The knowledge of why people should eat fruit and how fruit should be grown and utilized has historically varied. Focusing on such questions, this paper examines the history of the “hometown of Chinese honey nectar peach,” Longquanyi district of the city of Chengdu. In the Republican era, new varieties of honey nectar peaches were grafted on Longquanyi soil as a result of transnational exchanges of knowledge among missionaries, Western and Chinese elite scientists, and local landlords. In the Maoist years, the state imposed particular ways of knowing and doing upon local peasants in the name of the building of socialism, while the peasants tried to adjust to fruit farming as subsistence agriculture on their own. Based on the case of Longquanyi peach, this paper suggests adding the metaphor of “grafting” to the vocabulary list of global history of science. Features of grafting techniques, namely the dependency of a scion of imported variety on a local rootstock and the visibility of artificial attempts to integrate existing differences, help us emphasize power dynamics of knowledge encounters and local actors’ adaptive agency. The metaphor of grafting does not essentialize the binaries of Western, modern epistemologies and those of indigenous and traditional by understanding the relationship of scion and rootstock as relative. Global flow of scientific knowledge can be imagined as a vast orchard filled with grafted trees plastered with bandages, rather than indistinguishably “entangled” stems and roots underground.
