This Kiwifruit Isn’t From New Zealand at All. It’s Chinese, and This Is How It Got Hijacked 这种猕猴桃根本不是新西兰产的。它是中国的，这就是它被劫持的原因
时代杂志版本
he kiwifruit may be New Zealand’s defining agricultural product, generating a handsome $1.05 billion in exports for the country in 2015, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But how the South Pacific nation came to claim the exotic, fuzzy fruit with soft, green flesh and a unique taste is a story that combines considerable luck and a stroke of marketing genius.
根据美国农业部的数据，猕猴桃可能是新西兰的标志性农产品，2015年为该国出口了10.5亿美元。但这个南太平洋国家是如何声称这种异国情调的、毛茸茸的水果的，它有柔软的绿色果肉和独特的味道，这是一个结合了相当大的运气和营销天才的故事。
The erstwhile Chinese gooseberry, as its archaic English name suggests, finds its root a hemisphere away in China. Its original name in Chinese, mihoutao — “macaque fruit” — refers to the monkeys’ love for it, according to the 16th century Chinese medicine encyclopedia, the Compendium of Materia Medica.
正如其古老的英文名字所暗示的那样，昔日的中国醋栗在半个半球之外的中国找到了它的根。根据16世纪的中医百科全书《本草纲目》，它的中文原名“猕猴果”是指猴子对它的喜爱。
▲阳光金果sungold
The kiwifruit’s status as a transplant might not come as a surprise for many readers. After all, the story of one of the world’s greatest marketing and botanical hijacks has been vaguely circulating for decades, from a New York Times item about trade in New Zealand over 30 years ago to a TIME column about branding and psychology in 2010.
猕猴桃作为移植植物的地位可能不会让许多读者感到惊讶。毕竟，几十年来，世界上最大的营销和植物劫持事件之一的故事一直在模糊地流传，从30多年前《纽约时报》关于新西兰贸易的文章到2010年《时代》杂志关于品牌和心理学的专栏。
▲新西兰阳光金果
But the scant documentary evidence of how the fruit made it across the Pacific has given an apocryphal flavor to a tale that is, in fact, all too real.
但是，关于这种水果是如何穿越太平洋的文献证据不足，这给一个事实上太真实的故事增添了一种杜撰的味道。
▲New Zealand's newly built Sunshine Golden Fruit Orchard
“There is no formal history of the kiwifruit industry in print, so we have to patch together information about the past from multiple sources,” Hugh Campbell, a sociology professor at New Zealand’s University of Otago, tells TIME by email. He co-authored the entry on the kiwifuit in Te Ara, the official New Zealand online encyclopedia.
新西兰奥塔哥大学的社会学教授休·坎贝尔通过电子邮件告诉《时代周刊》：“没有正式的猕猴桃产业历史印刷品，所以我们必须从多个来源拼凑过去的信息。”。他与人合著了新西兰官方在线百科全书Te Ara中关于猕猴桃的条目。
Historical consensus — as presented on New Zealand’s official history website — suggests that the first seeds arrived on New Zealand at the turn of the 20th century.
It all began in 1904, when Mary Isabel Fraser, the principal of an all-girls school, brought back some Chinese gooseberry seeds from China. They were then given to a farmer named Alexander Allison who, planted them in his farm near the riverine town of Whanganui. The trees went on to bear their first fruit in 1910.
新西兰官方历史网站上的历史共识表明，第一批种子是在20世纪初抵达新西兰的。
这一切始于1904年，当时一所女子学校的校长玛丽·伊莎贝尔·弗雷泽从中国带回了一些猕猴桃种子。然后，它们被交给了一位名叫亚历山大·艾利森的农民，他把它们种在了靠近河岸城镇旺甘努伊的农场里。1910年，这些树结出了第一个果实。
New Zealand’s appropriation of the Chinese gooseberry wasn’t inevitable. Around the same time the first seeds were introduced to New Zealand, the species was in fact also experimented with as a commercial crop both in the U.K. and the U.S., wrote New Zealand plant physiologist Ross Ferguson, one of the world’s top kiwifruit researchers, for Arnoldia, the magazine of Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum.
新西兰对中华猕猴桃的侵占并非不可避免。世界顶级猕猴桃研究人员之一、新西兰植物生理学家罗斯·弗格逊在哈佛大学阿诺德植物园杂志《Arnoldia》上写道，大约在第一批种子被引入新西兰的同时，该物种实际上也在英国和美国作为一种商业作物受到了考验。
▲新西兰奇异果包装厂
But, as luck would have it, neither the British nor the American attempt at commercializing the fruit was as fruitful. For example, the first batch of seeds brought to Britain’s Veitch Nursery all produced male plants, thwarting the growers’ plans to produce edible fruit. The same fate befell the U.S. government’s attempt. “It seems ironic that the sending of seed by a missionary to an amateur gardener should eventually lead to a new horticultural industry, when the efforts of the Veitch Nursery and the U.S. Department of Agriculture were so much less successful,” Ferguson remarked in his 1983 essay.
但是，幸运的是，英国和美国将这种水果商业化的尝试都没有取得如此丰硕的成果。例如，第一批带到英国维奇苗圃的种子都是雄性植物，这阻碍了种植者生产可食用水果的计划。美国政府的尝试也遭遇了同样的命运。弗格森在1983年的文章中说：“具有讽刺意味的是，当维奇苗圃和美国农业部的努力不那么成功时，传教士向业余园丁发送种子最终会导致一个新的园艺产业。”。
▲新西兰奇异果园
The gooseberry’s rebranding didn’t happen until almost 50 years after Allison’s trees bore fruit, according to New Zealand’s official history, when agricultural exporter Turners & Growers started calling their U.S.-bound Chinese gooseberries “kiwifruits” on June 15, 1959.
根据新西兰官方历史，猕猴桃的品牌重塑直到Allison的树结果近50年后才发生，当时农业出口商Turners&Growers于1959年6月15日开始将他们运往美国的中国猕猴桃称为“猕猴桃”。
▲新西兰奇异果园
The fruit’s importer told Turners & Growers that the Chinese gooseberry needed a new name to be commercially viable stateside, to avoid negative connotations of “gooseberries,” which weren’t particularly popular. After passing over another proposed name, melonette, it was finally decided to name the furry, brown fruit after New Zealand’s furry, brown, flightless national bird. It also helped that Kiwis had become the colloquial term for New Zealanders by the time.
该水果的进口商告诉Turners&Growers，中国醋栗需要一个新名字才能在美国商业上可行，以避免“醋栗”的负面含义，因为“醋栗”并不特别受欢迎。在通过了另一个拟议的名字“melonette”后，最终决定以新西兰毛茸茸的棕色不会飞的国鸟命名这种毛茸茸的棕色水果。这也有助于新西兰人成为当时新西兰人的口语术语。
▲New Zealand Kiwi Orchard
Demand for the fruit started to take off, and by the 1970s, the name kiwifruit took root across the Chinese gooseberry trade, cementing its popular imagination as the quintessential New Zealand product. All this happened while China was busy tearing its own social fabric to pieces, during the decade of terror that was the Cultural Revolution.
对猕猴桃的需求开始起飞，到20世纪70年代，猕猴桃这个名字在中国猕猴桃贸易中扎根，巩固了其作为典型新西兰产品的流行形象。所有这一切都发生在中国忙于将自己的社会结构撕成碎片的十年恐怖时期，即文化大革命。
▲New Zealand Kiwi Orchard
“I think it was a matter of luck and suitable climate” that the fruit thrived in New Zealand, Ferguson tells TIME. Now an honorary fellow at the New Zealand Institute for Plant & Food Research, he helped classify the Actinidia deliciosa — the furry, green kiwifruit — as a separate species in the 1980s.
“我认为这是一个幸运的问题和适宜的气候”，水果生活在新西兰，弗格森告诉时代。现在，他是新西兰植物与食品研究所的名誉研究员，在20世纪80年代帮助将美味猕猴桃（一种毛茸茸的绿色猕猴桃）归类为一个单独的物种。
▲Golden Kiwi Orchard
Large-scale cultivation of the kiwifruit can now be found in many countries, including the U.S., Italy and — ironically — China, which became the world’s top kiwifruit producer by 2014, and where the fruit is commonly used to make jam. But much of the kiwifruit grown worldwide can be traced back to Alexander Allison’s Whanganui farm — so much so that the Pacific nation had to try to halt the export of kiwi plants at one point, in order to reduce potential competition on the global market.
猕猴桃的大规模种植现在可以在许多国家找到，包括美国、意大利和中国，具有讽刺意味的是，中国在2014年成为世界上最大的猕猴桃生产国，猕猴桃通常用于制作果酱。但全球种植的猕猴桃大多可以追溯到亚历山大·艾利森的旺格努伊农场，以至于这个太平洋国家不得不一度停止出口猕猴桃植物，以减少全球市场的潜在竞争。
▲Golden Kiwi Orchard
Today, even parts of the Chinese-speaking world call the fruit by a partial transliteration of its Oceanic moniker. In Hong Kong and Taiwan, at least, it’s known as strange fruit — qi yi guo in Mandarin, or kei yi gwo in Cantonese. (Google searches of mihoutao still turns up considerable results, but mostly confined to web pages from the People’s Republic.)
今天，即使是部分讲汉语的国家也用“海洋”这个名字的部分音译来称呼这种水果。至少在香港和台湾，它被称为奇怪的水果-在普通话中的奇一果，或在粤语中的kei yi-gwo。（在谷歌上搜索米后涛仍然会得到相当多的结果，但大多仅限于来自中华人民共和国的网页。）
▲▲golden kiwifruit vine
And how deliciously ironic that unscrupulous Chinese traders have tried to pass off domestically grown kiwifruits as imports.
具有讽刺意味的是，肆无忌惮的中国商人试图将国产猕猴桃冒充进口。
https://time.com/4662293/kiwifruit-chinese-gooseberry-new-zealand-history-fruit/
（阳光金果g3猕猴桃）
▲New Zealand's newly built Sunshine Golden Fruit Orchard
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