Kiwifruit: History and Origins

Table of Contents

1. A Wild Vine of the Yangtze Forests
2. Macaque Peach: The Fruit in the Chinese Record
3. Plant Hunters: Fortune, Planchon and Wilson
4. 1904: A Headmistress and a Packet of Seeds
5. From Chinese Gooseberry to ‘Hayward’
6. Melonette, Then Kiwifruit: How the Name Was Chosen
7. Two Species, Not One: The 1984 Split
8. Boom, Crash and the Single Desk
9. Gold Kiwifruit and the Psa Epidemic
10. Vitamin C and the Clinical Trials
11. The Kiwifruit Today
12. Key Research Papers
13. Connections
14. Featured Videos

A Wild Vine of the Yangtze Forests

Kiwifruit belongs to the genus Actinidia, a group of roughly fifty to sixty species of woody climbing vines native to eastern Asia. Almost all of them grow in China, and the two that matter commercially — Actinidia chinensis, the smooth-skinned parent of today's gold kiwifruit, and Actinidia deliciosa, the fuzzy green one — are both Chinese natives. Their home is the belt of warm, wet, forested hill country along the middle and upper Yangtze River: the modern provinces of Hubei, Hunan, Shaanxi, Henan and Sichuan and their neighbours. In the wild the vines scramble twenty metres or more into the forest canopy, and the fruit ripens in autumn to be eaten by birds, monkeys and people.

The 2001 review by Hongwen Huang and Ross Ferguson sets out the geography that shaped the crop: A. chinensis grows mostly in the warmer lowlands of the eastern provinces towards the coast, while A. deliciosa grows in the cooler, higher, inland country to the west. The two ranges overlap in a band across Shaanxi, Henan, Hubei and Hunan, and a 2021 survey of more than 3,300 wild vines from 128 populations confirmed that the two forms occupy measurably different climate niches and carry different chloroplast lineages, with their ranges having contracted and expanded with the ice ages.

Two biological facts about the wild vine explain a great deal of what follows. First, Actinidia is dioecious — male and female flowers grow on separate plants, so a lone vine, however healthy, never bears fruit. Second, the fuzzy green kiwifruit is a hexaploid: it carries six sets of chromosomes rather than the usual two. A 2025 haplotype-resolved genome of A. deliciosa shows that this hexaploid arose by hybridisation within the A. chinensis complex and inherits its chromosomes polysomically, which is one reason kiwifruit breeding is slow and seedlings vary so widely.

Unlike the apple or the grape, kiwifruit has almost no archaeological record: no carbonised seeds from Neolithic sites, no pips in ancient middens that have been securely identified. That is not surprising for a soft fruit gathered from the wild rather than stored, but it means the early history has to be read from texts and from the genetics of the living plants, not from digs.

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Macaque Peach: The Fruit in the Chinese Record

In Chinese the fruit has carried many names. The commonest is 猕猴桃, mihoutao, "macaque peach", the peach the monkeys eat; others recorded before the twentieth century include yangtao ("sun peach" or "goat peach"), tengli ("vine pear") and hulitao ("fox peach"). Yangtao was the name in everyday use in the Yangtze valley when Western visitors arrived, and it was the first name the fruit had in English. In modern Taiwan and Hong Kong a newer name, qiyiguo, "strange fruit", is simply a transliteration of the English word "kiwi" travelling back to the plant's homeland.

How far back the fruit can be traced in writing is less certain than many popular accounts suggest. The usual claim is that the first identifiable description of the plant is in a poem by the Tang-dynasty poet Cen Shen (eighth century), which describes a mihoutao vine trained over a well in what is now Shaanxi, and that the first clear description of the fruit itself comes from the Song dynasty in the twelfth century. The identification rests on the name rather than on a botanical description, so it is best read as "probably" rather than "certainly". A stronger claim sometimes made — that the kiwifruit appears in the Shijing, the Book of Odes compiled in the first millennium BCE — depends on identifying an ambiguous plant name in a very old text, and horticultural historians do not treat it as secure. This page does not assert it.

What the record does show clearly is what people did not do: they did not farm it. Huang and Ferguson note that even in the early twentieth century there is no evidence of kiwifruit being cultivated as a crop in China. Rural communities gathered the fruit from wild vines in autumn to eat fresh, to sell in local markets and to use in folk medicine — a tradition, not evidence of any particular effect — and large quantities are still collected from the wild today, in ways that threaten the wild populations. Commercial cultivation in China began only around 1980. The plant that would become one of the world's great fruit crops therefore spent the first two thousand years of its recorded history as a wild harvest.

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Plant Hunters: Fortune, Planchon and Wilson

The kiwifruit entered Western science in the aftermath of the First Opium War. The Scottish botanist Robert Fortune, sent to China by the Horticultural Society of London, collected a specimen of the vine around 1845; from that specimen the French botanist Jules Émile Planchon formally described and named Actinidia chinensis in the London Journal of Botany in 1847. The type specimen — the pressed plant on which the name legally rests — is held at Kew. Nobody in Europe had yet tasted the fruit.

The living plant arrived half a century later, through the most celebrated of the Edwardian plant hunters. In 1899 the English nursery firm of James Veitch & Sons sent the young Ernest Henry Wilson to China to collect garden plants for Europe and North America. Wilson based himself at Yichang (then written Ichang), a treaty port on the Yangtze just downstream from the Three Gorges, and in 1900 he sent seeds of the fuzzy kiwifruit back to Veitch in England. Plants were on sale in Britain by 1904, and seeds and plants obtained from Wilson went to the United States at about the same time. Wilson, who went on to introduce something like two thousand Asian plant species to Western gardens, is therefore directly responsible for bringing the kiwifruit to Europe. For a while it was even called "Wilson's gooseberry".

Yet in Britain and America it remained a curiosity of the shrubbery, not a crop. Ross Ferguson's 2004 centenary paper gives the reason: a vine needs a male and a female plant close together to fruit, and gardeners who raised a single handsome specimen from a packet of seed usually got flowers and no fruit, or fruit and no idea why the next plant bore none. The introductions to Britain and the United States "remained as ornamental plants and did not develop into commercial production". The kiwifruit's future would be decided by a different packet of seeds, carried to the other end of the earth.

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1904: A Headmistress and a Packet of Seeds

Wilson's other contribution was indirect. In 1900 he made the fruit known to the small community of foreign residents in Yichang, among them a New Zealand missionary named Katie Fraser. Her sister, Mary Isabel Fraser (1863–1942), was the principal of Wanganui Girls' College, a graduate of the University of Otago and a lifelong campaigner for girls' education. Isabel visited Katie at the mission in 1903, and when she returned to New Zealand in 1904 she brought kiwifruit seeds home with her.

She gave them to Alexander Allison, a farmer with a taste for unusual plants who lived at a property called Letham south of Whanganui. Allison sowed them, and the vines he raised are recorded as fruiting for the first time around 1910 — the first kiwifruit ever to ripen outside Asia and be taken seriously. He passed seeds and plants to other nurserymen and orchardists around the North Island, and by 1917 the plant was being sold under the name "Chinese gooseberry", with growers already encouraged to select for larger, more oval fruit.

Two things make this modest exchange the founding event of a world industry. The first is genetic: every commercial cultivar of green kiwifruit grown anywhere in the world descends from the plants raised from Fraser's seeds — by the account preserved in New Zealand, from just three of Allison's vines, one male and two female. The second is that New Zealand, unlike Britain, happened to have exactly the climate the vine wanted: mild, humid, frost-light winters and long warm autumns in the North Island. Ferguson, who has written more about this history than anyone, judges the kiwifruit "the most successful of all the Chinese plants that Wilson introduced into cultivation" — and it succeeded through a route Wilson never planned.

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From Chinese Gooseberry to ‘Hayward’

Through the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s the Chinese gooseberry was a New Zealand back-garden novelty, sold by nurseries, grown on trellises and pergolas, and occasionally sent to local markets. The grower Bruno Just sold an estimated eight to ten thousand plants across the North Island in the late 1920s, many of them around Tauranga and Te Puke in the Bay of Plenty, the district that would become the heart of the industry. The first commercial orchards were planted near Whanganui in the early 1930s, and Jim MacLoughlin began planting vines at Te Puke in 1932. During the Second World War, when fruit imports were restricted and American and British servicemen were stationed in the country, the fruit found a wider audience.

Because the vine is dioecious and every seedling is different, a good Chinese gooseberry could only be kept by grafting — taking cuttings from the one vine and growing them on rootstocks, so that a "variety" is really a single plant copied thousands of times. The early selections were named after the people who made them: ‘Allison’, ‘Bruno’, ‘Abbott’, ‘Monty’, ‘Gracie’. In the early 1950s Harold Mouat of the government's Fruit Research Division classified and standardised the important ones.

One of them stood apart. Around 1924 an Auckland nurseryman named Hayward Wright, working at Avondale, raised a vine whose fruit was larger than the rest, kept far better in storage and had an excellent flavour. It was slow to catch on — it was a shy bearer and it ripened late — but its keeping quality was exactly what an export trade would need. The cultivar was formally named ‘Hayward’ in his honour in 1956. It was first exported in 1959, had become the dominant export cultivar by the late 1960s, and from 1975 was for two decades the only kiwifruit New Zealand exported. When Italy, Chile, France and eventually China planted kiwifruit, they planted ‘Hayward’. A single seedling from a single Auckland nursery is still, a century later, the mainstay of green kiwifruit production worldwide.

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Melonette, Then Kiwifruit: How the Name Was Chosen

The first commercial exports of Chinese gooseberries left New Zealand in the 1952–53 season, trial shipments from a few Te Puke orchards to Britain and Australia, made possible by government research into how well the tender fruit could travel and by the cold-storage and shipping know-how the country had built up for apples and butter. Early cargoes were mostly ‘Abbott’ and ‘Bruno’. The fruit reached California in 1959, and it was the American market that forced the change of name.

The problem was the word "gooseberry". Fruit importers on the West Coast reported that United States quarantine officers were wary of anything called a gooseberry, because European gooseberries, grown close to the ground, carried disease concerns that the tree-like kiwifruit vine did not, and because berries attracted higher import duties. An Auckland fruit-packing and export firm tried a new name first: "melonette", under which the fruit was briefly shipped to the United States in the 1950s. Its American importer objected that this was no better, since melons were taxed as heavily as berries, and asked instead for a short name that instantly said "New Zealand".

The answer came at a meeting at the same firm in June 1959: kiwifruit, coined by analogy with "passionfruit" and built on "kiwi", the nickname New Zealanders already used for themselves, which American servicemen who had been stationed in the Pacific during the war would recognise. The first known printed use is in a San Francisco importer's brochure of September 1959. In California the name was taken up quickly, helped by a Los Angeles produce distributor, Frieda Caplan, who persuaded supermarket buyers to stock the fruit, and by Californian growers who adopted it for their own plantings. New Zealanders themselves went on saying "Chinese gooseberry" through the 1960s, but by 1970 every export carton used the new name.

Two stories about the name deserve a caution. It is often said the fruit was named because it looks like the kiwi bird — small, brown and fuzzy. The resemblance is real, but the documented reasoning at the time was about the nickname for New Zealanders, not the bird. And it is sometimes said the change was made to avoid the word "Chinese" during the Cold War; the surviving accounts point instead to the practical problems of "gooseberry" and "melon" at the customs desk. Both stories are told here as stories.

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Two Species, Not One: The 1984 Split

For most of the twentieth century the fuzzy green kiwifruit went under Planchon's name, Actinidia chinensis. The French botanist Auguste Chevalier had noticed in 1940 that the hairy, large-fruited form was distinct — he first placed it under another species as Actinidia latifolia var. deliciosa, and in 1941 moved it to A. chinensis var. deliciosa — but the distinction was little used outside herbaria.

The decisive change came when Western and Chinese botanists could finally examine wild plants together. In 1984 the Chinese botanist Liang Chou-fen and the New Zealand botanist A. Ross Ferguson published, in the Guangxi botanical journal Guihaia, the new combination Actinidia deliciosa (A. Chev.) C.F. Liang & A.R. Ferguson, raising the fuzzy, hexaploid, green-fleshed kiwifruit to the rank of a full species. The name A. chinensis was reserved for the smoother-skinned, mostly diploid or tetraploid plants of the eastern lowlands — the ancestors of the gold kiwifruit. So the cultivar ‘Hayward’, sold for sixty years as A. chinensis, became A. deliciosa overnight.

The story has not quite ended. Genome sequencing — a draft genome of A. chinensis was published in Nature Communications in 2013 and a carefully annotated one in 2018 — together with the 2021 chloroplast survey and the 2025 hexaploid genome, has shown how closely the two are related and how the hexaploid arose by hybridisation within the same complex. Some botanists now prefer to treat them again as varieties of one species, A. chinensis var. chinensis and var. deliciosa, and both usages are found in the current literature. For a reader the practical point is simple: green kiwifruit and gold kiwifruit are close relatives but not the same plant, and the difference goes down to their chromosome counts.

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Boom, Crash and the Single Desk

The 1960s and 1970s were the kiwifruit's boom decades in New Zealand. Exports grew steadily, Europe took the bulk of them, and by 1973 ninety per cent of the country's orchards were in the Bay of Plenty. In 1976, for the first time, more kiwifruit left the country than was eaten at home. Growers organised: a Kiwifruit Export Promotion Committee in 1970, then a Kiwifruit Marketing Licensing Authority in 1977 that set export standards for size, quality and packaging. In the late 1970s the crop was hailed as a "golden harvest", and the returns and the orchardist's lifestyle drew investors and new growers into districts that had never grown it, such as Northland and Hawke's Bay. From 1984 exporters were chartering entire refrigerated ships.

The crash followed quickly. Because the crop was propagated from a plant New Zealand had freely exported, other countries could grow exactly the same fruit. Italy, whose grape-growers already had the trellises and the skills, planted heavily through the 1980s and by about 1990 was producing more kiwifruit than New Zealand; France, Chile, Portugal and Japan followed. With world supplies rising, and New Zealand's own interest and exchange rates unstable, the industry fell into a crisis between 1987 and 1989. Many rival exporters competed to sell the same New Zealand fruit and drove the price down. Growers who had recently borrowed to plant were ruined, and a further price collapse came in 1992 as the newer producing countries reached full production.

Growers responded by asking the government to regulate exports. In 1988 the New Zealand Kiwifruit Marketing Board was set up as a statutory body with sole authority to market the country's kiwifruit everywhere except Australia — a "single desk", meaning every grower sold export fruit through one seller rather than competing against each other abroad. In 1997 the board adopted the trade name Zespri for New Zealand kiwifruit, and in 2000 it became a grower-owned company under that name, which still holds the statutory single-desk right for exports outside Australasia. The arrangement remains a subject of policy debate in New Zealand; this page records it as history rather than taking a view.

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Gold Kiwifruit and the Psa Epidemic

The answer to a world full of ‘Hayward’ was a fruit nobody else had. From the late 1970s New Zealand's Department of Scientific and Industrial Research imported seed of A. chinensis — the smooth-skinned, yellow-fleshed species — and began a breeding programme. Its first great success was a vine selected in 1991 and named for its position in the research orchard and the institute that bred it: ‘Hort16A’. Sweet, smooth, golden and tasting faintly of mango, it was launched on the world market in 2000 as the first commercially successful kiwifruit cultivar ever to come out of a planned breeding programme, and it opened Asian markets that had been lukewarm about the sharper green fruit. By 2010 gold fruit was a third of New Zealand's kiwifruit sales.

Then the industry met the disease that every monoculture eventually meets. Pseudomonas syringae pv. actinidiae, known as Psa, is a bacterium that causes kiwifruit canker — oozing cankers on the trunk, spotted leaves, wilted shoots and, in the worst cases, dead vines. It had been described in Japan in the 1980s and found in Italy in 1992, but a far more aggressive strain began destroying Italian orchards in 2007–08. In November 2010 it was found in the Bay of Plenty. It spread through the region within a year, and ‘Hort16A’ proved catastrophically susceptible: most of the gold orchards in the country were cut out between late 2010 and 2013. A 2017 genomic study traced the pandemic strain, biovar 3, in New Zealand, Italy and Chile to a single recent origin in China.

The recovery came from the same breeding programme. A second gold selection, ‘Zesy002’ (also called Gold3, and sold as SunGold), turned out to tolerate Psa far better, and growers regrafted their surviving rootstocks to it. Joel Vanneste's 2017 review in the Annual Review of Phytopathology credits the industry's survival to that one less-susceptible cultivar. By 2022 gold varieties made up two-thirds of New Zealand's kiwifruit volume — a complete inversion of the ‘Hayward’-only industry of the 1980s, brought about by a bacterium.

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Vitamin C and the Clinical Trials

From the start of the export trade the kiwifruit's selling point, beyond its novelty, was its vitamin C: a green kiwifruit carries more vitamin C, weight for weight, than an orange, and a gold one more still. For decades that was a nutrition-table fact used in marketing. Only in the 2010s was it tested properly in people.

The clearest work came from Anitra Carr, Margreet Vissers and colleagues at the University of Otago in Christchurch. In a 2013 randomised trial in Nutrients, young men with low fruit intake were given either half a gold kiwifruit a day or a chewable tablet of the same vitamin C dose for six weeks; ascorbate rose in plasma, urine, white blood cells and muscle in both groups, and the fruit and the tablet turned out to be equally well absorbed. A companion study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition the same year showed that skeletal muscle vitamin C tracks intake closely. These were the first studies to measure vitamin C in human tissue after eating a whole fruit rather than a supplement. The other well-known modern trial is not about vitamin C at all: in 2023 an international randomised crossover trial in the American Journal of Gastroenterology found that two green kiwifruit a day increased complete bowel movements and improved abdominal comfort in people with constipation, compared with psyllium — the study behind the kiwifruit's current reputation as a food for constipation. For the nutrient itself see Vitamin C; for what is in the fruit, the Kiwifruit Nutrient Profile.

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The Kiwifruit Today

World kiwifruit production was about 4.4 million tonnes in 2023, according to FAO figures. China grew some 2.4 million tonnes of it — roughly 55 per cent of the world total — followed by New Zealand (about 660,000 tonnes), Italy (about 390,000), Greece, Iran and Chile. The plant's homeland has become its biggest producer, though the paths were very different: New Zealand and Italy export most of what they grow, while China eats nearly all of its own.

China's rise was fast. A national survey of wild Actinidia began in 1978 and screened more than a thousand candidate vines; commercial planting started in the early 1980s with imported ‘Hayward’, and Huang and Ferguson counted about 45,000 hectares by 1998, a third of them in Shaanxi, producing 118,500 tonnes. They predicted then that within a few years China would out-produce every other country, and it did. By 2020 China had about 290,000 hectares of kiwifruit, and ‘Hayward’ was only about six per cent of it: the rest were Chinese-bred cultivars, among them the red-fleshed ‘Hongyang’ selected in Sichuan from wild-collected seed. The Wuhan Botanical Garden holds the world's largest kiwifruit gene bank.

So, a century and a quarter after Isabel Fraser's seeds, the kiwifruit has come full circle. The wild vine of the Yangtze forests was domesticated on the far side of the Pacific, named for a flightless bird, split into two species, remade in gold and returned to China as an orchard crop. It is still, botanically, barely domesticated: a handful of clones, each a single seedling copied by grafting, with the whole genetic wealth of the genus still growing wild in the hills where it started — which is where the next chapter of its history will almost certainly be written.

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Key Research Papers

The list covers the botanical history of the introduction to New Zealand, the Chinese wild resource and its commercialisation, the genomics behind the two-species question, the Psa epidemic, and the human trials on vitamin C and constipation. Every identifier below was checked against Crossref or PubMed before publication; the identifier is the link and closes each citation.

1. Ferguson AR (2004). 1904—the year that kiwifruit (Actinidia deliciosa) came to New Zealand. New Zealand Journal of Crop and Horticultural Science. — doi:10.1080/01140671.2004.9514276
2. Huang H, Ferguson AR (2001). Review: Kiwifruit in China. New Zealand Journal of Crop and Horticultural Science. — doi:10.1080/01140671.2001.9514154
3. Ferguson AR, Huang H, Costa G (2023). History of Kiwifruit: Evolution of a Global Crop. In: Kiwifruit: Botany, Production and Uses. CABI. — doi:10.1079/9781800620933.0001
4. Huang S, Ding J, Deng D, et al. (2013). Draft genome of the kiwifruit Actinidia chinensis. Nature Communications. — doi:10.1038/ncomms3640
5. Wang Z, Zhong C, Li D, et al. (2021). Cytotype distribution and chloroplast phylogeography of the Actinidia chinensis complex. BMC Plant Biology. — doi:10.1186/s12870-021-03099-y
6. Li X, Kuhl H, Zhu S, et al. (2025). The haplotype-resolved genome assembly of the hexaploid kiwifruit Actinidia deliciosa reveals its hybrid origin and polysomic inheritance. Plant Communications. — doi:10.1016/j.xplc.2025.101436
7. Vanneste JL (2017). The Scientific, Economic, and Social Impacts of the New Zealand Outbreak of Bacterial Canker of Kiwifruit (Pseudomonas syringae pv. actinidiae). Annual Review of Phytopathology. — doi:10.1146/annurev-phyto-080516-035530
8. McCann HC, Li L, Liu Y, et al. (2017). Origin and Evolution of the Kiwifruit Canker Pandemic. Genome Biology and Evolution. — doi:10.1093/gbe/evx055
9. Carr AC, Bozonet SM, Pullar JM, Simcock JW, Vissers MCM (2013). A Randomized Steady-State Bioavailability Study of Synthetic versus Natural (Kiwifruit-Derived) Vitamin C. Nutrients. — doi:10.3390/nu5093684
10. Gearry R, Fukudo S, Barbara G, et al. (2023). Consumption of 2 Green Kiwifruits Daily Improves Constipation and Abdominal Comfort—Results of an International Multicenter Randomized Controlled Trial. American Journal of Gastroenterology. — PubMed PMID: 36537785

PubMed Topic Searches

1. PubMed: Kiwifruit domestication and origin
2. PubMed: Kiwifruit phylogeography and ploidy
3. PubMed: Kiwifruit bacterial canker (Psa)

External Authoritative Resources

• Te Ara — the Encyclopedia of New Zealand: Kiwifruit (Hugh Campbell and Julia Haggerty)
• International Plant Names Index — Actinidia deliciosa (Liang & Ferguson, Guihaia, 1984) and A. chinensis (Planchon, 1847)
• FAOSTAT — world kiwifruit production by country and year
• Wikipedia — Kiwifruit industry in New Zealand, with the primary-source record

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Connections

• All Food
• Kiwifruit Hub
• Kiwifruit Nutrient Profile
• Vitamin C
• Constipation
• Natural Constipation Relief
• Oranges: History and Origins
• Apples: History and Origins
• Grapes: History and Origins
• Pears

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