120 



CHINESE NUTS— WALNUT 



P. W. Wang 



Kinsan Arboretum, Chuking, Kiangsu Province, China. 



Historic research by Berthold Laufer in his "Sino Iranica" 

 pubhshed by Field Museum of Natural History of Chicago is very 

 valuable. His conclusion is that China is not the original home of 

 walnuts but imported from Persia via two routes, the earlier by 

 Chinese Turkestan and little later by Tibet. I recommend every 

 member to read this book. It contains many valuable historical in- 

 formations about trees and vegetables in Asia. 



According to the recent travel of late Mr. F. N. Meyer no graft- 

 ing or budding of nut trees yet practiced in China. The walnuts 

 varied from thinnest shell like peanut or hard shell with poor flavor. 

 The Chinese walnut are proved to be hardier than Persian walnut 

 in America. 



There is no walnut in this province except a few in ornamental 

 gardens. What we can get is through grocery stores. They import- 

 ed them from Tientsin or Tsintao. The former is easy to crack 

 with fine flavor and the kernel color is light. The latter is hard to 

 crack, the internal partition has a peculiar construction that the 

 kernel is very hard to take out even in broken pieces and the kernel 

 has a brown color with the taste of bitterness and astringency. That 

 shows that the walnut in Chili is far superior to that of Shantung 

 I do not believe that the above difference is due to the latitude, be- 

 cause there is one walnut tree in a garden in Soochow, a big city 

 50 miles from Shanghai, the nut is very good. 



The Chinese way of eating walnut is just like Americans. One 

 thing that coincides with Dr. Kellogg's treatment to a Senator'.*; 

 daughter. In China there is no baby fed by cow's milk. When the 

 mother lacks milk and the home is not rich enough to hire a milk- 

 nurse, walnut milk is substituted. The way of making walnut milk 

 is rather crude here, they simply grind or knock the kernel into paste 

 then mix with boil water. I wish to learn Dr. Kellogg's way of mak- 

 ing walnut milk. 



One tradition that believed by most Chinese even well educated 

 Chinese for thousands years that if you eat walnut constantly, your 

 life will be prolonged, and if you only eat fruits and nuts excluding 

 all provisions other than produced from trees even rice and wheat 

 your life will be eternal. I must recall the theory of Dr. Kellogg 

 that may be the proof of the above tradition. "Beef fats is deposited 

 in the tissue as beef fats without undergoing any chemical change 

 whatever; mutton fat is deposited as mutton fat; lard as pig fat 

 etc," Perhaps the influence of animal fat reduces the life as animals 

 are generally short lived and nut fats increases the life as nut trees 

 live for centuries. 



