Rice feeds more than 3.5 billion people every day, yet its history is surprisingly complicated. Oryza sativa was gathered in the Yangtze valley of China about 24,000 years ago and domesticated around 11,000 years ago, with parallel cultivation in the Ganges region of India by 6500 BCE. A second species, African rice (Oryza glaberrima), was domesticated in West Africa about 2,000 years later and is more drought and pest resistant, though it sheds seeds easily. Rice spread through migration, Alexander the Great's campaigns, Moorish invasions of Iberia, Crusaders and the Silk Road, and reached the Americas through Spanish colonists and the transatlantic slave trade. Enslaved West Africans brought irrigation and cultivation skills that made rice farming viable in North America. Today rice is a major source of methane emissions, and researchers are studying ancient rice DNA to breed better varieties.

Hampi is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Karnataka, India, with more than 1,600 surviving remains spread over 4,100 hectares. It was the capital of the Vijayanagara Empire from 1336 to 1565. Travellers from Persia and Portugal described it as a prosperous, wealthy and grand city with temples, markets and farms along the Tungabhadra River. By 1500 it was estimated to be the world's second-largest city after Beijing, and probably India's richest at the time. In 1565 a coalition of Muslim sultanates defeated the Vijayanagara Empire, its capital was conquered and destroyed, and the city was left in ruins. Hampi remains a religious centre, with the active Virupaksha Temple at its heart.