Well, a brief look at Agrohaitai.com, Tomatofest and Tatiana's tomatobase shows that there are at least a handful of Chinese tomato varieties that can be purchased in the US. However, as I can read Chinese, like growing tomatoes, and have an interest in learning new Chinese vocabulary regarding my hobbies, I decided to try and see what kinds of tomatoes are commonly grown in China, and whether there are a lot of varieties particular to China.

Before long, I hit a motherload of information at this site:

http://www.vegnet.com.cn

I have just begun to explore this site, but for the most part it serves as a huge internet trading hub for market vegetable growers in China. Anyone who has been to China may have seen the huge agricultural tents dotting the suburbs and countryside outside of the major cities; after markets opened up in the 1980s, during the last twenty five years or so, Chinese farmers have become extremely skilled and efficient at growing vegetables year-round, and from what I hear a lot of urbanites are actually moving to the suburbs these days to try their hand at agriculture!

Anyway, vegnet.com.cn sells seeds, fertilizer, green house materials... if it is useful for growing vegetables, you can find on this site links to dozens of sellers selling whatever it is you want. I am looking for vegetable seeds, tomato seeds in particular, so I quickly navigate my way over to the section selling these.

WOW, hundreds of listings appear... there sure are a lot of tomato varieties in China! However, at closer glance, a lot of these are actually imported varieties from places such as the US, Holland, Israel, etc. However, a lot of them are in fact varieties developed in China by horticultural stations in various parts of the country. Just like in the US, Chinese vegetable growers are fortunate to have ranks of talented agricultural scientists providing them with knowledge and new varieties!

So anyway, after browsing through the listings of tomato seeds, I came to a few general conclusions that were a little dissapointing...

1) It seems that all of the seeds that are unique to China and listed here have been designed particularly for market growers, which I imagine is the only real market for seed producers. The listings tout characteristics such as productivity, robustness, resistance to disease (and other ailments such as cracking), the firmness of fruit and its ability to ship easily, stuff like that.

2) This means that there are not a lot of exotic varieties in evidence here. I did see representatives of most of the various colors- red, pink, yellow, black, one or two green types. They have of course the full range of sizes from cherry to beefsteak, what the listings refer to as "hard" tomatoes, which may mean that they are good for sauce or the like. Some black types were sold as a health food, which might find a market in China where people are constantly trying to cook healthy and make use of natural supplements. But for the most part, the tomatoes are red, regularly shaped, and kind of generic in appearance. Those that aren't red and perfectly round still resemble common varieties found in the West, and often the listing tells us that they were developed from foreign varieties. In short, these tomatoes were for the most part bred for production, not their novel features.

3) A lot of the varieties are single-generation hybrids... no doubt this is the price people pay for high-performance super-varieties.

4) It's hard to get exact information on a lot of the plants. Some of the companies give a lot of detail in their listings about origin of the tomatoes, if they were imported or domestically bred, and so on, but many don't. I don't doubt that a lot of the tomatoes here are simply varieties found abroad that are branded with a Chinese name; it's not possible to tell really from this site.

So, as most of you probably expected from the start, there were no big surprises on this site; it's mostly for the pragmatic farmer. After looking around a bit, my impression is that Chinese hobbyist growers are a lot more passionate about growing cucumbers, melons, squash, stuff like that. Anyway, I guess that if I want to know about any interesting Chinese heirloom types I need to look around for sites that cater to the Chinese hobbyist vegetable gardener and ask around about interesting varieties. No doubt some of those varieties I read about would actually be fun to grow where I live; it's just hard to know based on the seed listing alone. If I find anything that looks interesting, I will post back here!

Just for the heck of it, here is a link to one of the many seed companies found on vegnet.com.cn- a Chinese producer that specializes in tomato seed...

http://www.shiduseed.com/products.htm