Rice did not begin as a crop. It began as a grass.

Somewhere in the river valleys of what is now southern China and northern Southeast Asia, approximately 9,000 years ago, people began harvesting wild rice — Oryza rufipogon — from the edges of wetlands and riverbanks. They carried the seed home. They saved the largest grains. They planted near water. They watched what grew.

Over thousands of years, through the same process of selection and observation practiced by seed keepers across the world, that wild grass became the crop that now feeds more than half of humanity.

But the story of rice in Southeast Asia is not just the story of a plant. It is the story of how a civilization organized itself around a single crop — and built a knowledge system, a social structure, and a relationship with water and land that sustained it for millennia.

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