The most popular cherry in America is the dark red Bing cherry, but few know where its name came from. The variety was first developed at Seth Lewelling's orchard in Oregon. The Lewelling family had hauled 700 fruit trees out west in the mid 1800s to take advantage of the region's fertile land and mild weather. Ah Bing was a 6-foot-tall Chinese immigrant who worked for Lewelling for 30 years, earning money to send back to his wife and children in China.
As the foreman of Lewelling’s orchard crew, Ah Bing supervised more than 30 men. He worked closely with Lewelling on grafting, propagating, and caring for trees. The Bing cherry, Ledding recalled, surfaced one day when Lewelling and Ah Bing walked through the rows of cherry trees, where each man maintained separate rows. In Ah Bing’s row, there was a marvelous new type of cherry. Someone suggested that Lewelling name the cherry after himself. But Lewelling protested. He had already named a cherry for himself. “No, I’ll name this for Bing,” Ledding recalled him saying. “It’s a big cherry and Bing’s big, and anyway it’s in his row, so that shall be its name.”
But other stories portray Ah Bing as even more central to the development of the cherry. In 1922, the agricultural journal The Oregon Grower related that Lewelling had assigned a collection of “Black Republican” cherry seedlings to Ah Bing to care for in 1875. Ah Bing’s cultivation resulted in the Bing cherry, which, the author commented, would “pass his name down in horticultural history.”
The name stuck, but the connection to Ah Bing is little known. He was a victim of the Chinese Exclusion Act and suffered through riots as anti-Chinese sentiment worsened. Read about Ah Bing and his cherries at Atlas Obscura.