Five grains: five kinds of grains. Usually refers to rice, millet (shu), millet (ji), wheat, and beans. Also generally refers to grain or food crops.
What are whole grains?
In the "Emperor's Internal Classic", the five grains are considered to be "japonica rice, adzuki beans, wheat, soybeans, and yellow millet", while in "Mencius Teng Wengong", the five grains are called "rice, millet, millet, wheat, and beetroot". , also called grains as "barley, wheat, rice, adzuki beans, and flax" during Buddhist sacrifices. Then Li Shizhen recorded in "Compendium of Materia Medica" that there are 33 types of cereals, 14 types of beans, and a total of 47 types. So many. Nowadays, cereals are usually referred to as rice, wheat, sorghum, soybeans, and corn. Grains other than rice and flour are customarily called cereals, so cereals also generally refer to food crops
Answer ：ni__po - Assistant Level 2 6-6 18:00
Millet, beans, hemp, wheat, rice
History of Five Grains
What are Five Grains
"Gu" is the simplified character for "谷", which originally refers to grains with shells; things like rice, Ji (jìji, i.e. millet), broomcorn millet (also known as yellow rice), etc. have a shell on the outside, so they are called valley. The sound of the word Gu comes from the sound of shell.
The earliest record of the term "grains" can be found in "The Analects of Confucius". According to the record in The Analects of Confucius: More than 2,400 years ago, Confucius took his students on a long trip. Zilu was lagging behind. He met an old farmer carrying a bamboo basket with a staff and asked him, "Have you seen the Master?" The old farmer said: "If the limbs are not working, and the grains cannot be distinguished, who is the Master?"
Dear reader, can you distinguish the grains?
Wugu means five kinds of grains. Books older than "The Analects" such as "The Book of Songs" and "The Book of Books" only mention "hundred grains" and nothing about "five grains". From hundreds of grains to five grains, have the types of food crops been reduced? No. In the past, people often gave a proper name to several different varieties of a crop, which made the list too much. Moreover, the word "hundred" here is just used to mean many, and there are not really a hundred kinds. The emergence of the term "grains" indicates that people have a relatively clear concept of classification, and also reflects that there were five main food crops at that time.
When the term "grain" was first coined, there was no record of what it actually meant. The earliest explanation we can see now was written by people from the Han Dynasty. There are two main interpretations by the Han and post-Han people: one is rice, millet, millet, wheat, and bean (i.e. soybean); the other is hemp (referring to cannabis), millet, millet, wheat, and bean. The difference between these two statements is that one has rice but no hemp, and the other has hemp but no rice. Although hemp seeds can be eaten, their fibers are mainly used to weave cloth. Grain refers to grain. The former statement does not include hemp among the five grains, which is more reasonable. But on the other hand, the economic and cultural center at that time was in the north, and rice was a southern crop. Its cultivation in the north was limited, so it was possible that the grains contained hemp but not rice. "Historical Records Tianguan Shu" "Every year is good and bad" (prediction of good times and bad years). The crops mentioned below are wheat, millet, broomcorn millet, bean sprouts and hemp, which belong to the latter theory. Probably because of these reasons, the Han people and people after the Han Dynasty had two different interpretations of grains.
Combining these two statements, there are six main crops in China: rice, millet, millet, wheat, bean and hemp. The famous work of the Warring States Period, "Lu Shi Chun Qiu" (written in the third century BC), contains four articles specifically talking about agriculture. Among them, "The Examination of Time" discusses the gains and losses of growing crops, millet, rice, hemp, bean sprouts, and wheat. pros and cons. Grain is millet. These six crops are exactly the same as the six mentioned above. The crops mentioned in "Lu's Spring and Autumn Annals: Twelve Chronicles" are also these six types.
Obviously, rice, millet, millet, wheat, bean sprouts, and hemp were the main crops at that time. The so-called five grains refer to these crops, or five of these six crops. However, with the development of social economy and agricultural production, the concept of grains is constantly evolving. Now the so-called grains are actually just the general name of food crops, or generally refer to food crops.