Since the Western Han Dynasty, China has opened a sea passage with the African continent, starting from the African continent, passing through Sri Lanka and Nanyang Islands, and finally landing off the coast of Fujian. During the Western Han Dynasty, watermelons traveled across the ocean along this route to China. At that time, only members of the royal family and nobles were entitled to enjoy watermelons. However, watermelon was not called watermelon at that time.
Tao Hongjing, a medical scientist in the Southern Dynasties, once described a peculiar melon in Notes on Materia Medica. "Yongjia has a big cold melon that can be hidden until spring." . Li Shizhen, a medical scientist in the Ming Dynasty, thought that this cold melon mentioned by Tao Hongjing was watermelon. In other words, when watermelon first came to China, its name was Hangua.
The name watermelon appeared in the Southern Song Dynasty. As for why it is called watermelon, some people think that watermelon entered the Central Plains from the Western Regions through the Silk Road in the Tang Dynasty, hence the name.
During the reign of Song Gaozong, envoys brought back watermelon seeds from Jin State and planted them in Jiangnan, but the spread was not wide. It was in the middle of the Southern Song Dynasty that the people of the Song Dynasty really began to grow watermelons on a large scale. Therefore, the characters in Jin Yong's martial arts masterpiece Tian Ba Long Bu should have never eaten watermelon, because they all lived in the middle of the Northern Song Dynasty, and it took a century to become attached to watermelon.
But Guo Jing and Huang Rong in The Legend of the Condor Heroes can eat watermelon. As you know, Guo and Huang lived in the middle and late Southern Song Dynasty. Watermelon has become a very common thing in both the Central Plains and Jiangnan. I remember Mr. Jin Yong once asked Huang Rong to go to the melon farmers in Niujia Village to buy a car full of watermelons. The melon farmer boasted, "The watermelon in Niujia Village is sweet and crisp. You will know if you taste it, girl." This description is very reliable. It is against history to ask North Korea and Qiao Feng to buy watermelons.
In short, watermelon spread from the western regions to Qidan, then from Qidan to Jin, and finally from Jin to the Central Plains and Jiangnan. I guess the name of watermelon comes from this-the western regions are in the west, so we in China named this kind of melon "watermelon". (Li Kaizhou)