Coix lacryma-jobi Seeds | Chinese Jobs Tears Lacroyma-jobi Ma-yuen
LATIN NAME: Coix lacryma-jobi
COMMON NAME: Chinese Jobs Tears, Ma Yuen, Yi Yi Ren
Plant Profile
Job’s tears is a grass with a grain inside a shell so hard and glossy that it has been used as a bead for as long as it has been used as food. Coix lacryma-jobi grows 1-2 m tall on cane-like stems with broad, bamboo-like leaves, and produces drooping clusters of tear-shaped seeds that ripen from green to grey-white or dark brown.
It is native to warm East Asia and has been cultivated as a grain for millennia, particularly in China, where it is both a food and a listed drug. The plant likes water and will grow at the edge of a paddy or in any soil that stays damp, which makes it useful in places where other grains struggle.
Science & Biotechnology
Coix sits on the boundary between food and medicine more visibly than almost any other grain. The seed is eaten as yi yi ren in soups and congees, and it is also a pharmacopoeial drug used for oedema, damp-heat conditions and skin problems. The oil extracted from the seed produced Kanglaite, a coix seed oil emulsion approved in China as an adjunctive injection in cancer therapy, which is a rare regulatory status for a botanical.
The active fraction is usually described as coixenolide together with polysaccharides, and trials have reported improvements in quality of life and tolerance of chemotherapy, with less clear evidence for survival benefit. That is a modest claim, and it is worth reading carefully, but the fact that a grass grain reached injectable pharmaceutical status at all is unusual enough to be worth knowing.
Uses & Benefits
In the kitchen the polished grain is cooked in soups and congees, and it has a chewy texture and a mild, slightly nutty taste. It is gluten-free, which has made it a minor player in the gluten-free grain market, and it is used in brewing in some regions.
The ornamental use is older than the culinary one in some cultures: the hard shells are pierced and strung as beads, rosaries and curtain ornaments, and the plant is grown in gardens for its arching habit and its decorative seed heads. It is also a useful plant at the edge of a pond or in a boggy corner where little else will grow.
Growing from Seed
The shell is hard and germination is slow and uneven. Soak the seed for twenty-four hours, then give it four to six weeks of cold, moist stratification at 2-4°C before sowing. Sow 2 cm deep at 20-25°C; germination can take three to six weeks and continues over a long period.
Grow the seedlings on in rich, moist soil in full sun, and keep them wet, since the plant is semi-aquatic in habit. Plant out after the last frost, 40-50 cm apart. It is vigorous and will self-seed in warm climates; in cool ones, save seed from the earliest ripening heads, because the crop needs a long season to finish.
Our Take
Grow it for the seed heads and for the strange, beautiful grain, and treat the medicinal claims as a reason to read more rather than a reason to self-treat. It is one of the few plants that is a food, an ornament, a bead and a drug at once.
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