original texts, so they do not establish the earliest arrival year. The Bencao Gangmu (completed 1578, first printed 1596) already has an entry on corn and says it came from the western lands; those years date the book, not corn's introduction.1,2,4
Where
China's main corn-growing regions include the Northeast, North China and the mountainous Southwest.1,3
How
Fresh corn can be boiled, steamed or roasted, while its kernels can be ground into meal for porridge. Bencao Gangmu also describes frying or stir-frying the kernels and compares popped corn with popped glutinous grain.1,2
Why
Corn can be eaten fresh or ground into meal as an everyday grain. Cornmeal, also called bangzimian, was once an everyday coarse grain food in poor households.1
Impact and influence
The national grain production announcement released on December 12, 2025, reported corn output of 301.235 million metric tons and a sown area of 44.9608 million hectares for 2025.3