by Coe, Andrew
If you ask what they eat—we answer, they do not eat beef nor bread, mutton nor milk, butter nor cheese; but they do eat fowls and fishes, pigs and puppies, rats and rice, maize and millet, wheat and barley, pumpkins and potatoes, turnips and tomatoes, ground-nuts and garlics, pears and peaches, plantains and pumeloes, grapes and guavas, pineapples and pomegranates, olives and oranges, sharks’ fins and birds’ nests. But why so much curiosity to learn what they eat, while so little concern for the fact that they are hastening by millions to a world of everlasting starvation, while we hold in our hands the bread which came down from heaven, of which a man eat he shall live forever—and we refuse to give it to them, at the peril of our salvation and theirs.22
Cursory and sprinkled with errors (Dean knew from sources like The Middle Kingdom that beef and mutton were at least occasionally eaten), this description is typical of missionary writings of the era. There was no reason to dwell on the old, pagan, depraved habits of the Chinese because all of that would soon be swept away by the clean, pure, “civilizing” influence of western Christianity.
There were a few exceptions to this attitude, at least regarding food. Charles Taylor, a medical missionary sent to Shanghai in the early 1850s by the Methodist church, whose 1860 book Five Years in China is liberally larded with Christian condemnation, also reveals a scientist’s knack for direct observation. He was curious about every aspect of Chinese life, from housing to criminal punishment, and his section on foodstuffs shows clearly that he actually tasted, and enjoyed, bamboo shoots, frogs’ legs, and ripe persimmons. He is not put off when his Chinese host ladles soup into his bowl with a spoon that has touched his own lips or cleans his guest’s chopsticks with his fingers—“after having sucked them clean.” And he is one of the rare Americans of the nineteenth century who admits to having enjoyed the occasional formal Chinese banquet:
Figure 2.3. An American missionary with her Chinese converts in Fuzhou, c. 1902. After the signing of the Treaty of Wang Xia, most Americans in China were either missionaries or traders.
The variety of preparations is certainly very great, and many of them are as delicate and well-flavored as any one could desire. Such at least is my own opinion, founded on actual experience; for just in order to inform myself, I have done what, perhaps, few foreigners who visit China venture upon—imagining the presence of some canine or feline ingredient—have tasted most of the dishes at a fashionable Chinese dinner, even when the appearance and odor suggested something disagreeable, and have found them exceedingly palatable.23
The Americans who lived and worked in China during that time were mainly interested not in what it was but in what they thought it should be—an economically and technologically modern Christian nation. To them, imperial China was an antiquated monolith akin to ancient Egypt or Rome and best relegated to the dustbin of history. Even by the 1890s, few Americans had seen much more of the country than the coast and a few inland cities, and only a small minority had mastered Chinese. Their culturally limited viewpoint profoundly influenced the reception on American soil of Chinese immigrants and Chinese food.
CHAPTER THREE
Coarse Rice and Water
In 1795, when the Americans were still marveling at Chinese food from the confines of Guangzhou, the Middle Kingdom’s most famous poet, Yuan Mei, wrote of the deterioration caused by advancing age:
When I was young and had no money to spend
I had a passionate longing for expensive things.
I was always envying people for their fur coats,
For the wonderful things they got to eat and drink.
I dreamt of these things, but none of them came my way,
And in the end I became very depressed.
Nowadays, I have got quite smart clothes,
But am old and ugly, and they do not suit me at all.
All the choicest foods are on my table;
But I only manage to eat a few scraps.
I feel inclined to say to my Creator
“Let me live my days on earth again,
But this time be rich when I am young;
To be poor when one is old does not matter at all.”1
Yuan Mei was born poor in 1716 in the city of Hangzhou. His teachers realized the power of his intellect very early; after he passed the official examinations, he became a district magistrate in the city of Nanjing on the lower Yangzi River. Passionate, irreverent, and disrespectful of authority, he soon realized that he was unfit for official life. Already famous for his poetry, he decided to take up the writing life full time. In 1748, he resigned his posts and retired to a sprawling estate—the Sui Gardens—he had built in the outskirts of Nanjing. His gardens included twenty-four decorative pavilions, a scholar’s library and studio, arched bridges over a pond, and a kitchen. There, for the rest of his life, he devoted himself to poetry and friends, sexual indulgences, and refining the gastronomic arts.
Like many with sensitive stomachs (probably caused by too much early indulgence), Yuan Mei was obsessed with food. He hired a chef, Wang Xiaoyu, who shared his culinary passion and aesthetic. Wang told him:
To find an employer who appreciates one is not easy. But to find one who understands anything about cookery, is harder still. So much imagination and hard thinking go into the making of every dish that one may say I serve up along with it my whole mind and heart. The ordinary hard-drinking revelers at a fashionable dinner-party would be equally happy to gulp down any stinking mess. They say what a wonderful cook I am, but in the service of such people my art can only decline. . . . You, on the contrary, continually criticize me, fly into a rage with me, but on every such occasion make me aware of some real defect; so that I would a thousand times rather listen to your bitter admonitions than to the sweetest praise.2
Wang brought to the poet’s kitchen his ability to cook the simplest ingredients in a way that preserved and enhanced their natural characteristics. “If one has art,” he said, “then a piece of celery or salted cabbage can be made into a marvelous delicacy.”3 Yuan also expanded his kitchen’s repertoire by eating widely, both at the houses of friends and on his extensive travels throughout China. When he encountered a dish he liked, he took notes, barged into the kitchen to interrogate the chefs, even brought them home to demonstrate its preparation. His tastes ran to simple meals, due both to his stomach problems and because he thought a cook could only make four or five successful dishes at a time. After a banquet where more than forty different kinds of food had been served, he wrote, “when I got home I was so hungry that I ordered a bowl of plain rice-gruel [congee].”4
At age eighty, when the choicest morsels had lost their savor, Yuan Mei decided to sum up a lifetime of eating in his book Suiyan Shidan, “Recipes from the Sui Gardens.” It contains more than three hundred recipes for fish, shellfish, meat, poultry, vegetables, bean curd, noodles, breads, and rice dishes. More important, he prefaces the book with a dozen pages of culinary rules and taboos that give readers a grounding in the general principles of how food should be cooked and served. Like Chef Wang, Yuan holds that foods should exhibit their own characteristics when cooked, and each dish should have one dominant flavor. “Then the palate of the gourmand will respond without fail, and the flowers of the soul blossom forth.”5 Comparing cookery to matrimony, he writes that ingredients should complement one another and criticizes cooks who pile too many incompatible meats into one pot. In the kitchen, the chef should keep his workspace and knives clean to avoid contamination of flavors. Guests at the table should not “eat with their eyes” or be overwhelmed by a profusion of elaborate, poorly prepared dishes. And they should not “eat with their ears” or be impressed by hearing of the cost of rare dishes like birds’ nests and sea cucumbers. Yuan preferred well-prepared bean curd and bamboo shoots and declared chicken, pork, fish, and duck “the four heroes of table.”6 Above all, the host should never allow the standards of his kitchen to slip: “into no department of life should indifference be allowed to creep; into none less t
han into the domain of cookery.”7
Yuan’s recipes embody the food preferences of a cultivated scholar-gourmet. They are neither street food nor the pricey, pretentious dishes the wealthiest merchants favored but fall somewhere in between. These recipes also represent the apogee of the regional cuisine of eastern China during the late eighteenth century, particularly of the cities along the lower Yangzi River. Yuan’s cookbook has been so influential that dishes like drunken prawns (live shrimp that are flash-cooked at the table in flaming rice wine) are staples of Chinese restaurants today. That Yuan Mei, a highly educated member of China’s elite, a poet and a government official, would have thought it worth his time to write a cookbook is not surprising. (Of American statesmen, only Thomas Jefferson displayed a similar interest in cuisine.) Since nearly the dawn of Chinese culture over three millennia ago, the Chinese have considered cookery an essential art, one of the defining elements of their culture.
Although Chinese cuisine has changed greatly over the centuries and has continually been open to outside influences, it has always been composed of the same basic building blocks. Like all cuisines, it is based on the combinations of specific raw ingredients, flavorings, preparations, and manners of serving and eating dishes. It is also intimately entwined with the country’s vast and varied landscape, its climate, and many millennia of human history. In fact, you cannot explain China’s cuisine without also describing its geography and the way agriculture came to assume a particularly central role in its culture and history. In the mid–nineteenth century, the emperor of China held sway over more of the Earth’s surface than any ruler except the queen of England and the czar of Russia. Beyond the eighteen provinces of China Proper, the Daoguang emperor also ruled over Manchuria, which was the Manchu tribal homeland to the northeast, and an enormous swath of colonial possessions. These included the vast “western Regions”: Tibet, Mongolia, and the arid steppes of Central Asia, all the way to present-day Kazakhstan and Kirghizia. (With the exception of Mongolia and parts of Xinjiang, the People’s Republic of China now encompasses nearly the same territory.) In its size and complexity, China in many ways resembled western Europe, with its provinces corresponding in size and cultural variation to Europe’s nations.
The emperor thus ruled over a wide range of landscapes and climate zones, ranging from rocky high-altitude desert to frozen steppe to tropical rain forest. Surprisingly, very little of China’s land is arable. More than a third of it consists of mountains and steep, untillable hills, and most of its northwestern quarter is an arid zone with only isolated areas fit for growing crops. These mountains and deserts form a natural barrier that for centuries protected China from outside invaders. But this terrain also forced the people very early to develop intensive agricultural practices that made the best of what land they had, mostly along its great rivers. Many of the largest waterways rise in the Tibet Plateau, which is capped by Qomologma, or Mount Everest, the “Mother Goddess of the Earth.” To the north of this region of snow-capped peaks and arid basins lie deserts and rocky steppes—the route of the Silk Road linking China with the Middle East. To the east, where the Tibet Plateau slopes down toward the Pacific Ocean, the great rivers of East and Southeast Asia begin, including the Huanghe, or Yellow River. From its source in the mountains, the Huanghe follows a long, looping course, carrying with it enormous amounts of yellowish loess—sedimentary deposits that have been spread for millennia on the North China Plain, a sprawling area of flat lowlands. Three thousand or more years ago, this fertile area became the birthplace of Chinese civilization, and it remains one of the most humanized landscapes on Earth. The Huanghe’s legacy has not always been benevolent; periodic floods with devastating effects on the human population have earned the river the name “China’s Sorrow.”
The Tibet Plateau is also the source of China’s Yangzi, the third longest river in the world. After leaving the mountains and traveling along the southern border of Sichuan’s fertile “Red Basin,” the Yangzi enters a region of steep valleys, at the eastern end of which the Chinese government has erected the controversial Three Gorges Dam. Downstream, the river flows through a series of wide valleys and plains before finally disgorging into the China Sea. The cities and agricultural regions along this stretch are among the oldest and most important in China. Traditionally, the lower Yangzi has marked the boundary between the northern and southern halves of China Proper, with their differences of climate, agriculture, and culture. (Northerners have long looked down on the South, calling it a zone of heat, humidity, and insects.) Lying between the Yangzi and the border with Vietnam, the South is a region dominated by low mountains and hills that has much less arable land than the North. The most populous districts are located right along the hilly coastline, in pockets of flat land formed by bays or river valleys. The largest of these is the valley of the Xi (“West”) River, which begins in Guangxi Province and connects with two other river systems to form the Zhu, also known as the Pearl River. Along its banks lie the cities of Guangdong, Macau, and Hong Kong and the wide expanse of the Pearl River Delta. For many reasons—proximity to Southeast Asia, distance from Beijing, lack of natural resources, and so on—the people of South China’s coast have always been far more oriented toward the outside world than those in other parts of the Middle Kingdom.
China’s climate has always been both its curse, with frequent floods and droughts, and its blessing, helping to feed a vast population. Some writers have pointed out the similarities between the weather conditions of China and North America, which has an analogous latitudinal position on the globe. In truth, however, China is generally colder, hotter, wetter, and more arid than North America. Two great seasonal weather patterns cause this climate of extremes: the waves of cold, dry air that push into China from Siberia and the warm, moist air associated with the Asian monsoon coming from the south. The interplay between these two systems leads to the baking heat of China’s summers and the bitter cold of its winters. From Central Asia all the way to the Pacific, the climate of North China is generally dry. The failure of the rains to arrive has meant drought, crop failure, and starvation for millions of people. If too much rain falls, the rivers can overflow their banks and submerge wide swathes of the countryside. In 1888, two million people perished when the Huanghe flooded the North China Plain. South China is generally warmer and its rainfall heavier and more reliable. The floods that do occur are usually less destructive because they are constrained by the hilly landscape. Farmers there do have to contend with typhoons, the western Pacific Ocean’s counterpart to hurricanes, which can cause landslides, floods, and widespread crop destruction.
China’s diverse climate and geography have allowed a vast array of plant and animal life to thrive. In terms of sheer number of species, China is one of the richest geographical regions on Earth. Since at least the era of Peking Man, five hundred thousand years ago, the human population has seen all of this natural bounty as potential foodstuffs. This is true even today, as one can see from the displays of wild water and land animals for sale in tanks and cages in Guangzhou’s sprawling marketplace. (Unfortunately, many of these species are now in danger because of the persistence of the same practices of hunting and gathering.) And the Chinese people learned very early to support themselves by domesticating plants and animals. The inhabitants of prehistoric China may have been one of the earliest groups to learn this skill. According to a 2002 joint Sino-Swedish DNA study, the first domesticated animals were dogs, which diverged genetically from wolves around 13,000 BCE in East Asia. From China all the way to Europe, they became important to humans both as an aid to hunters and as a source of food. East Asia’s first domesticated plant was probably rice, in South China (not, as was long believed, millet in North China). Archaeological excavations at sites along the lower and middle Yangzi River have revealed that wild rice was first domesticated around 8500 BCE. Some grains of this rice have been found amid the shards of crudely decorated ceramic urns and bowls that are among the earliest pott
ery found on the Eurasian landmass.
During approximately 6000–3000 BCE, a series of regional cultures rose and flourished across China. We don’t know much about their culinary habits except that they were omnivorous, with a gradually increasing reliance on grain as a staple. In the North, particularly in the dry plains along the inland Yellow River, relatively drought-resistant millet became the principal crop, along with persimmons, peaches, other fruits, and various nuts. Chinese cabbage, an important vegetable, was eventually joined by leeks, onions, and mallow, whose mucilaginous leaves were probably used as a thickener. The most common animals were dogs and pigs, which had been domesticated in China by 7000 BCE. From the Yangzi River all the way through Southeast Asia, rice was clearly the dominant grain. Pigs and dogs were, again, the main domestic animals in South China; water buffaloes arrived somewhat later. Southerners also consumed large amounts of fish and shellfish and foraged for an abundant number of edible wild plants. During this era, life wasn’t completely consumed by the struggle for sustenance. At the Jiahu village site in Henan Province, archaeologists have found the earliest musical instruments, as well as pots containing the residue of an aromatic liquor made from rice and honey and flavored with fruits.
Scholars date the birth of a recognizably “Chinese” culture to the centuries between 3000 and 1554 BCE and to the area stretching from the Pearl River Delta in the South to the Great Wall in the North. This was the era of the legendary Xia Dynasty, when villages grew into large towns, with hundreds of houses and clear evidence of stratified social life (particularly elite tombs filled with offerings and decorated with murals) and regular trade between communities. Most of these population centers have been found in North China from Shandong to the west (archaeological work has lagged in South China). Some of this region’s rulers may have been the original models for the legendary god-kings of early Chinese history. These included Sui Ren, who first tamed fire; Fu Xi, who taught people to hunt and fish; and Po Yi, who domesticated the first birds and beasts. According to a story from the third century, Shen Nong, the Farmer God, taught his people the rudiments of agriculture:
