Food of the gods

"I never got to be an emperor and I never lived like one," joked Peng Yong-chuan (彭湧川), "but for the past 30-something years, I've been served the kind of rice only the Japanese emperor was privileged enough to eat."

The 75-year-old Hakka farmer born in Hsinchu, who settled in Hualien County, is almost single-handedly responsible for preserving Yoshino No. 1 (吉野一號米), which is said to the best rice in the world.

Also known as "Japanese Emperor's rice" (天皇米) because it was exclusively grown for Emperor Hirohito as tribute during the Japanese colonial era in Taiwan (1895 to 1945), the rice used to be solely cultivated in Peng's adopted Hualien hometown of Taohsiang village (稻香村) in Chian township (吉安鄉), where the soil and other environmental factors were ideal.

Yoshino No. 1, unlike other rice varieties, is said to have an appealing smell and unique taste when it's properly prepared. It has a sweet flavor that stays on the palate even after a lot of chewing. Its grains are rounder and plumper than other varieties and are crystal clear, with a white, heart-shaped dot in the middle. Japanese growers claimed the shape of the dot was similar to the sun rising on the nation's white flag and thus cherished the rice even more.

Cultivating the rice, however, is extremely labor-intensive and too much or too little wind, rain or fertilizer destroys the crop. Also, without proper care, the length of the stem easily exceeds 110cm before ears of rice develop. There is a critical point where the stem can no longer support the weight of the ears of rice and bends over. If this happens the rice changes in taste and is fit only for chicken feed. It is essential, then, that the crop is picked at the right time. Too early and the rice is not ready, too late and it's over ripe.

Birds like the rice so much, according to agriculture official Chen Ming-te (陳明德), that he said a Yoshino No. 1 harvest is like a miracle, dependant on the mercy of the birds.

As a result of the difficulty of growing the rice and the departure of the Japanese after World War II, production of Yoshino No. 1 stopped because the cost of growing it was higher than the returns.

It wasn't until 1969, when Peng retired from his hospital job after 20 years and started helping his in-laws cultivate a large piece of farmland, that Japanese emperor's rice would be cultivated again. Peng recalled stories told by his primary school teacher in Hualien about the quality of the rice and was inspired to try growing it himself.

He was lucky enough to obtain some seeds of the long-forgotten rice from an old colleague working in the Farming Reform Field (農業改良場) in Hualien, but it took a long time and a lot of determination before he managed to successfully harvest a crop.

Originally, Yoshino No. 1 was invented by Aoki Shigelu (青木繁氏) in 1926 and was first known as "Aoki rice" (青木米). In 1909, the Japanese government's policy of managed emigration to relieve domestic population pressures, meant that "immigration villages" were set up in Hualien. Immigrants from Tokushima Ken and Kagawan Ken in Shikoku Prefecture started to cultivate paddy rice in what used to be known as Chijiaochuang. Now known as Chian township village, it was then named after some of the immigrants' hometown of Yoshinokawa.

Among the new settlers, Shigelu was an agriculture researcher and developed a new variety of rice by crossing a Japanese rice plant Kikuchi Mai (菊池米), from Kumamoto Prefecture in Kyushu, with an indigenous type of Taiwanese rice called zai lai rice (在來米). The hybrid variety was then crossed with another type of rice, called Taichung No. 65.