Abstract: UNESCO Biosphere Reserves were first established under the Man and Biosphere Programme of UNESCO in the 1970s. Their mandate has expanded beyond conservation to include sustainable development and local capacity enhancement. As institutions under UNESCO, they also work on “building peace” by seeking to reconcile relations between peoples, and between people and the natural world.

Citation: [AUTHOR (2021). “TITLE”] in Anderson et al. (eds.). Encyclopedia of Sustainability, 2^nd ed. Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing.

https://doi.org/10.47462/1408240605

Any figures or illustrations or illustrations included here are not finalized for publication. Advance publication date as per post date. Copyright Berkshire Publishing Group.

Back to list of Advance Articles

Biosphere Reserves

Biosphere reserves (BRs) are geographic areas designated by the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) wherein local organizations are convened to fulfil three functions: conservation of biodiversity, sustainable development, and “logistics” – research, learning and community capacity enhancement in support of the first two functions. To become designated, nominators must provide a compelling case that the selected regions are of global ecological, social, and cultural significance, they have a resident population, and that there are sufficient governance structures and processes in place for residents to undertake the functions. In 2021, there are 714 sites in 129 countries that form an international network.

BRs are established under the UNESCO Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Programme. About once every 10 years, MAB develops an overall program strategy, while the international network  of BRs establishes its own strategic action plan to guide operational priorities for the BRs. Presently, the MAB Strategy (2015–2025) serves as the overall strategy while the Lima Action Plan (2016–2025) specifies goals, objectives, and actions for BRs (see UNESCO 2017).

The present MAB Strategy includes a commitment to advancing the aims of “sustainability science.” The strategy defines sustainability science as “an integrated, problem-solving approach that draws on the full range of scientific, traditional and [I]ndigenous knowledge in a transdisciplinary way to identify, understand and address present and future economic, environmental, ethical and societal challenges related to sustainable development.” It goes on to state, “BRs, particularly through their coordinators, managers and scientists, have key roles to play in operationalizing and mainstreaming sustainability science” (UNESCO 2017, 19). In other words, BR practitioners work with people in academic, and private, public and civil society sectors to learn about and implement actions that support sustainability.

Many international goals and multilateral agreements also shape the activities locally. For example, BR practitioners are required to act on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Increasingly, around the world, BR managers also recognize the rights of Indigenous peoples and the vital role they can and do play in achieving conservation, mitigating and adapting to climate change, and reaching sustainability targets. Hence, local, national and international efforts are being made to reach out to Indigenous peoples, build respectful relationships, and co-create governance and management arrangements that meaningfully engage them. The first Indigenous-led BR—the Tsá Tué BR—was designated in 2016 in Canada’s Northwest Territories.

History

When the MAB Programme was established in 1971, it was conceived as an international, interdisciplinary and applied research program. Scientists from around the world were invited to undertake research across fourteen thematic “project areas” that focused on human use of the environment. Some themes were geographic such as mountain regions and urban areas, while other themes were cross-cutting such as human perceptions of the environment and the effects of pesticides on humans and the environment.  Originally, BRs were designated to support research across several of these project areas, however, they came to be most clearly identified with project area 8: “Conservation of natural areas and of the genetic material they contain.” This identification would forever “brand” BRs as being tools for biodiversity conservation, despite longstanding efforts to be more than simply another conservation designation. In the 1990s, the thematic project areas were disbanded. Nevertheless, local organizations and countries continued to seek the status of a BR designation and the number of BRs continued to grow. BR organizations came to emphasize their role in undertaking beneficial management practices and supporting local training initiatives rather than as sites for international research and monitoring programs.

Until 1995, the official functions of BRs were biodiversity conservation and applied scientific research. In 1996, MAB created the Statutory Framework of the World Network The Statutory Framework explicitly articulated that “sustainable development” be one of three functions (alongside conservation and logistics) and introduced a decennial periodic review process to ensure that all BRs implemented the three functions. For many BRs created prior to 1996, the Statutory Framework also required them to expand the boundaries of their region and to introduce new measures to meaningfully include local people in their management and governance (UNESCO 1996).

The Statutory Framework also specified that all BRs contain three types of zones: one or more core areas, protected by legislation; one or more buffer zones where research and uses compatible with ecological protection are allowed; and a transition area where sustainable resource use is practiced (UNESCO 1996). Today, in some countries, this transition zone is called a zone of cooperation. Although these zones were previously conceived by MAB, zonation had not been an explicit requirement. Hence, many BRs designated in the 1970s and 1980s did not fully comply with the stated intentions. Today, once a BR has been designated by UNESCO, the Framework states that “organizational arrangements” must be instituted so that “a suitable range of inter alia public authorities, local communities and private interests” implement the functions of a BR (UNESCO 1996, 17).

Implementation

Across the international network, BRs exhibit a great diversity of governance arrangements (for examples, see Reed and Price 2020).  Designation of a BR does not confer any new level of jurisdiction. Hence, the regional organizations do not have regulatory authority or direct management and decision-making powers. Rather, they must operate within national and sub-national legislative frameworks. In this context, management may involve a range of activities such as implementing regulations introduced by a government authority and/or working with relevant government agencies in cooperative decision-making forums.

Despite ambitious goals, many BRs around the world struggle because they are not well supported financially or logistically by their local or national governments (see Reed and Price 2020). In some countries (e.g., France and Germany), core funds are provided by government authorities, whether regional or national, and may be leveraged through projects or social enterprises. Indeed, in France and Germany, universities have also developed programs to train BR managers. In other cases, BRs must obtain project-level funds to implement local or regional conservation or sustainability initiatives; partner with educational institutions to deliver training programs; undertake educational and demonstration projects and provide logistical support for scientific research. In these cases, BRs rely, to a large degree, volunteer labor to advance their aims. Notwithstanding these examples, in many countries the success of BRs in meeting their mandates is predicated on the initiative and skills of a small number of people who often dedicate years and much volunteer labor to demonstrating the links between environmental protection and sustainable development.

Importantly, since 1994, BRs have not been considered protected areas under IUCN’s classification (Dudley 2008; Stolton et al. 2013). Core areas and, sometimes, buffer zones match some IUCN categories, but transition areas do not. Hence, BRs share some of the privileges and some of the criticisms of protected areas. The term “biosphere reserve” has likely contributed to this confusion. The word “reserve” often has a negative connotation, harkening back to the creation of protected areas that excluded local and Indigenous peoples from use. In some countries (e.g., Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Norway, Sweden), the word reserve is being replaced by more general terms such as region, area, or park. Informally, these may also be referred to as “biospheres” (as in the UK). In other countries, new terms are being used nationally (e.g., “eco-park” in Japan). Nevertheless, the MAB Programme maintains the use of “biosphere reserve” in international documents.

Importantly, as part of the UNESCO ‘family’, BRs share the commitment to build peace internationally through education, science, and culture. This commitment is evident in different ways across the international network. For example, following years of civil war in Lebanon, practitioners in BRs adapted sustainable development to address local needs. They focused their efforts on projects that would support income generation and natural and cultural values rather than environmental protection per se (Matar & Anthony 2020). It is worth noting that there are currently twenty transboundary BRs shared between two or more countries, often in parts of the world characterised by past civil or international conflict (Fall 2005).

Where BRs are located in territories held or managed by Indigenous peoples, the commitment to peace can be seen in reconciliation efforts that bring Indigenous and settler inhabitants together, learn from each other, and work collectively towards ecological and cultural regeneration (Shaw et al. 2020). In Canada, that has meant that ‘settler’ practitioners have had to learn how to work honourably with Indigenous peoples to ensure that Indigenous practices, knowledge and institutions are both included and safeguarded. Such efforts have required practitioners to learn about and recognize past harms to Indigenous peoples and their institutions arising from environment and development programs or campaigns, collaborate meaningfully in projects to ensure mutual benefits, and restructure governance arrangements in individual BRs and in the national network. Practices that recognize Indigenous rights and seek to reconcile through shared understanding and initiative are also evident where BRs operate throughout the Americas and Australia.

BRs have also worked to translate sustainability concepts into action on the ground. For example, the Clayoquot Sound Biosphere Region in Canada reports bi-annually to residents about the state of “vital signs” in their community. This report provides key local indicators that track the ecological and social health of the region. Since 2018, these reports have explicitly reported on progress towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. These reports have informed community conversations related to key local issues such as sustainable tourism and youth engagement. Data from the reports have informed decisions by regional authorities about local development and regional funding priorities.

The World Network of Biosphere Reserves can provide practical lessons about conservation and sustainability that can be shared and taken up across sites and beyond the boundaries of individual BRs. They help translate lofty ideals such as sustainability into practical activities on the ground. They have often been a neutral forum to bring uncommon allies together to address regional challenges. BR practitioners can also teach us lessons about how to build peace between different peoples and societies, and between peoples and the natural world. The mandate to build peace makes BRs unique model regions in a world where multiple types of protected areas and sustainability initiatives exist and demonstrates their contribution to conservation and sustainability where no one is left behind.

Maureen G. REED, School of Environment and Sustainable Development, University of Saskatchewan, Canada

See also Biodiversity; environmental management; sustainable development.

Further Reading

• Dudley, Nigel. (Ed.). (2008). Guidelines for applying protected area management categories. Gland, Switzerland: IUCN.
• Fall, Juliet. (2005). Drawing the line: Nature, hybridity and politics in transboundary spaces. Surrey, UK: Ashgate.
• Matar Diane, A. & Anthony, Brandon P. 2020. Sense and sustainability: The story of biosphere reserves in Lebanon. In Reed, Maureen G., & Price, Martin F. 2020. (Eds.) UNESCO BRs: Supporting biocultural diversity, sustainability and society. Oxon, UK: Earthscan/Routledge.
• Reed, Maureen G., & Price, Martin F. 2020. (Eds.) UNESCO BRs: Supporting biocultural diversity, sustainability and society. Oxon, UK: Earthscan/Routledge.
• Shaw, Pam; Shore, Monica; Haine Bennett, Eleanor; & Reed, Maureen G. Perspectives on growth and change in Canada’s 18 UNESCO BRs. In Reed, Maureen G., & Price, Martin F. 2020. (Eds.) UNESCO BRs: Supporting biocultural diversity, sustainability and society. Oxon, UK: Earthscan/Routledge.
•  Stolton, Sue; Shadie, Peter; & Dudley, Nigel. (2013). IUCN WCPA Best practice guidance on recognising protected areas and assigning management categories and governance types. Best practice protected area guidelines series no. 21. Gland, Switzerland: IUCN.
• UNESCO. (2017) A new roadmap for the Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Programme and its World Network of Biosphere Reserves. UNESCO Paris. Retrieved from https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000247418
• UNESCO. (1996). Biosphere reserves: The Seville Strategy and the Statutory Framework of the World Network. UNESCO, Paris. Retrieved from http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0010/001038/

Abstract: The cooking of the Macanese, an ethnic group originating in Macau, represents one of the earliest examples of creole cooking. What can be seen on the dining plates of these people reflects history and culture dating back to the seafaring discoveries of the Portuguese. Macanese cuisine demonstrates how Portuguese culinary traditions have been interpreted and incorporated in acts of eating in greater China, while being accented by the flavors of Portugal’s colonial history.

Citation: Cheung (2021). Berkshire Encyclopedia of Chinese Cuisines. Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing Group.

DOI: 10.47462/2110312034

Keywords: Macau; Macanese; Portuguese; cultural identity; creole; fusion; handover; indigenous; balichao; bacalhau; minchi

Any figures or illustrations or illustrations included here are not finalized for publication. Advance publication date as per post date. Copyright Berkshire Publishing Group.

Back to list of Advance Articles

Cuisine of Macau

Annabel Jackson, Independent Scholar

The Portuguese have engaged in cross-cultural culinary conversations for centuries. They introduced chilies to China, tempura and pão de ló cake to Japan, and coffee to Brazil. They created vindaloo in India when Portuguese carne de vinha d’alhos (meat braised in vinegar) was infused with chopped fresh chilies and Indian spices. But it was in Macau that an entirely new cuisine, based on Portuguese cooking techniques and traditions, would emerge. As food anthropologist Sidney Mintz has observed: “Human movement is a primary cause of changes in food behavior” (Mintz 2008). To study Macanese cuisine, the indigenous cooking of Macau, is to study the Macanese people, positioning food and its consumption at the heart of an understanding of history, geography, and culture.

Origins of an Enclave and the Macanese

The Portuguese were allegedly and begrudgingly granted the rights to land in Macau (Macau was never an official colony, but was referred to as an enclave), the Chinese considering them as an at least efficient means of policing pirate activity in the South China Sea. They arrived in the mid-1500s, some three-hundred years before the British would annex Hong Kong. Early artworks suggest that the place was uninhabited, bar a few fishing Tanka families who lived on their fishing vessels. But the Portuguese sailors did not arrive alone; they came with wives and servants from Portuguese colonial outposts such Goa, Malacca, and Timor, and from countries such as Japan and the Philippines, where the Portuguese were engaged in trade. Officially, no Portuguese women travelled on the ships or resided in the colonies. Integration with locals through marriage was encouraged by Lisbon.

The Macanese, then, were Eurasians born into Christian families: offspring of Portuguese men and women from various Asian and southeast Asian countries. It is particularly important to note that there was no local existing culture: Chinese blood would only much later make up part of the Macanese ethnicity, and even when the Chinese did start to work in Macau—cleaning ships, for example—they would return home (to China-“proper”) at night, through the border gate. There was thus no direct Chinese influence on the cuisine except for the utilization of locally available perishables.

Works by the British artist George Chinnery (1774–1852), who lived for some years in Macau, show Chinese traders selling Cantonese snacks on the streets; so, the community in Macau would have had early exposure to Guangdong cooking. “Until the 19th century Macao was just a transit city for foreigners and Portuguese from the mainland, and although the Chinese afforded the city its character, its soul lay with the Macaenses (Macanese) or ‘sons of the land’” (Pons 1999, 100). The Macanese have also historically followed the Chinese in their commitment to “looking after people’s health by way of the food they eat” (Jorge 2004, 17). Thus we find a dish like chau chau parida, which is traditionally made with pork kidneys and served to postnatal women: parida means “delivered of a birth.” The Macanese would also enthusiastically take part in local festivals such as Chinese New Year, in addition to Christian celebrations.

Origins of Macanese Cooking

The Macanese call themselves the filhos da terra, the children of the land, and consider themselves the indigenous people of Macau. A peninsula on a southern tip of Guangdong Province, on the South China Sea, Macau also includes a pair of islands, Coloane and Taipa, though these three land masses are now entirely co-joined. They form part of the Pearl River Delta, with land on either side of the river meeting in Guangzhou (Canton), the capital city of Guangdong, China’s most southerly province, and traditionally Cantonese-speaking.

The Pearl River Delta is rich in agriculture, sustaining a rice-based diet including plentiful fish and vegetables, with pork and chicken the favored meats. The staples of the Portuguese diet, then, from which Macanese cuisine would develop—fish and seafood, pork and chicken; potatoes, cabbage, and onions; and eggs—were in plentiful supply. The defining Asian flavors of the cuisine would emerge as the fermented seafood preparation balichão, coconut milk, and turmeric.

The Portuguese did not arrive empty-handed either, being already heavily involved in the spice trade; the heady aromas of peppercorns, star anise, cinnamon, and cloves rose from the ships’ holds. They carried provisions as well: bacalhau (salt cod), Madeira wine, cured meats, and olives and olive oil. They carried, too, thanks to the varying backgrounds of wives and servants, the intangible cultural skills and knowledge that spanned many Asian cuisines, and ingredients that were not native to southern China. Dishes incorporating non-native ingredients clearly had their origins from far away, and intra-Asia movement of people would already have been spurning culinary interchange. Conditions were ripe for a new, hybrid cuisine to emerge.

What is Macanese Cooking?

The emergence of Macanese cuisine can be traced through a variety of strands: from saudade (the longing for home experienced by the Portuguese, an intense suffering expressed in the mournful music tradition fado) to another kind of longing: for the varied aromas, flavors, and textures of Asian cuisines on the part of wives and servants.

Attempts to exactly define it can be problematic, and there are linguistic complications. Within the Chinese language, the people referred to as Macanese, or the food referred to as Macanese, do not necessarily exist. While in English the term “Macanese” (or, in Portuguese, Macaense) refers to a specific people and a specific cuisine: “[T]he Chinese attribute the term Macanese to everything found in the territory” (Augustin-Jean 2002, 123). For the people of Macau, “although they are often unable to identify Macanese food, they still call themselves Macanese and justify it by the fact that they live in the territory. Consequently, it is probable that the associations of the following terms are made by the Chinese population: Macanese food equals food of Macau (regardless of origin)/Macanese population equals inhabitants of Macau” (Augustin-Jean 2002, 123).

There’s little consensus in the Macanese community itself. Macanese writer and researcher Antonio Jorge da Silva asserts that this is because “some families in Macau have closer ethnic ties to Portugal than do others: many mainland Portuguese have married into local Macanese families. This has a direct impact on the culinary preferences…[and] some mainland traditional dishes have been integrated in Macanese cuisine” (Jackson 2003, 30). The scholars Yang Zhang and Ching Lin Pang (2012, 939) take the question further: “The development of Macanese food is fraught with ambiguities and dissonant voices and views. Macanese food is constantly reconfigured by different actors, at the imagined and material level in response to the tension between the discursive narratives and practical enactment.”

Food writers have created mythologies around its emergence. Sir arrives back at the colonial waterfront villa tired and hungry from an exhausting voyage, and longs for the cooking of his mother. He goes to the kitchen with one of his servants and, as best as he can, shows her how to first reconstitute a piece of bacalhau in water and, later, how to prepare it in a stew with thickly sliced potatoes, bell peppers, and onions. The dish is richly flavored with liberal amounts of olive oil and garlic, and becomes a regular in this household: an essentially Portuguese dish but one cooked with local vegetables. It is “Macanese” though it would be recognizable as Portuguese in Lisbon.

Scenes such as this were repeated across Macau’s domestic kitchens. A Malay servant would be preparing a beef stew with bay leaf and rosemary from the kitchen garden. The aromas are acceptable, but she considers the gravy rather thin on flavor. So, she stirs in the star anise and cinnamon stick she knows from home, and a truly hybrid dish is created. Similarly, fried crab is deemed lacking in flavor, so a wife of Goan descent adds fresh chilies and tamarind pulp (for a hot-sour sensation) which, in turn, remind her of home. (Augustin-Jean 2002, 122; Doling 1994, 56–57). Fish pie, made with a sweetened pastry, is imaginatively flavored with ground coriander and saffron (saffron almost always means turmeric in Macanese recipes). In the absence of fresh milk, coconut milk is used to make a tapioca dessert. Papaya flowers from the tree growing outside the kitchen door are tossed into a stir-fried crab dish at the suggestion of a neighbor; and everyone is intrigued by the cooking smells of highly seasoned tripe emanating from the house on the hill. One wife tries to emulate it, and her version is now considered superior.

As for components, Macanese cuisine does not feature much of a range of vegetable dishes, with the exception of creations such as bitter gourd cooked in coconut milk, and eggplant sambal—both bitter gourd and eggplant being widely available in markets because they are very popular with the Cantonese. Most Macanese cook Cantonese-style vegetable dishes at home, such as stir-fried bok choy or steamed pea shoots; or serve a simple Portuguese-inspired salad of local lettuce, tomato, onion, and green bell pepper, studded with brined olives.

Characteristic Dishes

The breadth of the Macanese cannon attests to the breadth of the ethnicities represented in the community, and Macanese can thus be deemed to have sophisticated palates that appreciate a broad range of flavors, textures, and sensations. Flavor combinations were born that were unfamiliar to both Asian and European palates. Dishes range from subtle noodle soup or deep-fried vegetarian pastries, to rich meat stews and spicy seafood curries, to sweet snacks, cakes, and desserts. Macanese cuisine has also absorbed Portuguese dishes to the point that they would be considered Macanese, particularly salt-cod dishes such as pastéis de bacalhau.

Balichão

Balichão is not used in every dish, but is a condiment unique to Macanese cuisine. Almost certainly inspired by the belacan of Malaysia and Indonesia, and redolent of Vietnamese nuoc mam, it is a fermented fish sauce made with krill. These tiny shrimps, which used to abound in the upper reaches of the Pearl River Delta, but are now difficult to access, are combined with Portuguese brandy or wine, chili, lemon, peppercorns, and bay leaf—all left in a clay urn for three months or so. These days, almost no one is making it in this traditional way, instead taking belacan as the base ingredient and mixing it with the other component parts. This sauce is fried and then used as a component part of dishes—it is not a dipping sauce. Like all fermented fish or seafood products, it is highly pungent, and a good source of nutrition, as well as flavor. It forms a particularly central role in the Malay-inspired dish porco balichão tamarindo, where it adds an extra layer of flavor, and in the noodle soup dish lacassa (based on Malaysian laksa) where it heightens aromas together with sprigs of coriander. Balichão is almost certainly the precursor of the Cantonese salted-shrimp paste, haam ha cheung, showing how Macanese cuisine in turn would influence local culinary culture.

African Chicken

One of the most iconic dishes in the Macanese repertoire, African chicken is believed to be one of the more modern, dating to the 1940s. It is thought to have been created by chef America Angelo (who died in 1979) at the former Pousada de Macau, though there’s an almost identical dish from Goa, and both bear a resemblance to India’s butter chicken. It is also known as galinha à cafreal, perhaps because of its final, rather blackened appearance: African slaves who worked on the ships were known as cafres (Jorge 2004, 82). Culinary links with Africa seem likely following a visit to one of Portugal’s colonies (probably Angola or Mozambique) by Angelo. The recipe attributed to him involves a marinade of butter, garlic, chilies, coconut milk, and bay leaves, although versions available in Macau today are almost always made with a tomato-based sauce. Many chefs cooking the dish in Macau today maximize the amount of sauce, which is then mopped up with bread.

Minchi

Macau novelist and lawyer Henrique de Senna Fernandes (1923–2010) said that not a day had gone by when he had not eaten minchi (personal communication, 1994), and it is a dish which appears in Macanese literature. There are many different versions, but it is always served with rice and a flipped-over fried egg on top. It is usually made with a combination of ground beef and ground pork (preferably cut by hand with two choppers) cooked in Portuguese olive oil, with the addition of diced onions and tiny cubes of fried potato, and a sauce composed of dark soy, light soy (and possibly kecap manis, the sweet soy sauce of Indonesian derivation) and Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce. The inclusion of the latter suggests the dish may have been created following the arrival of the British in Hong Kong, this being an iconic British seasoning (which originated in colonial India). Alternatively, it may have been added to the sauce later; in any case, it points to a close relationship between the British and the Macanese, who were able to speak English in addition to Cantonese and Portuguese (and the Macanese patau, which has all but died out now). The term minchi is thought to be a corruption of the English word “mince” (Jackson 2003, 79). Other theories suggest that minchi could be based on the Indian ground lamb dish keema, which the Portuguese could have been exposed to in much the same way as the British Scotch Egg has its origins as an Indian kebab—a hard-boiled egg wrapped in spicy ground lamb.

Additional Iconic Dishes

Chamussas are pastries clearly related to the Indian samosa, and can be stuffed with a pea-based vegetarian filling or spicy minced beef. Unlike samosas, however, they are deep-fried, like Cantonese spring rolls. Even more specifically Asian is lacassa, a soupy rice-noodle dish flavored with balichão and coriander and a spot of Shaoxing (Chinese rice wine), and traditionally served the night before Christmas. Though deriving from Portuguese cozido, tacho is the most Cantonese of the repertoire: a hearty winter casserole using Cantonese cuts of meat picked up at the local market—including roast duck, Chinese bacon (lap yuk), Chinese sausage (lap cheong), pig skin, and pig trotter—and white cabbage cut into large chunks. On the other hand, the post-Christmas dish of diabo (meaning “devil”: the dish is said to be a devil for the stomach) reflects how the Macanese Christmas spread in some families is more British in flavor, incorporating roast turkey, ham, and braised duck. The main flavors are derived from pickles and Dijon mustard, and chili is often added too. Portuguese chicken, also known as Macau chicken (and po kok gai in Cantonese pinyin), cannot be found in Portugal as it is decidedly Macanese: a chicken marinated in white wine and bay leaf, but with coconut milk and light spicing. Ade cabidela is duck cooked in its own blood, with ade being an ancient Portuguese term no longer in use in Portugal. Bebinca de rabano is a steamed radish dish, eaten in the winter, and topped with Chinese sausage, torn coriander leaves, and chili.

Macanese Cuisine in Restaurants

Only as recently as the 1980s and early 1990s, dining in Macau was a relatively simple affair. The upmarket hotels would perhaps have a grill room, but these were the days before the ubiquity of upmarket Japanese and Italian restaurants. Dining in Macau was inexpensive, and casual, whether Cantonese, Portuguese, or Macanese. Street food abounded, with some stalls only setting up shop after dark. Delicacies long since banned in Hong Kong (owl, for example) or dishes considered too humble, such as worms baked with pork, mushroom and orange peel, were still to be found in Macau. When gambling was deregulated, with the Sands casino being the first to open on Chinese New Year in 2002, catering took a whole new turn. Mistakes were made: the typical gambler did not want to spend 45 minutes in front of a 100 meter-long buffet, he wanted to spend seven minutes (exactly seven minutes, researchers found) slurping a bowl of noodles.

The five star-plus hotels raised the bar high with their Michelin-starred restaurants, and the quality of Cantonese food at the high-end has surpassed even that of Hong Kong. At street level, there are myriad choices. There are more Portuguese restaurants than ever, and much evidence of “Macau food” such as Lord Stow’s egg tarts, pork chop buns, and almond cookies. It is harder to find Cantonese street food these days; meanwhile Macanese dishes, cafes and restaurants occupy their own space in the midst of this dynamism.

Culture and Tradition in Macanese Cooking

There’s little recorded history of Macau culture. Thus, as the Macanese writer Cecilia Jorge puts it: “It is not easy to describe reliably and accurately what used to be served at the table of our Macanese forebears or what people once ate as their ‘daily bread’ in Macau’s early days” (Jorge 2004, 7). As she points out, more is known about what the English and Americans ate in Macau in the 1800s, thanks to diaries such as those recorded by the American Harriett Low who lived in Macau from 1829 to 1833. Much of what is known has been information gleaned by those elderly Macanese who have worked as private chefs, or in hotels and restaurants.

It is not unusual to sit down at a Macanese table where steamed rice, fried potatoes, and bread rolls are served simultaneously, and while tea or beer would be served these days, the traditional drink of the dining table would have been Portuguese red wine. In similar style to the Cantonese, meal times would traditionally comprise of a number of dishes placed at the center of the table for sharing. Instead of chopsticks, however, spoons and forks would be used. Crucially, soup does not play an important role in the meal, although it is important on both the Portuguese and the Cantonese table. There may be some Cantonese-style (but with a twist) steamed or fried green vegetables served, but usually Cantonese dishes would be served alongside other Cantonese dishes.

Fewer and fewer Macanese cook traditional food at home, but family gatherings such as baptisms and weddings are occasions when the traditional chá gordo is served. This is a series of dishes cooked for celebrations and presented buffet style, with often bite-sized sweet and savory dishes sharing the table. Dishes would include chamussas (stuffed pastries, deep-fried), minchi, ade cabidela, porco balichão tamarindo (a salty and sour pork braise), arroz gordo (literally “fat rice”—meats layered with rice), mango pudding (distinguishable from the Cantonese version as its contains chopped pieces of fruit), and bagi (rice pudding made with coconut milk). Since this is a standing buffet, nothing served requires a knife for cutting.

Macanese cooking can be very time consuming (and expensive), both in terms of gathering and preparing ingredients. Families were large, and guests were often invited to share a meal, so elaborate preparation was justified, particularly for special occasions. The dessert called bebinca (rice flour, sugar, egg yolk, coconut milk, and dairy milk) is left to rest for a whole day before it is baked. Macanese roast soup requires cooking meats for three hours before removing the meat from the bones, baking it in the oven, and only finally combining it with the soup preparation. Bolo menino, a cake prepared with grated coconut and almonds, requires someone to beat twenty eggs which, in the days before electricity, would have been a time-consuming task.

In an anthology of recipes circulating in the Macanese community of Hong Kong, the method for some recipes covers an entire sheet of paper, suggesting the time available to be spent in the kitchen (or the availability of servants), while others start with phrases such as: “Prepare the pheasant in the usual way.” Hunting was a popular pastime on Taipa among the menfolk. The huge pots of meat-based tacho and diabo would have traditionally been prepared by men, while the making of sweets and desserts, including bolo vestido (literally “dolled up” cakes), would have been the preserve of talented female confectioners.

Geographical and Cultural Influences

In its early trading days, Macau was called the Venice of the East and was considered one of the most wealthy ports in the world. It enjoys similar prestige today, having overtaken Las Vegas as the gambling capital of the world. The fortunes of different Macanese families have been similarly up and down. The 1920s and 1930s, notes David Brookshaw, a scholar of postcolonial history, “were decades when the Macanese felt secure, unaware of the great upheavals that were to come, when their culinary arts were practised by the old families and patua was still spoken among an older generation” (Brookshaw 2004, ix). Many Macanese either chose or were forced to travel overseas for university educations and jobs, and the Macanese in diaspora—particularly in Portugal, the United States, and Australia, in addition to Portuguese-speaking countries such as Brazil—has for a considerable time been larger than the domestic population.

Critically, in the run up to the transfer of sovereignty from Portugal to the People’s Republic of China in December 1999, there was a strong sense that the Macanese were losing their homeland—their terra—and being quashed by the Chinese. Many more left at this time.

Their fears to some extent have not come to pass, as the Macau government has shown itself very keen to preserve aspects of Macanese (and Portuguese) culture. Clubs, or casas, in cities from Lisbon to Melbourne to San Diego are partially (Macau) government-funded, and have become meeting places where Macanese food is central. Every three years, the Macau government funds a conference for a thousand members of the Macanese diaspora, which always includes a cooking competition. The hotels and casinos, which have been opening in bewildering numbers in the past fifteen years, are encouraged to list Macanese and Portuguese dishes, and Portuguese wine. Independent “Portuguese” restaurants such as A Lorcha and Litoral list Macanese dishes on their menus.

Yet there is a sense among Macanese that their status has changed. “In the colonial era, the Macanese were hierarchically subordinate to the Portuguese but enjoyed superior social status when compared with the Chinese” writes the researcher and production director Maria Eusébio. “Yet, in the plays of the postcolonial era, the Macanese are portrayed as clearly subordinate to the Chinese.” She continued with some specific lines from a play: “‘I really don’t understand, for our whole lives, we learnt to admire the red and green flag (Portuguese flag). Sing the national anthem, if we are not Portuguese, not Chinese, then who are we?’” (Eusebio 2013, 33).

Within this rather precarious arena of identity, Macanese food assumes a central role in representing a lost “space” or “place” and comes to embody identity and a distinct racial validity (Zhang and Pang 2012, 939).

The exponential growth of the hospitality industry, however, has given the younger generation of Macanese career opportunities at home in Macau. Many young Macau Chinese are similarly delighted to be able to return home after studies, rather than remaining abroad.

Macanese culture remained strong through to the 1960s, when Macanese women would almost certainly marry members of the Portuguese military if they didn’t marry a fellow Macanese. When the military left, however, the Macanese started to be more aligned with Cantonese culture, which was considered rather dominant. Yet whereas families with strong Portuguese identity (the wealthier, the better educated) would almost certainly have eaten Portuguese and Macanese food every day, the families which would also eat simple Cantonese-style dishes such as tofu stir-fried with cabbage would have been seen to be of slightly lower class.

Identity Through Cuisine

Historically, the Macanese would have defined themselves by that great cultural triumvirate: language, religion, and food. While Portuguese remains an official language of Macau, it is spoken far less today by young Macanese, who increasingly use Mandarin in addition to English. Their patua has all but vanished (though there is a theatre group trying to revive it, in Macau), and Catholicism is no longer the binding force it once was. Macanese cuisine is therefore pivotal to cultural identity, and members of the diaspora say they cling to memories of food as the main way of being or feeling Macanese.

This centrality of Macanese cuisine to Macanese cultural identify has revealed itself in some interesting ways. It has often been mooted that the lack of Macanese restaurants (the first, Riquexó, opened as recently as 1978) is because this cuisine is not restaurant food; as it was created in the domestic kitchens, aesthetics were rarely if ever given consideration. The question is whether or not the Macanese simply wanted to keep their cuisine to themselves. Until the 1990s, almost nothing had been written about Macanese food, and recipes were only handed down orally, and only within families. Sometimes they were not handed down at all, or were “whispered into the ear of a younger family member before being recorded on paper and duly ‘interpreted’ by their descendants” (Jorge 2004, 24). One hand-written recipe found contains a diagram showing how to wrap a pastry triangle. It was written on a Hong Kong hospital notepad.

“It is quite possible that the best recipes for each special delicacy has gone to the grave along with the people famous in their day for their culinary arts” (Jorge 2004, 10). Restaurateurs such as Isabel Eusebio (Balichão) and Sonia Palmer (Riquexó) were concerned that the cuisine was dying out and began to share recipes and ideas. It was still being cooked well, but by an increasingly older group of mostly women (such as Isabel’s mother, Maria Eusebio, and Sonia’s mother, Aida de Jesus), who were becoming too elderly to continue. With increasing interest in world cooking and cultural tourism emerging, Macanese cuisine caught the wave and books began to be published about Macau and the place of Macanese cuisine therein, in several languages.

The secrets contained within recipes in regards to cultural identity, and even contained in their names, are a focus for Cecilia Jorge. “Rather than strive to determine what is or not Portuguese heritage among the delicacies we still so enjoy today, we should try to ‘read’ between the recipe lines,” she writes in the introduction to Macanese Cooking (Jorge 2004, 8). “We should take note of the names (or various names) of the dish, its native and foreign ingredients, how it is prepared, cooked and when it is served. From this ‘reading’ we can form a notion as to our collective identity.” She concludes that: “Macanese miscegenation is, in cultural terms, the result of a process still in transformation and at different rhythms as set by historical events” (Jorge 2004, 8). There is no one recipe, no perfect recipe, and everything is in a state of flux.

Recipes that have been circulated previously, for example among the Macanese community in Hong Kong, are illuminating. One anthology, typed on a manual typewriter and amounting to more than a hundred pages, had gathered recipes from Macanese all over the world. The editor credits many of the recipes with names (Guilly appears most frequently; Delmira Alves is sometimes denoted as D.A.; and one recipe is from “Melita’s cook, Adi”). Where more than one recipe for the same dish is included, the editor might comment on which one appears better or more authentic. A footnote for a recipe for porco balichão tamarindo suggests a “modern” version, which is essentially a far less time-consuming version: evidence already of busier lives and fewer servants, perhaps.

The presentation of such recipes indicates the travelled and cosmopolitan nature of the community; and, interestingly, they are presented in English. Cantonese ingredients are typed in pinyin: such as lap cheong (Chinese sausage) and kai choi, which are Cantonese bitter vegetables. Ingredients such as rice flour and white wine are listed in Portuguese (farina arroz pulu, vinho branco), or in both English and Portuguese (turnip/rabono and garlic/alho). One recipe converts ounces to catties, the traditional measurement in a Cantonese market (1 catty = 22 ounces). Measurements might be in (Portuguese) coffee spoons rather than teaspoons, and soup spoons rather than tablespoons; and some ingredients, such as ginger, are listed not by weight or by size but by cost: 20c. Prices were clearly stable, and inflation was not a consideration.

Modern Adaptation and Preservation

Veteran Macanese cook Aida de Jesus oversaw the daily running of Riquexó along with her daughter, but both here and at APOMAC, a club for Macanese but with a restaurant open to the public, young Filipinos have been taught how to prepare Macanese dishes. Principally, Portuguese restaurants such as A Lorcha and Litoral serve Macanese dishes, as does the restaurant at IFT—Macau’s Institute of Tourism Studies. There’s the risk though, that Macanese cuisine will be reduced to a repertoire of just a handful of dishes, all adapted to suit the hotel guest.

Perhaps adaptation is not quite the threat it might be seen as: the nature of Macanese food is adaption, as is particularly true for domestic kitchen-based cuisines. Some dishes probably never made it past the first post, or remained the domain of just one family. Other changes simply reflect the times. Lard would be seen as an essential part of the flavor and texture of arroz carregado, a firmly textured pressed rice dish pricked with spring onions and traditionally served with porco balichão tamarindo. Yet cooking with lard has ceased to be popular (or essential, in terms of using every single last piece of the pig) and has been replaced by butter, or elsewhere with olive oil, altering flavors and texture in the recreation of a typical dish. Musing on the Macanese concoction po kok gai (Portuguese Chicken Curry), chef and restauranteur Abraham Conlon addresses the decoration of this dish, which might include hard-boiled egg, olives, and chouriço. “[They were] likely added much later,” he writes, “by clever twentieth-century restaurateurs who either wanted to make the dish more ‘exotic’ for Chinese tourists or more ‘Portuguese’ for visiting Portuguese dignitaries” (Conlon and Lo 2016, 181).

Continual Reinterpretation

Geography would suggest that Macanese cuisine can be defined as a hybrid Portuguese-Cantonese cooking, but the movement of the Portuguese, and their wines and servants, across the world but most particularly in Asia, inform its nature. Macanese cuisine is grounded in Portuguese culture and traditions, but accented by Asian culture and traditions, as well as ingredients. The construction of Macanese cuisine began in domestic kitchens 450 years ago, but remains a dynamic process to this day. A distinction can be drawn, then, between Macanese cuisine’s place of origin and its continual reinterpretation. “Macanese cuisine has become…a full-fledged cuisine, evolving from home food enjoyed at home to a home food cuisine offered in restaurants” (Zhang and Pang 2012, 935).

Further Reading 

• Appadurai, Arjun. (1988). How to make a national cuisine: Cookbooks in contemporary India. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 30(1).
• Augustin-Jean, Louis. (2002). Food consumption, food perception and the search for a Macanese identity. In David Y. H. Wu and Sidney C. H. Cheung (Eds.), The globalisation of Chinese food. London, UK: RoutledgeCurzon.
• Belasco, Warren. (2005). Food and the counterculture. In James Watson and Melissa Caldwell (Eds.), The cultural politics of food and eating. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing.
• Brookshaw, David. (2002). Visions of China: Stories from Macau. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
• Conlon, Abraham, & Lo, Adrienne. (2016). The adventures of Fat Rice: Recipes from the Chicago restaurant inspired by Macau. New York: Ten Speed Press.
• De Senna Fernandes, Henrique. (2002). Candy. In David Brookshaw (Ed), Visions of China: Stories from Macau. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
• De Senna Fernandes, Henrique. (2004). The bewitching braid. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
• Doling, Annabel. (1994). Macau on a plate: A culinary journey. Hong Kong: Roundhouse Publications.
• Eusébio, Maria. (2013, Summer). The voice on the postcolonial stage. The Newsletter, no 64.
• Jackson, Annabel. (2003). Taste of Macau: Portuguese cuisine on the China coast. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
• Jackson, Annabel. (1999). Hong Kong, Macau and the muddy Pearl: Travels in the Pearl River Delta. Hong Kong: Asia 2000.
• Jorge, Cecília. (2004). Macanese cooking: A journey across generations. Macau: APIM.
• Klein, Jacob. (2014). There is no such thing as Dian cuisine!: Food and local identity in urban southwest China. Food & History, 11(1), 203–225.
• Low, Harriet. (2002). Lights and shadows of a Macao life: The journal of Harriett Low, travelling spinster. Washington, WA: The History Bank.
• Mintz, Sidney. (2008). Food and diaspora. (SOAS Food Forum Distinguished Lecture).
• Nery, Felipe. (2006). The transition: A novel. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse.
• Pons, Philippe. (1999). Macao. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
• Sutton, David. (2001). Remembrance of repasts: An anthropology of food and memory. Oxford, UK: Berg.
• Watson, James. (Ed.). (1977). Between two cultures: Migrants and minorities in Britain. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.
• Wilk, Richard. (2002). Food and nationalism: The origins of “Belizean food.” In Warren James Belasco and Philip  Scranton (Eds.), Food nations: Selling taste in consumer societies. New York: Routledge.
• Zhang, Yang, & Pang, Ching Lin. (2012). From home food to Macanese cuisine? Historical development, tourist branding and cultural identity. Sociology Study, 2(12), 934–940.

Abstract: First introduced into China by the Japanese in the 1930s, crayfish became popular in the Nanjing area in the early 1990s as part of a dish prepared with Sichuan pepper and spices. China is now the top consumer and producer of crayfish, which has gained acclaim as a luxury item prepared in a variety of ways and enjoyed all across the country. The rise of what had once been peasant fare reflects other changes in China due to agricultural enterprises at that time.

Citation: Cheung (2021). Berkshire Encyclopedia of Chinese Cuisines. Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing Group.

DOI: 10.47462/1497604295

Keywords: 

Any figures or illustrations or illustrations included here are not finalized for publication. Advance publication date as per post date. Copyright Berkshire Publishing Group.

Back to list of Advance Articles

Crayfish

Sidney C. H. Cheung, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR

First introduced into China by the Japanese in the 1930s, crayfish became popular in the Nanjing area in the early 1990s as part of a dish prepared with Sichuan pepper and spices. China is now the top consumer and producer of crayfish, which has gained acclaim as a luxury item prepared in a variety of ways and enjoyed all across the country. The rise of what had once been peasant fare reflects other changes in China due to agricultural enterprises at that time.

Crayfish, also called crawfish (words derived from the old French écrevisse), are freshwater crustaceans resembling marine lobster, although smaller in size. Crayfish farming has existed in France for the Parisian market since 1880; in the United States, massive cultivation began in the 1960s (LaCaze 1966, 1970). Unlike lobsters, crayfish live in freshwater, yet because of their appearance, they have been marketed particularly in mainland China as “little lobsters” (xiǎo lóngxiā 小龍蝦) because of the upscale image of lobster there.

In Japan, a crayfish bisque was first prepared by Chef Akiyama Tokuzo in 1916 for more than two-thousand diplomatic guests coming to Japan from various countries for the Taisho Emperor’s coronation ceremony. Chef Akiyama was appointed the master chef of the imperial court in the same year, shortly after he came back from France. During those years, French cooking was commonly used for imperial and diplomatic events, and the crayfish bisque was prepared based on Akiyama’s culinary experience in France, with local crayfish found in Hokkaido. In the 1920s, the American crayfish was brought to Japan.

The Procambarus clarkia (kè shìyuán áoxiā 克氏原螯蝦) species of crayfish was brought to the Jiangsu area by the Japanese in the 1930s, although the reason is still unclear. The local Jiangsu people tended to believe that there was a Japanese conspiracy to use the crayfish to destroy their rice paddies, since crayfish like to eat the roots of crops. More importantly, they dig holes which drain water away from the rice paddies. It’s no surprise then that the local people did not welcome the crayfish; and since the crustacean can survive in dirty water, it was not considered edible by most people.

Over the years, while villagers in the Jiangsu area might catch crayfish in the river as a kind of leisure activity, and boil them as a snack, they were ignored as a commercial enterprise. Then came the emergence of a dish called “Nanjing little lobster,” which appeared in the early 1990s. Its rapid growth in popularity was not limited to Nanjing, but extended to large cities such as Shanghai, Wuhan, and Beijing. It is difficult to trace the origin of this dish, stir-fried with Sichuan pepper and chili together with more than ten different kinds of herbs and spices, together known as the thirteen spices or “thirteen fragrances” (shísān xiāng 十三香). The culinary characteristics of this hot and spicy dish may be related to the emergence of a dish that started out as food for the working class in Nanjing. The movement of inland migrant workers and traders to and from the coastal areas may explain how and why crayfish has been cooked with the hot and spicy taste that is unfamiliar in the Jiangsu area. Since then, other methods of preparation have gained favor as well, using garlic, salt, oil, or wasabi.

In line with this food craze, crayfish cultivation in China began in the 1990s, when spicy crayfish was promoted as a “local food” in order to support regional economies and agricultural development. Nowadays, spicy crayfish is one of the most popular dishes in cities along the Yangzi (Chang) River and in Jiangsu, Anhui, Hubei, Sichuan, etc. Even to the north in Beijing, many restaurants feature spicy crayfish as one of their “local delicacies.”

What happened in Nanjing demonstrates not only the rising price of crayfish marketed as “little lobster,” but also the upscale movement of crayfish from peasant’s fare of unknown origin to a luxurious gourmet food that represents new Nanjing foodways. This surprising upward mobility is a timely example of agricultural changes brought about by China’s emerging rural enterprises. While only 6,700 tons of crayfish were harvested in the early 1990s, it was recorded that 6.55 million tons were harvested in 1995, increasing to around 10 million tons in 1999. If we only consider the production in the Jiangsu area, the amount of crayfish harvested in 1995 was 3 million tons, increasing to 6 million tons in 1999 (Xia 2007, 3).

One setback to the popularity of “little lobsters” among Chinese consumers occurred in late 2010, when twenty-three people fell sick after eating crayfish in restaurants located in Nanking. At first accounts differed, but the cause turned out to be Haff disease, which is the development of rhabdomyolysis (swelling and breakdown of skeletal muscle, with a risk of acute kidney failure) within 24 hours of ingesting seafood. After the incident, many crayfish eateries either closed down or did extremely poorly. In order to attract customers, the Xuyi prefectural government claimed that if anyone got sick after eating Xuyi crayfish in the registered eateries, they would receive a compensation of RMB 500,000–1,000,000.

While in the following years there were no major incidents regarding the safety of eating crayfish, there were some alerts circulated in various media outlets about the environmental contamination of crayfish farming. The popularity of spicy crayfish has been increasing during the last several years, and a few major crayfish festivals were organized for boosting the local economy in rural areas along the Yangzi River Delta areas. In 2015, it was widely reported that the total consumption of crayfish in China was around 600,000 tons, with 200,000 tons consumed in Jiangsu, a region which only produced 100,000 tons. The market for spicy crayfish is still expanding, with online purchase and door-to-door delivery giving the market another big push in recent times.

Further Reading 

• Cheung, Sidney C. H. (2015a). From Cajun crayfish to spicy little lobster: A tale of local culinary politics in a third-tier city in China. In J. Farrer (Ed.), Globalization and Asian cuisines: Transnational networks and contact zones (pp. 209–228). New York: Palgrave MacMillan Press.
• Cheung, Sidney C. H. (2015b). The social life of American crayfish in Asia. In Kwang Ok Kim (Ed.), Re-orienting cuisine: East Asian foodways in the twenty-first century (pp. 221–237). New York: Berghahn Books.
• Cheung, Sidney C. H. (2017). New Orleans, new territories. In Chu Yiu-Wai (Ed.) Hong Kong culture and society in the new millennium: Hong Kong as method (pp. 79–90). Singapore: Springer Verlag.
• Dunlop, Fuchsia. (2008). Shark’s fin and Sichuan pepper: A sweet-sour memoir of eating in China. New York: W.W. Norton.
• Huner, Jay V. (1992, March–April). Chinese crawfish and the Louisiana crawfish industry. Aquaculture Magazine, 6–13.
• LaCaze, Cecil. (1966). More about crawfish. Louisiana Conservation-ist, 18(5/6), 2–7.
• LaCaze, Cecil. (1970). Crawfish farming. Fisheries Bulletin 7. New Orleans, LA: Department of Conservation.
• Pitte, Jean-Robert. (2002). French gastronomy: The history and geography of a passion (Jody Gladding, Trans.) New York: Columbia University Press.
• Xia, Aijun. (2007). Little lobster cultivation technique. Beijing: China Agriculture University Press.
• Chen, Xiaoxuan, & Edgerton, Brett F. (2001, November–December). Freshwater crayfish culture in China. Aquaculture Magazine, 41–44.

Abstract: Non-rennet cheeses have existed in China for almost two millennia. Such cheeses reflect the influence of the foodways of pastoralists from the steppes, especially Persians and Turks. Premodern Chinese adopted the milking practices of these peoples and incorporated cheese and other dairy products into their diets. These ancient cheese-making practices survive nowadays in Yunnan Province, though they enjoy a precarious existence due to environmental regulations and market economics.

Citation: Cheung (2021). Berkshire Encyclopedia of Chinese Cuisines. Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing Group.

DOI: 10.47462/1231550650

Keywords: Dairy products; milk; cows; sheep; non-rennet cheeses; Yunnan; history

Any figures or illustrations or illustrations included here are not finalized for publication. Advance publication date as per post date. Copyright Berkshire Publishing Group.

Back to list of Advance Articles

Cheese

Miranda BROWN, University of Michigan

The Chinese are hardly famous for their cheeses; in fact, most modern accounts of Chinese cuisine emphasize the stunning lack of dairy products. Yet this oversimplifies the situation. Historically, dairy products played a role in the diet of the core regions of China, particularly in the Yangzi (Chang) River Delta, in the southeast. As the sinologist François Sabban (1986) shows, Chinese gastronomes once wrote about the fashioning of dairy products including cheese on a regular basis. In modern times, however, cheese has enjoyed a less conspicuous place in the Chinese diet, although it is regularly consumed in the borderland regions of Inner Mongolia, Tibet, and Yunnan.

At least three kinds of cheeses played a significant role in the diet of the elite in premodern times, none of which was rennet based. The first was what food writer Fuschia Dunlop (2016) calls a “rudimentary lactic cheese,” evidently of foreign, Central Asian origin. The earliest references to these cheeses date to the early first century ce. Such cheeses went by a variety of names (mili 𤑺蠡, ganlao 乾酪, lulao 漉酪), many of which were borrowed from a foreign language from the steppes. Not coincidentally, references to these cheeses surface, first, in poems that described military confrontations between the ancient Chinese and their nomadic enemies (Blažek 2015; Pulleyblank 1962).

The Central Asian origins of these cheeses are also evident from their methods of preparation. Though made in a variety of ways, the cheeses invariably entailed a base of yogurt—the quintessential food of the steppes. The earliest recipe for this kind of cheese is preserved in the Essential Techniques for the Commoners (Qimin yaoshu 齊民要術) written in the mid-sixth century ce by a Chinese aristocrat living in the Turkic-controlled north. The recipe describes a process akin to the making of aaruul or qurut, nowadays consumed by Mongols and Tibetans. Yogurt, made from the milk of sheep or cows, is strained of liquid and then shaped into balls, or dried outside in the heat (Sabban 1986; Jia n.d, 57, 431–434). Later descriptions, dating after the fourteenth century, point to something more like kashk, a cheese with a Persian name made by fermenting yogurt by boiling it in a little water before straining and reshaping the curds into sticks or balls for drying (Anonymous 1268, 14, 39a). While this kind of cheese disappeared from the mainstream Chinese diet centuries ago, it is still widely consumed in Central Asia and the Middle East, including the Persian-speaking world (Aubaile-Sallenave 1994; Buell and Anderson 2010, 65; Moraba 2016).

The Chinese also consumed a second kind of fresh cheese, produced through acidification, which they referred to simply as “milk curds” (rufu 乳腐) or, later, “milk cakes” (rubing 乳餅). Such cheeses appear in texts beginning in the eighth century, at the height of Central Asian cultural influence in China (Sabban 1986, 42). Extant recipes are later, dating from the thirteenth century, but they suggest a very simple procedure. Fresh cow’s milk was brought to a low boil before stirring in a splash of rice vinegar or lime juice. Once soft curds emerged, the cook would strain the curds with a gauze and squeeze out the remaining whey with a stone (Anonymous 1268, 14, 39a). Unlike yogurt-based cheeses, whose earliest names betray their foreign origins, the origins of this cheese are less certain. The recipe resembles closely the cheeses consumed not in Mongolia as much as the varieties eaten in Northern India, Iran, and Central Asia (Sen 2016; Tan 2016; Dunlop 2016).

This fresh cheese is still popular in Yunnan (southwestern China), nowadays regarded as a local specialty. In restaurants, cooks stir-fry the cheese together with local mushrooms or Xuanwei ham. At home, people pan-fry the cheese and sprinkle it with sugar. The contemporary version differs from its premodern predecessors in two ways. Whereas premodern southern Chinese preferred cow’s or buffalo’s milk, the cheese is now made primarily with goat’s milk (though vendors often make a version with cow’s milk for customers who dislike the gamey flavor of goat). Second, the cheese is coagulated with an aged quince juice rather than with vinegar. One local vendor, a Muslim man in Dali 大理, stated that vinegar interferes with the flavor of the cheese.

The third kind of cheese are stretched curds. Nowadays, these curds are called rushan 乳扇 (literally, milk “fans”). The name most likely was a corruption of the Chinese term ruxian 乳線 (milk “threads” or “strings”), since the pronunciation of the two words are similar in the local Yunnan dialect. Unlike mozzarella, the best-known stretched curd in the West, rushan or ruxian is produced without rennet, and instead employs a combination of lactic acid and acid-fermentation. The first stage resembles the making of fresh cheeses. Fresh milk is left out to ferment spontaneously. Once curds separate from the whey, they are then washed in an acidic juice (nowadays, quince juice), until a pliable curd forms, one that can be kneaded and stretched on chopsticks before being dried into sheets (Dunlop 2016). People in southwest China eat stretched curds predominantly as sweet snacks. The curds are often deep-fried and sprinkled with sugar. The curds are also served in savory dishes, and used to encase, for example, a mixture of mashed purple yams and gizzards.

The origins of this cheese are debated. Unlike the yogurt or fresh cheeses described above, this stretched curd does not closely resemble the cheeses consumed in Central Asia. Not surprisingly, a number of theories exist about the emergence of the cheese in China, most of which assert its non-Han-Chinese origins. One episode of the Chinese-Australian television series, a Taste of China (2016), proposed that the cheese originated from the Mongols, who conquered Yunnan in the thirteenth century. Other sources suggest, in contrast, that the Bai or Yi ethnic minorities, who are numerous in Yunnan, were the first to create the cheese. In part, both of these theories reflect the fact that stretched curds are currently made only in China’s southwest, the homeland of a large number of non-Han ethnicities. The theories also owe much to the fact that Han Chinese have consumed few dairy products in recent centuries (Anonymous 1983, 163; Li 2004; Wu et al. 2005; Xiong 2007).

Interviews with local cheesemakers and vendors have suggested, however, a different story about the origins of the stretched curd. A number of Yunnan locals, including Tibetans, insist that the Han Chinese were the creators of stretched curds. Their claims are consistent with the historical record. The first references to stretched curds appear in Chinese sources in southeast China from the mid-fifteenth century (Chen and Xue 2008, 96). Many of the Han Chinese inhabitants of western Yunnan, moreover, descended from émigrés (including Central Asian Muslims) from the southeast, who were sent by the Ming emperor to relocate to the frontier in the tens of thousands. The émigrés brought not only their culinary practices to the southwest, but also government-issued cattle (Wiens 1952, 106–117; Brook 2010, 47; Dillon 1999, 36). In the second half of the sixteenth century, not long after the initial wave of émigrés to the southwest, references to stretched curds appear in materials associated with southwest China (Guizhou and Yunnan) (Chen and Zheng 1554, 163; Yang and Hu 1563; Chen and Xue 2008, 96).

While cheese has existed in China for almost two millennia, the survival of this ancient tradition is threatened. Unlike in the West, cheesemaking is largely the prerogative of small-scale cheesemakers, who raise small herds of cattle, water buffalos, and goats, and pool their milk in the local markets. The government recently has stepped up efforts to restrict local peasants from engaging in unregulated animal husbandry, in part due to health concerns. Local officials, furthermore, have forbidden them from grazing their cattle on hills, the traditional place for grazing, in order to prevent deforestation and the improper disposal of waste. These restrictions have raised the cost of milk and lowered the profit margins for cheesemakers.

Further Reading 

• Anonymous. (1268). Jujia biyong shilei quanji 居家必用事類全集. In Xuxiu Siku quanshu 續修四庫全書, 1184. Shanghai: Shanghai guji.
• Anonymous. (1983). Yunnan techan fengwei zhinan 雲南特產風味指南. Kunming Yunnanrenmin chubanshe: Yunnan sheng xinhua shudian faxing.
• Aubaile-Sallenave, Françoise. (1994). Al-Kishk: The past and present of a complex culinary practice. In Sami Zubaida and Richard Tapper (Eds.), Culinary cultures of the Middle East (pp. 93–104). London, UK: I.B. Tauris Publishers.
• Blažek, Václav. (2015). Was the Xiongnu gloss “dried fermented milk” borrowed from Tocharian? Journal of Sino-Western Communications, 7(2), 3–8.
• Brook, Timothy. (2010). The troubled empire China in the Yuan and Ming dynasties. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
• Buell, Paul D., & Anderson, Eugene N. (2010). A soup for the Qan Chinese dietary medicine of the Mongol era as seen in Hu Sihui’s Yinshan zhengyao. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill.
• Chen, Lijun 陳歷俊, & Xue, Lu 薛璐. (2008). Zhongguo chuantong ruzhipin jiagong yu zhiliang kongzhi 中國傳統乳製品加工與質量控制. Beijing: Zhongguo qinggongye.
• Chen, Wen 陳文, & Zheng, Yong 鄭顒. (1554). (Jingtai) Chongxiu Yunnan tujing zhi (景泰)重修雲南圖經志. Beijing: Beijing Airusheng.
• Dillon, Michael. (1999). China’s Muslim Hui community: Migration, settlement and sects. London, UK: Curzon Press.
• Dunlop, Fuchsia. (2016). China. In Catherine Donnelly (Ed.), Oxford companion to cheese. 167-68. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Jia, Sixie 賈思勰. (n.d.). Qimin yaoshu jiaoshi 齊民要術校釋 (Miao Qiyu 繆啓愉, Ed.). Beijing: Zhongguo nongye chubanshe: Xinhua shudian.
• Li, Cannan 李灿南. (2004). Baizu Dengchuan rushan 白族鄧川乳扇. Pengtiao zhishi 烹調知識, (7), 35–36.
• Moraba, Kareh. (2016). The story of kashk. Gatronomica, 16(4), 97–100.
• Pulleyblank, Edwin G. (1962). The consonantal system of Old Chinese. Asia Major, 9, 58–144, 206–265.
• Sabban, Françoise. (1986). Un savoir-faire oublié: le travail du lait en Chine ancienne. Zibun: Memoirs of the Research Institute for Humanistic Studies, Kyoto University, 21, 31–65.
• Sen, Colleen Taylor. (2016). Paneer. In Catherine Donnelly (Ed.), The Oxford companion to cheese (p. 538). New York: Oxford University Press.
• Tan, Aylin Öney. (2016). Turkey. In Catherine Donnelly (Ed.), The Oxford companion to cheese (pp. 732–734). New York: Oxford University Press.
• Wiens, Herold J. (1952). China’s march into the tropics. Washington, DC: Office of Naval Research, United States Navy.
• Wu, Shaoxiong 吳少雄; Wang Baoxing 王保興; Guo Siyuan 郭祀遠; Li Lin 李琳; & Yin Jianzhong 殷建忠. (2005). Yunnan Baizu chuantong rushan de yanzhi ji yingyangxue pingjia 雲南白族傳統乳扇的研製及營養學評價 Shipin gongye keji 食品工業科技, (3), 170–171.
• Xiong, Yuanzheng 熊元正. (2007). Baizu de rupin he ruzhuan 白族的乳品和乳饌. Pengtiao zhishi 烹調知識, (6), 36–37.
• Yang, Shen 楊愼, & Hu, Wei 胡蔚. (1563). Nanzhao yeshi 南詔野史. Taipei: Chengwen chubanshe.

Abstract: Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu Province, is home to one of China’s best-known noodle dishes: Lanzhou lamian. Created over a century ago, these hand-pulled beef noodles are a simple yet delicious regional specialty emblematic of both the city itself and the Hui Muslim people of the northwest. Lanzhou lamian have steadily acquired popularity and can now be found at restaurants all around the country. But this renown does not extend abroad, and English language writing on lamian remains scarce.

Citation: Cheung (2021). Berkshire Encyclopedia of Chinese Cuisines. Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing Group.

DOI: 10.47462/1416408417

Keywords:Lanzhou; noodles; Hui Muslim; beef; Northwest China

Any figures or illustrations or illustrations included here are not finalized for publication. Advance publication date as per post date. Copyright Berkshire Publishing Group.

Back to list of Advance Articles

Noodles, Lanzhou

Adam B. R. Moorman, Fortismere School, London

Lanzhou lamian is a popular noodle dish with origins in Lanzhou, Gansu in the northwest of China. Although commonly known as “Lanzhou hand-pulled beef noodles,” the full name of the dish is Lanzhou qingtang niurou lamian (兰州清汤牛肉拉面), which can be broken down as follows: Lanzhou is the city that gives the dish its name. Qingtang is the clear broth in which the noodles are served. Niurou means beef, thinly sliced, floating in the broth. Lamian refers to the combination of “pull” and “noodles,” which describes the hand-pulling technique for making these noodles. Not surprisingly, in the city itself, they are simply called niurou mian—beef noodles.

History

The exact origins of Lanzhou lamian are open to debate. Some sources claim the noodles date from the Tang Dynasty (618–907 ce), but there is unfortunately no way to verify this. Others state that the Lanzhou lamian we know today actually originated during the Jiaqing period of the Qing dynasty, around 1799 ce, in Henan Province. At that time, the noodles were sold from a cart in the streets of Huaiqingfu (怀庆府), in today’s Boai County, by an itinerant peddler. From here, a Dongxiang (东乡) nationality Muslim named Ma Liuqi (马六七), who lived and worked in Huaiqingfu, is believed to have brought them to Lanzhou, the city with which they have since become associated (Zhongguo gansu wang 中国甘肃网 2014).

Alternative sources claim the noodles were first created around 160 years ago, as a food served to honored guests by the nomadic herders of China’s arid northwest. The same sources claim the first restaurant to serve them in Lanzhou during the Qing dynasty was named Yueyang lou (月阳楼), translated as “Sun and Moon Inn” (Unknown author 2011).

Although there may be debate over when and where the noodles actually originated, most accounts converge around the year 1915 with the figure of Ma Baozi (马保子). This Hui (回) Muslim chef is universally recognized as the creator of the Lanzhou lamian available in restaurants today. His work popularized lamian and established their identification with both the city of Lanzhou and the Muslim inhabitants of the region.

Ma was a poor man who made his living by cooking pots of beef noodles at home and then loading them onto a shoulder pole to be carried around the streets of Lanzhou to sell to hungry customers. Ma’s breakthrough came when he began to serve the noodles in a clear, stock-rich broth made from beef and lamb livers. The broth proved a great success, increasing Ma’s sales to the point that he could open his own restaurant, where it became the custom to give customers a free bowl of the broth as they waited for their noodles. Over time, the clear broth has become an indispensable part of the dish. Lanzhou natives claim that one look (to gauge clarity) and one sip (to gauge taste) are sufficient to judge the quality of the lamian served at any given restaurant (CCTV 2012; Hua 2007).

Popularity in China

The popularity of Lanzhou lamian on both a local and national scale is undeniable, and easy to verify. In fact, so integral to Lanzhou life is the dish that the local government imposes price controls, and any rise in the cost of a bowl of lamian can cause considerable resentment and protest among the local population (Kaczynski 2007).

Lamian restaurants abound in Lanzhou. In 2012, there were over one thousand Muslim-run lamian restaurants in the city, serving in excess of a million bowls a day (CCTV 2012). To put this into context, Lanzhou has a population of 3.6 million people, 159,000 of whom are Hui Muslims (Xinhuanet 2012). These figures give an idea of both the ubiquity of the dish, and also its strong association with the Hui community, the main purveyors of lamian.

Lanzhou lamian has also become a well-loved dish throughout China, so much so that in 1999 the central government officially recognized it as one of the top-three fast-food dishes in China, giving it the title “Zhonghua diyi mian (中华第一面),” or “The number-one noodles of the Chinese people,” (Unknown author 2010). Nowadays, restaurants can be found nationwide, identifiable by the ubiquitous signs advertising zhengzong lanzhou qingtang niurou lamian (正宗兰州清汤牛肉拉面), or authentic Lanzhou lamian, often accompanied by an inscription in Arabic. This authenticity, however, is not guaranteed. If pictures of the lush grasslands of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau or the Xining Great Mosque adorn the walls, the proprietors are probably not from Lanzhou. In fact, many Lanzhou lamian restaurants around China are actually run by Hui or Dongxiang nationality Muslims from neighboring Qinghai Province (The Beijinger 2010).

Lanzhou lamian is a dish as simple as it is flexible, and can be eaten at any time of the day, though particularly for breakfast (CCTV 2012). In fact, some restaurants do all their trade in the morning, and may well close after lunch, as beyond that point the clear broth is past its best (shixun zhongguo 视讯中国 2011).

The most popular restaurants usually have long queues and waiting times, and may be so busy that diners have no choice but to sit wherever there is a free seat, with little chance of finding a table to share with friends.

Appearance and Ingredients

Lanzhou lamian is a dish characterized by simplicity, in both composition and presentation. There are only a few ingredients, but these must be fresh, of high quality, and added in their correct proportions in order to bring out the perfect taste and mouth-feel (kougan 口感). The success of the dish rests on achieving this simplicity through the delicate balance of the ingredients.

The five characteristic features of Lanzhou lamian are recorded in an easily remembered saying that is displayed in many restaurants: yihong, erlü, sanbai, sihuang, wuqing. This literally translates as “one red, two green, three white, four yellow, five clear,” and identifies the key ingredients of the dish by their colors Zhongguo gansu wang 中国甘肃网 2009):

• Yihong (一红): The chili oil floating on the surface should be a deep red.
• Erlü (二绿): The coriander (cilantro) leaves and garlic shoots should be bright green.
• Sanbai (三白): The thin slices of Chinese radish should be pale white.
• Sihuang (四黄): The noodles should show the characteristic yellow of the local wheat.
• Wuqing (五清): The broth should be as clear as possible.

This saying details all that needs to be included in an authentic bowl of lamian. All other additions are superfluous; indeed, the appeal of the dish lies not in the complexity or sophistication of the ingredients, but rather in their freshness and the overall balance between them.

Especially important to the success of the dish is the flour used for the noodles, which must come from high-quality wheat that may be difficult to obtain outside the region (Kang, Wang, and Shang 2007). The noodles gain their characteristic flavor, elasticity, and texture from the addition to the dough of a particular kind of locally produced soda, called penghui (蓬灰) (CCTV 2012; unknown author 2010).

Similarly, the noodles would not be authentic without the characteristic chili oil, which must be prepared in a way that does not affect the clarity of the all-important broth. The chili is first fried over a low flame with sesame seeds and a mix of aromatic spices, which creates a hot red oil. If the flame is too low, the chili flavour will not infuse the oil; if it is too high, the chili will burn and blacken. The goal is for the chili oil to float on the surface, leaving the broth clear, and yet clinging to the noodles as they are pulled out of the soup by the diner’s chopsticks (Unknown author 2010).

Preparation of the Noodles

The most iconic and eye-catching element of Lanzhou lamian is the way in which the noodles themselves are prepared. The job of making the noodles is a highly skilled one, and requires extensive training and practice. In some family-run restaurants, this is a skill passed down from generation to generation.

In a typical restaurant, the sole duty of the lamian shifu (拉面师傅), or “pulled-noodle master,” is to make the noodles fresh for each customer, working swiftly and efficiently. Many restaurants configure their kitchens to be visible from the dining area, allowing customers to watch the lamian shifu at work.

The process of preparing each serving of noodles is quick, taking only a few minutes. Normally, there is a large block of noodle-dough, prepared earlier in the day, sitting on the stainless-steel table which serves as the workstation of the lamian shifu. He first cuts off a piece, and begins to knead and roll it, turning it into a long cylinder. This cylinder is then pulled so that it lengthens and thins, before being stretched and slackened and allowed to spin, coiling around itself the way a telephone cord does. He repeats this process several times, allowing the dough to rest in between. When making an order, he stretches the dough again before finally using his fingertips to separate out many individual strands, pulling and thinning them until they become a long string of noodles (Lander 2013; Moorman 2011). These are then tossed into boiling water. When they are ready, they are put into a bowl which is full of the clear broth, and the remaining ingredients are added on top. Although best observed live, this process is also neatly captured in the popular CCTV culinary documentary series “A Bite of China” (Shejianshangde Zhongguo 舌尖上的中国).

The great skill of the lamian shifu lies in his ability to prepare noodles of different thicknesses and shapes. Every restaurant offers a number of different styles of noodles, and diners specify which kind of noodles they want, meaning the lamian shifu must prepare each individual order to the customer’s exact specifications.

Although there are differences between individual restaurants, the main noodle styles are as follows, all variations in terms of thickness and shape (Zhongguo gansu wang 中国甘肃网 2009):

• Dakua (大宽) “big wide”: These are thin, flat noodles with a width of up to two fingers.
• Jiuye (韭叶) “chive leaves”: These are also thin and flat, but about a third of the width of
• Erxi (二细) “number two thin”: These are the thickest of the rounded noodles, thicker than spaghetti.
• Xi (细 ) “thin”: These rounded noodles are comparable to spaghetti.
• Maoxi (毛细) “hair thin”: These rounded noodles are about two-thirds the thickness of spaghetti.

Expanding Popularity

Although simple, lamian is a delicious dish that manages to balance tradition and simplicity so successfully that it has become a banner for the city of Lanzhou, and especially its Hui Muslim community, earning fame and plaudits all around China. Bearing in mind this popularity, it is curious that lamian remains so little-known outside China, especially when compared to the countless Chinese dishes that have become household names overseas. Hopefully, this article will go some way in remedying that.

Acknowledgements: I am very grateful to Stephen C. Riner and Daemon Borek of DAS Bookworks Xi’an for their comments on earlier drafts.

Further Reading 

• Chen, Xiaoqing. (Director). (2012). (Season 1, Episode 2) [TV series episode]. Zhushide gushi 主食的故事 [The story of staple foods]. In Shejianshangde zhong guo 舌尖上的中国 [A bite of China]. China Central Television.
• Hua, Shangde滑尚德. (2007). Lanzhou niurou mian wanzhongde fengbo 兰州牛肉面，碗中的风波 [Lanzhou beef noodles, storm in a bowl]. Gansu Daily. Retrieved from http://eat.gansudaily.com.cn/
• Kaczynski, Jaroslaw. (2007, July 4). As clear as mud. The Financial Times. Retrieved from https://www.ft.com/content/204642d6-2a5a-11dc-9208-000b5df10621
• Kang, Zhiyu; Wang, Jianjun; & Shang, Xunwu. (2007). Score system study for hand-extended noodle quality based on HMW-GS Index in wheat flour. Agricultural Sciences in China, 6(3), 304–310.
• Lander, Nicholas. (2013, September 20). The ancient art of noodles. The Financial Times. Retrieved from  https://www.ft.com/content/42b069ce-1fe4-11e3-8861-00144feab7de
• Moorman, Adam. (2011, October 6). For the love of lamian. The Beijing Review, (no. 40). Retrieved from http://www.bjreview.com/print/txt/2011-09/30/content_394755.htm
• Shixun zhongguo 视讯中国. (2011). Xunmeng sichouzhilu寻梦丝绸之路 [In search of dreams on the Silk Road]. Episode 6. [TV series episode]. Retrieved from http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMjg3NDQ0NDU2.html?from=y1.2-1-103.3.2-2.1-1-1-1
• Unknown Author. (2010). “Zhonghua diyi mian” niuroumian “中华第一面” 牛肉面 [“Number one noodles of the Chinese People” beef noodles]. Retrieved from http://www.itravelqq.com/2010/0806/52524.html
• Unknown Author. (2011). Lanzhou lamian yuanwei xibei youyu minzu zhaodai gaoji binke zhifengwei shipin 兰州拉面原为西北游牧民族招待高级宾客之风味食品 [Lanzhou hand-pulled noodles were originally a food reserved by nomadic herders of the northwest for receiving honored guests]. Retrieved from http://wenku.baidu.com
• Xinhuanet. (2012). Brief introduction to Lanzhou city. Retrieved from http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/special/2012-10/11/c_131899953.htm
• Zhongguo gansu wang 中国甘肃网. (2014). Lanzhou lamiande lishi 兰州拉面的历史 [A history of Lanzhou hand-pulled noodles]. Retrieved from http://story.gscn.com.cn/
• Zhongguo gansu wang 中国甘肃网. (2009). Yiqing, erbai, sanhong, silü一清二白三红四绿” 兰州牛肉面的历史 [One clear, two white, three red, four green] a history of Lanzhou hand-pulled noodles. Retrieved from http://www.gscn.com.cn

Abstract: China has a long history of dairy production and consumption. Milk was appreciated for its culinary and medicinal uses, with successive dynasties expanding production and acquisition of pastoral animals. Now China is one of the world’s great dairy nations. Dairy was first commercially available in cities, but advances in packing and shipping have made milk products a common sight in less-accessible areas.

Citation: Cheung (2021). Berkshire Encyclopedia of Chinese Cuisines. Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing Group.

DOI: 10.47462/1265857611

Keywords: Chinese recipes; recipe collections; food history; milk; dairy; culinary history; dietary history; dietetics; Daoist recipes

Any figures or illustrations or illustrations included here are not finalized for publication. Advance publication date as per post date. Copyright Berkshire Publishing Group.

Back to list of Advance Articles

Milk and Dairy Products

Năi yǐjí năizhìpǐn 奶以及奶製品

Robban Toleno, Columbia University

Dairy production and consumption developed in China between five and seven thousand years ago alongside the domestication of grass-eating animals—cattle, water buffalo, horses, and sheep. These animals were common in agriculture, transport, and war, making their milk readily available. The first technological hurdle of developing ways to store and preserve fresh milk appears to have been conquered fairly early. Earliest historical references are not about liquid milk, but about these processed milk products. The Chinese Book of Rites (Lǐjì 礼记), which was composed sometime during the first century bce, mentions the skill of preserving dairy into something called lǐlào (醴酪), alongside brewing, building, and cooking food, as one of the basic skills that marks the coming of civilization.

Like other arts of animal husbandry, Chinese traditions of dairy production and processing borrowed heavily from the practices of non-Chinese pastoralists that lived along the northern and northwestern frontiers. Sources from this period describe preparations such as lào (酪; fermented yoghurt), sū (酥; skimmed cream), and tíhú (醍醐; clarified butter), that are also mentioned in Buddhist texts, suggesting their Central Asian origin. These were most commonly made from cow and sheep milk, but other animal milk was also used, such as the mare’s milk that was fermented into a sour alcoholic drink. Sources from around the Tang dynasty (618–705 ce) describe a number of recipes based on dairy. These included the “mountain of cream” (sū shān 酥山) that was originally made by palace women; a winter street food called “milk tea” (năi chá 奶茶) that was in fact milk stewed with sweetened fruits instead of actual tea leaves; and a variety of breads, vegetable, and noodle dishes with milk as an ingredient.

In addition to culinary uses, dairy was known for its medical qualities. Medical texts such as the sixteenth-century Compendium of Materia Medica (Bĕncǎo gāngmù (本草纲目) integrated dairy of different animals into detailed formulas, such as the mixture of warmed wine and tihu prescribed to cure weakness and damp. Milk was especially valued for its strengthening abilities. Echoing earlier texts, one Qing-era book of culinary medica described cow’s milk as “sweet and settling [terms from Chinese medicine], like human milk…It benefits those with dryness of the blood and blockage of the bowels, stomach reflux and difficulty swallowing, and is appropriate for old people with rising heat. Water buffalo milk is beneficial. Children who require breastfeeding can substitute cow or goat milk.”

Dairy continued to develop during the later imperial period (after the year 1000), as successive dynasties expanded their production and acquisition of pastoral animals. In addition to military and work animals, these dynasties also kept reserves of dairy animals that would be brought to the capital as tribute. The Ming dynasty (1368–1644) demanded certain northern areas deliver an annual tribute of horses, of which a specified number were to be milking mares. Outside of the city of Zhangjiakou (about 200 km northwest of Beijing), the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) had a labor force of over 1,600 pastoral families tasked to care for 10,000 sheep and 2,400 cattle, and deliver roughly 8,000 kg of various milk products to the capital each year. The palace itself had its own dairy herd, with a certain number of animals reserved for each member of the imperial household. Among the delicacies they enjoyed were a yoghurt that was fermented with rice wine, and an elaborate confectionary made of delicate milk skin, sesame and candied cinnamon sticks.

At the same time, milk was a feature of Beijing’s street food. Describing lao, a late Qing guide to Beijing street food says that “milk and sugar are mixed in a bowl and condense into lao, which is eaten cold. Vendors place the bowl in a wooden vat, and carry it to the streets on shoulder poles. The taste is lovely.” Another even gives the price in the last line of the vendor’s rhyming cry as “one wen of cash, buys a bowl of lao,” making the dish well within the range of all but the poorest urbanites. The method for making su is described somewhat differently: “repeatedly boil pan of milk, stirring back and forth with a ladle, pour it into another container to cool. Remove the skin that forms on the top to make su.” This preparation would include the milk solids as well as the cream, and is identical to that used in making “milk skin” (奶皮子 năi pízi) in Mongolian areas today. Vendors in Beijing rolled layers of this su with sugared, dried fruits, which they cut into one inch strips and sold as “su rolls” (酥卷 sūjuăn).

Other regions had their own characteristic dairy preparations. Shunde in Guangdong produced a fresh cheese made out of the milk of the region’s water buffalo. This same region also became known for a panna cotta-style custard known as “double skin milk” (雙皮奶 shuāngpi năi), that is made by cooking and cooling sweetened water buffalo milk, which has a higher fat content than cow’s milk, and thus sets without the aid of any thickening agent (although egg white or starch are now used). Milk recipes were especially diverse in non-Han areas. From the southwestern province of Yunnan came a dish called “milk fans” (乳扇 rŭ shàn), which is made by heating milk with leaves of the Chinese lantern plant (Physalis alkekengi; sūan jiāng酸漿) to separate out the proteins (similar to the use of citric acid in making ricotta), which are then worked by hand and wound around pairs of bamboo poles to dry in the sun. The resulting sheets of dried cheese are fired or warmed over a charcoal fire before serving. Cities in the northwest serve confections of heated milk that is mixed with egg, sugar, fermented rice, green raisins, and sesame, producing a rich mix of flavors that suggests a Central Asian origin.

Western Innovations

Despite this long history, dairy was not universally accepted in China. In many places, dairy consumption was indeed so rare that long-time residents never encountered it. Writing in 1882, John Nevius, an American missionary who spent much of his adult life in China, described in fairly absolute terms a revulsion for dairy: “Milk is hardly used at all in the eighteen provinces; and in many places our practice of drinking it and using it in cooking is regarded with the utmost disgust.” The claim that Han Chinese traditionally avoided dairy either because of its cultural association with pastoral Central Asia, or because of an innate disposition to lactose intolerance, is still heard today, and bolsters the assumption that dairy only arrived with Western influence.

Newly arriving Westerners did not invent dairy production, but they did greatly expand it by bringing in dairy cattle, breeds such as Simmental, Ayrshire, and the iconic black and white Holstein. Starting in the late nineteenth century, new dairy ventures in the coastal cities of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Qingdao began importing dairy cows from Australia. These breeds required special care and feed, and were expensive to purchase and maintain, but were worth it because they produce significantly more milk, and remain in milk for longer in the year. According to tests conducted in the early twentieth century, these breeds were four times more productive than native Yellow cows, and six times more than the Baikal breed that was common in Mongolia.

Coastal cities developed small but productive dairy industries, but were eclipsed by the development of the northeast, the region that is still China’s dairy center. Driven both by opportunity and by hardship, Russian farmers began settling in northern Heilongjiang during the late nineteenth century, becoming a wave of refugees after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Many of these new arrivals brought entire dairy herds in tow, and settled the fertile farms and grasslands along the newly constructed China Eastern Railway. Morning trains would stop at towns along the line, collecting milk for the thriving city of Harbin. While the dairies in Shanghai and Tianjin produced liquid milk for urban consumers, the Harbin industry primarily produced butter, cheese, and the industrial protein casein. Some of the milk was consumed fresh by consumers in Harbin, but the more stable processed product was shipped by rail to major Chinese cities, or to foreign markets like Osaka or Vladivostok.

By the 1930s, dairy in various forms had become a fairly common sight in major cities. Production of liquid milk often remained within the city itself, and most cities had iconic local industries: Culty (可的) Dairy in Shanghai, Meidi (美的) Ice Cream in Wuhan, and Dairy Farm in Hong Kong. In addition to liquid milk, which was delivered by truck or bicycle in branded bottles, consumers had locally produced butter, cheese, and ice cream. They also had imports. Invented in the mid-nineteenth century, tinned condensed milk quickly became a global commodity. By the 1920s, China was third-largest market for American producers such as Borden, with other brands such as Anglo-Swiss (progenitor of the global giant Nestlé, which incorporated a subsidiary in Shanghai in 1936) and Rose following close behind. Colorful advertisements sold condensed milk as a food for the elderly and infants. In some areas (especially near Southeast Asia), sweet condensed milk was mixed into strong coffee, or used as a spread on toast.

At the time of the Japanese invasion, the Chinese milk industry was booming, with most urban businesses preparing major expansions. During the war, Japan occupied most of the major dairy producing areas, and looted dairy assets such as cows. In the period immediately after the Japanese surrender, producers sued for the return of these assets, and made plans for major investments, but were thwarted both by the ongoing civil war, and by the postwar resurgence of global trade, which introduced cheap imports of milk powder from the United States.

Milk for the Masses

The milk industry was greatly transformed under the People’s Republic. Economic planners prioritized dairy as a source of protein. Milk required less feed input than meat, and was produced by grazing, rather than by grain-consuming animals. The new government expanded production of milk in two ways. The first was to grow the national dairy herd. Soon after coming to power, the new government nationalized the dairy herds of foreign and Chinese investors, keeping some cows in the major cities, but moving many out to smaller inland cities, in order to make dairy available to schools, cadres, and especially to military bases throughout the country. It also embarked on intensive cattle breeding programs in order to increase the size and productivity of the cattle herd nationwide.

The second was by expanding dairy processing, to overcome the constraints of shipping liquid milk. Even after urban assets had been spread throughout the country, the dairy herd was still overwhelmingly located in the north and northwest, much of which was pastoral and sparsely populated. During the 1950s, this region became home to iconic state projects like the Hailar and Gansu dairies, which processed the surplus of fresh milk into tinned and powdered form, as well as butter for foreign export. Along with hides and meat processing, these dairy industries were intended to be the vanguard of modern industrialization of the grassland.

Like much else during the Cold War, milk in China also developed a symbolic political value. China aspired to copy the dairy industry in the Soviet Union, which at the time consumed twice as much milk per capita as the United States. Chinese delegations visited the massive dairy processing plants in places like Ukraine, and newspaper accounts described glowingly how the unique genius of socialism had made this basic human necessity accessible to all, in contrast to the United States, where the industry was hobbled by capitalist greed. Propagandists especially relished the image of farmers dumping milk when the price got too low. One satirical poem from 1960 used milk as a heavy-handed symbol of social justice by presenting US President John F. Kennedy as a tool of capitalist dairy interests, rhetorically asking “Without money, how will the people get milk? Did you think you would drink your milk for free?”

Yet China’s new milk production was not intended for everyone. For decades, dairy was officially restricted as a “special needs item” (tèxū pĭn特需品), meaning that it could only be purchased with ration coupons. Cities were favored, with a priority given to urban families who had very young or very old members, yet even these families received only a small amount. Over the next two decades, China’s dairy industry remained stagnant, as political chaos disrupted the complex supply chains behind the production and distribution of milk, and machines once supplied by China’s former Soviet ally broke down for lack of parts and maintenance.

Expansion and Transformation

The reforms of the Deng Xiaoping era encouraged dairy by relaxing restrictions, returning herds to private ownership, raising the state purchase price, and eventually allowing the private sale of milk. Although production did indeed expand, popular demand rose even faster. During the early 1980s, a number of cities faced milk shortages, forcing urbanites to line up well before dawn to ensure scarce supplies. By the end of the decade, production had largely caught up to demand, but the thriving market had created the new problem of production shortcuts and safety scandals that would plague the industry to the present day.

During the 1990s, dairy became increasingly common, and began to appear in new and different forms. In 1990, Nestlé began producing the Coffee-Mate creamer that was sold paired with bottles of Nescafé instant coffee and made their way to millions of homes nationwide. Milk powder became widely available in a variety of brands and tastes, and was added as a taste and nutrient supplement to products including baked goods, tofu, and instant drinks. During the early decade, joint ventures by Dean Foods, Walls, and Bud’s among others began producing ice cream in Beijing and Shanghai. Dairy-based infant formula, which promised unique nutritive and developmental benefits for the nation’s new generation of only children, became especially popular.

The introduction of UHT (ultrahigh temperature) packaging in the mid-1990s truly transformed the industry, making it possible to cheaply ship and store unrefrigerated milk to the whole country, and tripling national consumption. The new century transformed China’s dairy yet again. China joined the WTO in 2001, opening its market to foreign milk products, especially milk powder, which was cheaper, and perceived to be safer than the domestic product. To face this new competition, the Chinese government encouraged consolidation of smaller dairies into ever larger “dragon head” companies. The two largest of these, Yili 伊利 and its offshoot and main competitor Mengniu 蒙牛, are both based in the Inner Mongolian city of Hohhot, which became known as China’s “dairy city” (rŭpǐn chéng 乳品城). Other companies included Shanghai-based Guangming 光明 Dairy (known in English as “Bright Dairy”), a former state enterprise that evolved decades earlier out of the seized assets of the British Culty Dairy, and the Hebei-based Sanlu三鹿. Well-capitalized (including significant foreign investment) and enjoying both economies of scale and government cooperation, these large companies captured the majority of China’s rapidly growing dairy market: Yili and Mengniu alone accounted for about half.

Since 2000, China’s dairy industry has remained a high government priority. One reason was the repeated emergence of safety scandals. Since the 1980s, Chinese newspapers reported numerous instances of farmers or dairies producing in unsanitary conditions, or cutting costs by adding water to milk. These practices could have deadly effects. In a case from 2004, makers of milk powder were caught removing (for resale) nutrients from milk that was then made into infant formula, producing serious developmental problems in dozens of children. The defining moment was the crisis of 2008, when it was revealed that processed milk had been adulterated with the industrial chemical melamine, which mimics protein in laboratory tests. Although the poisoning was laid at the feet of Sanlu, there is a wide consensus that the practice of adding melamine was endemic through the industry. The damage was felt nationwide, with at least 300,000 infants sickened, of whom eight died of renal failure.

The melamine crisis was a turning point in China’s relationship with dairy. Although officially cleared of wrongdoing, the two largest dairies lost 80 percent of sales in the first weeks after the crisis. The government responded with new safety regulations, new investments in animal feed, and new regulations across the entire production chain. One direct consequence has been the concentration of cattle in ever-larger farms.

Despite its many scandals, the industry continues to grow at a phenomenal rate. While Sanlu itself was driven into bankruptcy, the other companies emerged from 2008 stronger than before, many recovering their losses within a matter of months. Yili and Mengniu in particular have continued to attract outside investment, and to expand production, not only the amount of dairy sold, but also the ever-changing forms and flavors. Chinese supermarkets and small shops will frequently stock a dizzying array of dairy products—fresh and UHT packed liquid milk, yoghurt, kefir, ice cream, butter, and occasionally cheese, as well as dry goods: milk powder, milk tablets, and of course milk candy, including the iconic chewy White Rabbit Milk Candy (大白兔奶糖), and its many imitators. Popular fast food outlets like McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken do a brisk business in soft-serve ice cream. Fast food retailers have recently been joined by the proliferation of franchises selling bubble milk tea. Meanwhile, many home cooks have taken to preparing milk-based coffee, steamed milk puddings, milk-based cakes, and butter-filled pastry. Dairy shows all signs of becoming an ever greater part of the Chinese diet.

Further Reading 

• Brown, Miranda. (2019). “Mr. Song’s Cheese, Southern China, 1368-1644.” Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies vol.19, no.2: 29-42.
• DuBois, Thomas David. (2019). “Milk From the Butterfly Spring: State and Enterprise in the Yunnan Dairy Industry,” Rural China 17 (1): 87-110. https://doi.org/10.1163/22136746-01701005
• DuBois, Thomas David. (2019). “Borden and Nestlé in East Asia, 1870-1929: Branding and retail strategy in the condensed milk trade” Business History. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2019.1688302
• DuBois, Thomas David. (2019). “China’s dairy century – making, drinking and dreaming of milk” in Rotem Kowner, Guy Bar-Oz, Michal Biran, Meir Shahar, Gideon Shelach, eds., Animals and Human Society in Asia: Historical and Ethical Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan): 179-211
• Glosser, Susan. (1999). “Milk for Health, Milk for Profit: Shanghai’s Chinese Dairy Industry Under Japanese Occupation.” In Inventing Nanjing Road: Commercial Culture in Shanghai, 1900–1945, edited by Sherman Cochran, 207–233. Ithaca, NY: East Asia Program, Cornell University.
• Lu, Shuying. 2018. Muru yu niunai: jindai Zhongguo muqin juese de chongsu (1895–1937) [Mother’s milk and cow milk: Reconstructing the mother’s role in modern China, 1895–1937]. Hong Kong: Zhonghua shuju.
• “Yan du xiao shipin za yong” [Ode to the Street Foods of Beijing]. (1937). In Beiping fengsu lei zheng [Categorized Customs of Beiping]. Taibei: Zhongyang yanjiu yuan lishi yuyan yanjiu suo.

Abstract: In Chinese history, the practice of collecting recipes evolved along two parallel but interacting trends. The first placed food within a medical context in order to nourish the body and heal different ailments. The second was concerned with technical aspects as well as the aesthetic enjoyments of food. Beginning with twenty recipes found on bamboo strips from the second century bce, Chinese recipe collecting would by the nineteenth century result in the comprehensive Tiaoding ji, with well over two-thousand recipes.

Citation:  Anderson, et al. (2021). Encyclopedia of Sustainability (2nd edition). Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing Group.

DOI: 10.47462/1419367258

Keywords: Chinese recipes; recipe collections; food history; culinary history; dietary history; dietetics; Daoist recipes

Any figures or illustrations or illustrations included here are not finalized for publication. Advance publication date as per post date. Copyright Berkshire Publishing Group.

Back to list of Advance Articles

Recipe Collecting Shípǔ 食谱

Robban Toleno, Columbia University

Few collections of food recipes survive from ancient and early imperial China. Ancient classical texts sometimes touch on food topics, but tend to focus on theoretical ideas that informed the dietary practices of literate elites, or they merely name foods but do not leave instructions for their preparation. What recipes we do have from early periods tend to be embedded in literary works such as medical literature and agricultural manuals that were valued for much more than the food recipes that they contain. Roughly around the Tang-Song dynastic transition (ca. tenth to eleventh century), improved woodblock print technology stimulated a new print culture that allowed publication and widespread circulation of genres of writing that previously might have only have been shared as hand-copied editions. The emergence of the recipe collection as a stand-alone and publication-worthy literary genre appears to date from after the development of this new print culture, in Song China (960–1279). Before this time, recipe collections may have circulated locally and played a role in domestic affairs (some have been found in tombs), but they did not earn a place in the orthodox bodies of writing handed down to the present.

The Song period was a pivotal time in Chinese culinary history, when a vibrant restaurant culture stimulated by the mixing of northerners and southerners matured cooking techniques and flavoring principles into a recognizably Chinese cuisine (Wilkinson 2015, 445; Freeman 1977, 144). Recipe collections from later imperial and early modern China show a continued evolution as cooks integrated new techniques and ingredients, but the core tradition had been established by the thirteenth century. The entire history of culinary recipe collecting in China can be understood as cumulative, because later collections have a tendency to build upon those of the past, with the more innovative, smaller collections getting absorbed into comprehensive compilations.

Medical Formulas and Food Recipes

In early imperial China, food and medicine were closely interacting categories, so the distinction between the two was not often as clear as it appears to us today. Although eating food (shi 食, chi 吃, etc.) is conceptually and linguistically distinct from the taking of medicine (fuyao 服药), the notion of a recipe as a written method was associated early on with medical formularies. Both medical formulas and food recipes could be denoted as fang 方 (recipe/formula) or as fa 法 (method). Indeed, food and medicine have been so closely associated that it can be difficult to distinguish a culinary recipe from a medical formula in early China. Collections of food recipes include celebrated medicinal ingredients in dishes that appear to be for general consumption, and medical formularies include everyday foodstuffs as medically active ingredients in formulas (Lo and Barrett 2005, 401). A representative example of diet therapy in China’s medical literature is Sun Simiao’s (581–682 ce) influential “Diet Therapy in the Qianjin Formulary” (Qianjin shizhi 千金食治) an excerpt of his Beiji qianjin yaofang备急千金药方). Medicines, like foods, were often prepared in a kitchen, using kitchen techniques.

The medicalization of food appears connected with the influence of Daoist and Confucian ideas on medical knowledge that matured during the Han period (202 bce–220 ce). Some of these ideas continue to shape Chinese dietary practices even today. These theories posited a cosmos structured by integrated but oppositional categories, yin 阴 and yang 阳, which colored people’s perceptions of foodstuffs. Foods were deemed, if not neutral, to have a “warming” (yang) or “cooling“ (yin) effect on the human body. Everything dynamic––from ghosts, to weather, to people, to foods––was thought to be filled with and influenced by flows of qi 气, a kind of fluid force that was often described as yin or yang. In this theoretical frame, cooking became a matter of balancing the properties of different ingredients for health, and not just one of harmonizing flavors for a positive gustatory experience. Medical texts such as materia medica (bencao 本草) applied such theoretical categorization to medicines and foods, thus subsuming everyday foodstuffs within a medical framework that was broadly inclusive of all ingestible natural ingredients. The pronounced overlap of food and medicine is one of the most prominent features of Chinese culinary and medical history, finding expression in such cultural concepts as “nourishing life” (yangsheng 养生) and healing with food (shiliao食疗, shizhi 食治) (e.g., Wilkinson 2015, 441).

Ambiguity in the categories of food and medicine is evident not only in many of the received texts of Chinese history, but also in excavated texts such as the “Recipes for Fifty-Two Ailments” (Wushier bingfang 五十二病方) found in a tomb of the Mawangdui 马王堆 archaeological site that was sealed in 168 bce. The Wushier bingfang formulas, which from the title and section headings is easily identified as medical, includes recipes using everyday food ingredients:

For rigidity due to a wound, boil li (plum) fruit in a sufficient amount of water. Let it bubble rapidly and then remove (the liquid). Sieve (the fruit) to obtain the liquid. When cooled to lukewarm, give it to the ailing person to drink…

Another. For rigidity due to a wound. Take one handful of xie (scallions) and boil in one half dou of pure liquor until it bubbles. Drink it, and immediately sit with warm clothing pressed around all four sides…

Another. Make gruel with blue choice millet grains. Use fifteen parts water to one part grain to produce five dou of gruel. Remove it, let the vapor steam away, and fill a new pottery water jar with it. Cover the mouth with three layers of cloth. Then seal it with mud two cun thick. Bake until the mud is completely fired, and drink it. The wound desists.

Another. Boil two roosters that have been aged for three nights, pouring three dou of water (into the kettle). Remove when done. Scoop out the liquid and pour it over (the roosters) again. Set a […] beneath a slotted steaming-pot and cook the five grains. Drop rabbit flesh into the slotted steaming-pot. Gradually pour the liquid on top, letting it collect in the bowl below. When done, drink the liquid. (Harper 1998, 230, 231, 241–242)

While this cultural tendency to blend food and medicine is a critical component of our understanding of Chinese food history, it is sometimes overstated, especially for ancient China. In 1999, an archaeological site from around the same time as Mawangdui yielded up a hitherto unknown text demonstrating that even in ancient China, food could sometimes be simply that: food. A recipe collection written on bamboo slips and placed in the tomb of Wu Yang 吴阳 (d. 162 bce) at Huxishan 虎溪山 in Yuanling 沅陵 (Hunan Province) illustrates that collections of food recipes without any obvious medical application also existed. Although the Huxishan recipe collection is heavily damaged, scholars are able to characterize the text, based on the extant portion, as focused on culinary outcomes:

Wu Yang could undoubtedly contemplate a diverse and nourishing variety of foodstuffs and cooking techniques in his diet. In the surviving twenty of an estimated original 148 meat and fish and seven grain and vegetable recipes, we can see that the Han élite valued a varied diet with different methods of cooking rice, grain and vegetables, dog, goose, lamb, deer, pig, chicken, swallow, beef and hare. Different parts of the animals were cooked separately with a variety of techniques including steaming, braising, and pot-cooking, using alcoholic liquor, ginger and various ingredients for flavouring. (Lo and Barret 2005, 402)

Premodern Chinese authors and editors of recipe collections in China sometimes medicalized food, and sometimes did not. This fact has led scholars to identify two main trends in Chinese food writings, one technical and the other therapeutic. The technical strain of food writings concern cooking methods and gustatory aesthetics, while the therapeutic food writings offer information on the use of foods for general health or medical intervention (Huang 2000, 121). This characterization helps our understanding of key differences in extant examples of Chinese recipe collecting, but the two main trends are not mutually exclusive. For lack of space, this overview of recipe collecting will mostly trace the development of collections of food recipes with culinary––rather than medical––motivations, but it will include cases where the two main trends overlap in a collection. We should keep in mind that recipe collections in China illustrate how food could serve a range of objectives, including culinary delight, medical efficacy, social differentiation, moral exemplification, spiritual transformation, and so forth.

Food Recipes in Ancient Classics

Such ancient classics as the Book of Songs (Shijing 诗经) and the Elegies of Chu (Chuci 楚辞) mention various foods and provide information on early Chinese food history, but lack specific information on how to prepare the foods. The best early example of Chinese food recipes in the received classics (as opposed to texts found in archaeological sites) occurs in the Book of Rites (Liji 礼记) by Dai Sheng 戴圣 (n.d., ca. first century bce). The material incorporated by Dai Sheng dates from as early as the fifth century bce and concerns Confucian ideas about ritual. The “Patterns of the Family” (Neize 內則) chapter describes eight meat delicacies eaten by the wealthy, each with details sufficient for the recreation of these ancient dishes. We read, for instance, how one delicacy was prepared from a suckling pig or young ram, which was gutted and stuffed with jujubes before being wrapped round with straw and reeds, plastered with clay, and baked. There is also a recipe for fried meatballs made with a mince of beef, mutton, and pork mixed with rice; another combines roasted dog liver wrapped in its own fat and rice fried with fat taken from the belly of a wolf (Huang and Needham 2000, 117–120; Chang 1977, 51–52; Anderson 2014, 131).

Daoist Recipes

Daoist writings contain some recipes that have often been overlooked by authors writing on Chinese food history, perhaps because they exhibit the aforementioned ambiguity between medical formulas and food recipes. One example is the second chapter of the Preface to the Five Most High Numinous Treasure Talismans (Taishang lingbao wufuxu太上灵宝五符序), which is comprised of seventy vegetable-based recipes aimed at achieving longevity. This text was compiled between the second and fifth centuries. The early details of its authorship are not known, but evidence suggests that a single scroll from the Later Han (25­–220 ce) passed through several stages of editing and expansion, becoming three scrolls by the fifth century. Key figures of Lingbao Daoism had a hand in this editing, including Ge Xuan 葛玄 (164–244 ce), Ge Chaofu 葛巢甫 (fl. 402 ce), and Lu Xiujing陆修静 (406–477 ce).

The medicalized diet represented by the recipes of this collection express Daoist anxieties regarding the human body, such as a belief in Three Worms (sanchong 三虫) that all human bodies were thought to host, which could only be expelled through a proper medical diet. The Daoist outlook on food and the human body was not entirely pessimistic, however, because they held that the human body could be not only healed of such worms, but even progressively improved until exalted states of bodily perfection were reached. Health, vitality, and longevity could be achieved through proper diet and exercises that harmonized and strengthened subtle energies.

Daoists celebrated certain foods and herbs for being most suitable for achieving these aims. Many of their recipes include one or more of several key ingredients: sesame, pine sap or the pine fungus fuling 茯苓 (Wolfiporia extensa), Sichuan pepper, dried ginger, and sweet flag (calamus). The Recipe of the Three Heavens of the Numinous Treasure combines all five of these ingredients and illustrates through the specificity of its methods the Daoist worldview, in which food, medicine, and magic are rolled up into one:

Five parts of sesame, four parts of pine resin, one part of [Sichuan pepper], three parts dried ginger, and three parts calamus.…A young unmarried man should pound the [ingredients]. Do not change the person. Each should be separately prepared. Carefully sift the five herbs. Each is pounded ten thousand times. The five herbs are each separately placed into red cups. All five cups should be set out in order on a red altar and left in the open air for one clear night.…mix with white honey or white grain-sugar. Afterwards, again pound thirty thousand times into pills the size of a wu tree seed.…At dawn turn towards the sun, prostrate with reverence, and swallow three pills. [Afterwards] say the prayer: ‘I desire to obtain longevity’. At sunset repeat the prostration while facing west…(adapted from Arthur 2013, 233; brackets mine)

Another recipe illustrates how even ingredients that today would be considered food were thought by Daoists to have miraculous efficacy when used in the correct way:

Sesame paste. Take on double liter (dou) of sesame paste and three half-pounds (jin) of scallion heads. On a low flame fry them in oil until the scallions are scorched to a bright yellow color. Strain this to get rid of any sediment. With wine ingest one cup (sheng) daily for one hundred days…your muscles and flesh will fill out and flourish. After two hundred days, the elderly will transform into young people.…After a long time of ingestion you will become a spirit immortal. (Arthur 2013, 235)

Some Daoists practiced a special dietary regimen that eliminated grain (pigu or bigu辟谷), based on theories that grain causes harm to the human body. They used seeds, vegetables, fruits, and herbs to replace grain in the diet. The Taiqing Scripture’s Method of Eliminating Grain (Taiqing jing duangu fa太情经断谷法, from the late sixth century but containing older material, outlines methods for achieving abstinence from agricultural grains such as wheat, millet, and rice, and it serves as another example of a text containing recipes for Daoist practitioners (Kohn 2010, 145–149).

Recipes as Tools of Civilization: The Qimin Yaoshu

In received historical texts, the first major departure of a recipe collection from the context of medicine occurs in a sixth-century agricultural manual. While commonly thought of as an agricultural text (nongshu农书), the Essential Techniques of Civilization (Qimin yaoshu 齐民要术), literally translated as “Essential Techniques for Ordering the People,” represents a milestone in the development of Chinese recipe collections. This comprehensive manual of technical skills was compiled around 540 ce by Jia Sixie贾思勰, a scholar official from the area of present-day Shangdong Province who served as governor of Gaoyang (now Zibo) during the Northern Wei dynasty (Ren 1999, 864). It highlights the central importance of agricultural knowledge as a toolkit used by Chinese households to subsist off the land and to create the conditions for their flourishing. Jia’s work collects in one place the subsistence methods of his time, which were used to produce and process the materials that sustained life on Northern Chinese estates. His book includes information on various aspects of agriculture, sericulture, animal husbandry, food processing, and cooking (Huang 2000, 123–124).

The sections on food in the Qimin yaoshu contain richly detailed descriptions of techniques for making of salt, for fermenting alcoholic beverages, sauces, vinegars, for drying fish and making jerky from meats, as well as other things that today we would consider the domain of industrial food production. There are also extensive sets of recipes for cooked dishes of food, though the organization suggests that Jia Sixie saw food preparation and cooking as integral activities. A sample overview of chapters illustrates the encyclopedic breadth of information on food preparation: dairy products made from cow and sheep’s milk (Ch. 57), roasted meats (Ch. 80), prepared meats (Ch. 81), wheat flour breads and cakes (Ch. 82), cooked millet (Ch. 83), rice noodle (Ch. 84), apricot kernel pudding (Ch. 85), boiled grain (Ch. 86), meatless dishes (Ch. 87), pickled vegetables (Ch. 88), and malt sugar (Ch. 89). A complete translation of the table of contents can be found in Shih Sheng-han’s A Preliminary Survey of the Book Ch’i Min Yao Shu (pages 3–4).

Some of the language, techniques, and ingredients appear archaic from the perspective of modern Chinese culinary practices. The Chinese food historian Shi Shenghan, who annotated and translated to modern Chinese the entirety of the Qimin yaoshu, observes that the text contains many enigmatic foods that we poorly understand today, because their practice has been lost and we have only a few clues embedded in historical materials (Shi 2009, 835). Even foods that can be recreated with confidence produce results that are different from what would today be familiar Chinese cuisine. Endymion Wilkinson, a sinologist with a keen interest in Chinese culinary history, relates how, while living in Beijing, he served his guests dishes based on the Qimin yaoshu recipes, and most people did not think they were eating Chinese food (Wilkinson 2001, 289).

Not all the foods would seem exotic or unfamiliar. Many, in fact, are still widely prepared today, and some are so familiar as to not seem worthy of comment, until we realize that these recipes may be the first publication of foods that have become intimately connected with Chinese culinary practices and cultural identity. For example, the chapter on wheat flour products and cakes has two recipes that deserve comment. The dish shuiyin 水引 (“water-pulled”) refers to a kind of wheat noodle pulled to the thickness of a chopstick, sliced into segments, then stretched to the thickness of garlic chive before being dropped into boiling water. This is likely the first historical recipe for making noodles (Shi 2009, 931; Ren 1999, 864). Another recipe in the same chapter is called jiyazi bing 鸡鸭子饼 (“cake of the child of chickens and ducks”). Eggs are broken into a small bowl, salt is added, and the mixture is dropped into hot oil and fried into a circular “cake.” Could this be the first Chinese recipe for an egg omelette?

The Qimin yaoshu is the first Chinese recipe collection to have circulated widely and over a long period of time. It showcases a broad set of cooking methods, including some that were still new at the time, such as the use of stir-frying (chao 炒) for vegetable dishes and two ways to make leavened wheat pastries. As a widely circulated manual, this information on food preparation helped to establish an ancestral repertoire of techniques that informed the later development of a distinctive Chinese cuisine (Ren 1999, 864). Its influence on culinary practices lasted many centuries and reached as far as Japan.

The Recipe Collection as a Stand-Alone Genre in Song China

Following publication of the Qimin yaoshu, China was reunified under the Sui dynasty (581–618 ce) and achieved a high point of cultural and economic flourishing under the Tang dynasty (618–907 ce). Little remains of food writings composed during this time. We know from titles in catalogs that some intellectuals did make efforts to document food, but only fragments of these writings survived until modern times.

The next major recipe collections to reach us from the depths of Chinese history are from the Song dynasty, when recipe collections garnered enough interest to circulate on their own as a genre of writing. As with the Tang dynasty, Song China was remarkable for its high level of economic prosperity and cultural flourishing. In the Tang-Song transition, aristocratic privilege was largely replaced by a meritocratic bureaucracy, bringing new talent to the capitals and creating a new class of salaried bureaucrats. These bureaucrats and their families arrived from different parts of the empire, mingling with peoples displaced from their homes in the north, as first the Khitan Liao dynasty (907–1125) and then the Jurchen Jin dynasty (1115–1234) won land from Song control and pushed the northern Chinese population into a southern retreat.

Affluent and nostalgic for the tastes of home, urban dwellers stimulated the birth of a restaurant culture boasting regional cuisines, first in Bianjing 汴京 (now Kaifeng), the Northern Song (960–1127) capital, and later in Lin’an临安 (now Hangzhou), capital of the Southern Song (1127–1279). Historians know of this urban restaurant culture through such sources as Meng Yuanliao’s A Reminiscence of the Eastern Capital’s Dream of Splendor (Dongjing menghua lu东京梦华录), which records in great detail the culture of Kaifeng before it fell to the Jurchens.

In the new urban culture of Song China, sensibilities shifted. Woodblock print techniques were improved to the point that intellectuals could publish without help from the imperial court. More printed texts circulated than ever before in Chinese history, giving rise to a new print culture that was more permissive and inclusive that that of the late Tang. Intellectuals began to explore as connoisseurs everyday features of the cultural landscape, publishing natural history treatises (pulu谱录) on such specialized topics as bamboo shoots (sunpu笋谱), citrus fruits (jupu橘谱), and crab varieties (xiepu蟹谱), as well as on tea and alcoholic beverages. From within this intellectual milieu emerged the notion of a cookbook, menu, or treatise on food, which in late imperial China would be referred to as shipu 食谱or caipu 菜谱. In the Song, food writing emerged as a legitimate form of intellectual activity and came to stand on its own, outside of agricultural treatises or medical texts. One way that this was achieved was to integrate anecdotes and social values into recipes, creating a literary product that was more than a mere manual for cooking. Song recipe collections speak to a set of tensions that develop when cooking reaches a high level of sophistication: complexity vs. simplicity, artifice vs. the natural, urban vs. rural, haute cuisine vs. commoner fare, etc.

Not everyone in the Song empire had interest in the gustatory delights of the capital. The Vegetable Recipes from Benxin Studio (Benxin zhai shushi pu本心斋蔬食谱) can be read as a condemnation of urban food culture. Its authorship is traditionally attributed to Chen Dasou陈达叟, although evidence in the text itself suggests that Chen Dasou may have merely written down what was dictated to him by Old Man Benxin upon his visit to Benxin’s hermitage (if “Benxin” does not refer to Chen Dasou, himself). Information on the identities of these individuals is lacking, but the text appears to be a product of the Northern Song. Chen Dasou identifies himself as coming from Qingzhang 清漳(镇), a town that during the Southern Song was deep within Jurchen territory. The rural setting is fitting for a collection that presents twenty fully vegetarian dishes of simple and pure ingredients, dishes that were “free of tainting by the smoke and fire of the human realm,” as we are told in the brief introduction. Each dish is listed with an elegant name, a concise explanation, and a sixteen-character ode relating to the dish. The odes are based on Confucian and Daoist literary allusions. The explanations are so spartan that the twenty dishes can be seen as menu items rather than recipes. Boiled strips of tofu dipped into an unspecified flavoring, stewed vegetables, cakes of powdered rice firmed up with steam––the foods are meatless and simple, exemplifying a Confucian love of frugality and a Daoist embrace of nature. Despite the moral stance behind this text, the odes are filled with puns and a short conclusion tells the reader that the playful humor is intended.

The Pure Offerings of Rural Households (Shanjia qinggong 山家清供) of the Southern Song likewise promotes simple rural foods with the intellectual flare of a man of letters (wenren 文人). The compiler, Lin Hong 林洪 (late twelfth to mid-thirteenth century), was a southerner from Quanzhou 泉州 (Fujian). A poet of modest fame, he traveled around the Song empire for many years, visiting prominent intellectuals, sharing meals with them, and writing down recipes (see Nakamura 1995, 20–24). His collection is a personal record of the foods, personalities, and aesthetic moments that he encountered, providing a valuable glimpse onto the food habits of the educated elite living outside of the capital of Lin’an. Most of the dishes are more complex than those of the Benxin zhai shushi pu, but they are likewise predominantly vegetable-based and meatless. The collection is not strictly vegetarian, however, as some recipes are for wild animals such as palm civet, raccoon dog, and deer. Others use crab, fish, mandarin duck, and mutton fat. An ethic of avoiding meat is evident in some of the recipes, but in this regard Lin Hong appears to have been more flexible than some of his hosts. He lists 104 recipes, each with anecdotes telling us where they came from and how they are significant. Many of the dishes contain herbs and roots with therapeutic value, showing that people were in the habit of self-medicating with food. Interestingly, Lin Hong chose to avoid medical language in the title of his recipes, not adding fang 方 or even fa 法 (with one exception for a method for making a grain-based alcoholic beverage) and thereby distancing his recipe collection from the appearance of medical formularies. This may be deliberate on his part: he presents these recipes as dishes to be shared in rural hospitality, not as a diet therapy manual, even though many of the dishes are expressly therapeutic according to his descriptions. From Lin Hong’s anecdotes we learn that his hero is the great Northern Song intellectual Su Shi苏轼 (aka Su Dongpo苏东坡, 1037–1101), who wrote extensively about food and who probably provided Lin Hong with the sense of intellectual license that he needed to undertake this project. The recipes are sufficiently explained for the dishes to be recreated.

Another collection traditionally attributed to the Song period, A Record of Madame Wu’s Cooking (Wushi zhongkui lu吴氏中馈录) is notable for bringing greater precision to recipes by including measurements (Huang 2000, 127). Unlike the Benxin zhai shushi pu and the Shanjia qinggong, this work is without anecdote or literary embellishment. It is simply a collection of recipes, many of which use meat, and has no introduction. Nothing is known about Madame Wu, other than that she lived in Pujiang 浦江 (slightly south of Hangzhou). Historical support for placing the text in the Song period is scanty and the history of the collection is still a point of disagreement among scholars. For example, because several recipes call for soy sauce (jiangyou酱油), some historians doubt that it is a Song work and suspect that it may even date to the early Ming. As late as the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), recipes use a fermented soybean sauce (jiang酱) similar to miso, and liquid soy sauce had not yet become commonplace (Nakamura 1995, 352–353). The extant text contains three sections: twenty-two meat and fish recipes (fuzha脯鲊, “dried meat and salted fish”), thirty-eight vegetable recipes, and fifteen sweets. The structure and wording of the sections suggests that the collection is probably incomplete, having lost sections with recipes for, perhaps, fresh fish and chicken dishes, and soups (Shinoda 1974, 156). Questions of dating aside, the collection gives us good information on the relative sophistication of cooking enjoyed by affluent members of society living near Hangzhou prior to the arrival of New World food products.

Tastes of the Northern Steppe Under the Yuan Dynasty

During the Mongol Yuan dynasty, recipe collecting further evolved in scale while continuing to reflect the trends of previous models. Medical, technical, and aesthetic aspects of food recipes each gained further legitimacy as large collections emerged within a hybrid Mongolian-Chinese cultural environment. Recipe collections of this period display heavy influence from Mongolian food practices. Mongolians held closely to their customary foods such as boiled mutton, despite the availability of Chinese alternatives. What is less clear to historians is the extent to which Chinese populations adopted the Mongolian dishes (see Mote 1977, 208–209, 253–258; Shinoda 1974, 197). Setting aside the problem of how much Mongolian food rubbed off on the Chinese, we can at least say with confidence that the recipe collections produced during the Yuan period would serve as important sources into the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), even after Mongol rule had ended (Shinoda 1974, 216–217).

The most influential Yuan recipe collection is the Complete Collection of Essential Arts for Family Life (Jujia biyong shilei quanji居家必用事类全集), hereafter “Jujia biyong”, an encyclopedic manual for the home. Similar in design to the Qimin yaoshu, it is also similar in terms of the long-term impact that it had on other recipe collections. The section on food and drink remained a valued source of recipes in the Ming period. The name of the compiler is not known. Compared with Song recipe collections, the scale of this one is massive: thirty-two food and beverage chapters with recipes for soups, various beverages, fruits and their preserves, alcoholic beverages, vinegars, sauces, fermented beans, vegetable dishes, brined and marinated meat and fish, dried fish, various methods for cooking meat, Chinese Muslim (huihui 回回) foods, Nuchen (ancestors of the Manchu) foods, moist wheat flour foods (noodles), dry wheat flour foods (breads), snacks and pastries, vegetarian dishes, dairy products, and products assembled from starches (Shinoda 1974, 198–216). Many of the recipes come from Mongol and other sources, adding cultural diversity to Chinese cooking repertoires. Yet another value of this work is that it records recipes from the Song period for which the name but not the recipe had appeared in earlier sources (Ren 1999, 874–875).

Begun in the Song but not published until the Yuan period, the Record of Miscellanies (Shilin guangji事林广记) is an encyclopedic anthology of quotations from other works with a notable section on food and drink. The Shilin guangji is valuable for having been compiled in the south of China, in contrast with the northern emphasis of the Jujia biyong. Climatic differences between the arid north and the water-rich south have caused the major patterns of Chinese food culture to always evolve separately in the north and the south. Like the northern Jujia biyong, the Shilin guangji provides recipes for products such as grain-based wines that are otherwise known only by name. The idiosyncrasies of the literary style and poor organization have resulted in this set of recipes garnering relatively less attention from scholars (Shinoda 1974, 218–219).

Presenting a medical approach to food, the Essentials of Diet (Yinshan zhengyao 飮膳正要) integrates the ideas of Chinese diet therapy literature with Mongolian knowledge and dietary practices. Compiled by Hu Sihui 忽思慧 (early fourteenth century), a dietary physician appointed by the Yuan court, the collection contains essays on medical theory concerning diet, sections with recipes, and sections with medical characterizations of various foodstuffs, including, for example, domesticated and wild animals. The entire collection has been admirably translated and analyzed by Paul Buell and Eugene Anderson in their book, A Soup for the Qan.

The Dietary System of the Cloud Forest Hall (Yunlintang yinshi zhidu ji云林堂饮食制度集) is a set of recipes compiled by Ni Zan倪瓒 (1301–1374), an educated Chinese man who by the end of the Yuan had gained fame as a landscape painter. The recipes, just over fifty and without introduction, were collected in or near his hometown of Wuxi无锡 (in present-day Jiangsu), and thus have value for understanding the history of food in this region. For example, there are many recipes for fish, shrimp, crab, and shellfish (and one for jellyfish), but only six are for meat and they are all pork. Mutton is absent. The collection has recipes for wild vegetables and flour products, but no mention of rice or congee, suggesting that a portion of the collection may have been lost (Shinoda 1974, 225–226). What did survive shows a tendency to use sweet flavors, a trend that has continued in the food of the region even to the present (Ren 1999, 875). The collection has been translated to English (Anderson and Mair 2005).

Building Upon the Past in the Ming Dynasty

After many tumultuous years spent wresting power from the Mongol rulers, the culturally Chinese Ming dynasty established a new political order in the fourteenth century. Political tensions continued to trouble Ming society for some time, stifling literary output at the start of the period. Recipe collecting had reached a high level of maturity in the Yuan, so compilers of Ming recipes had a tendency to look back to Yuan models for inspiration, often copying old recipes into new works and then building these up with additional material.

The first major Ming recipe compilation, the Capacity with Humble Chores (Duoneng Bishi 多能鄙事) by one of the ministers who helped found the Ming dynasty, Liu Ji刘基 (1311–1375), is largely extracted from the Yuan Jujia biyong, with very little original work. Similarly, the Profound Book of the Slender Hermit (Quxian shenyin shu臞仙神隐书) by Zhu Quan朱权 (1378–1448), seventeenth son of the founding emperor of the Ming, likewise borrows heavily from the Jujia biyong (Shinoda 1974, 245–247). In 1456, Emperor Daizong of the Ming dynasty even ordered the Yinshan zhengyao carved again to woodblocks for reprinting (Shinoda 1974, 251). Thus, recipe collecting became in the Ming a cumulative tradition, with older works still circulating and later collections often repeating recipes from earlier collections.

Despite the tendency to borrow heavily from predecessors, Ming compilers did sometimes add new recipes alongside the existing ones and Ming authors produced many writings that fill out our picture of Ming food practices. The best descriptive sources include travelogues and popular literature, especially the erotic Ming novel The Golden Lotus (Jinpingmei 金瓶梅), which is overflowing with minutely detailed descriptions of Ming foods. In the field of medicine, Li Shizhen李时珍 (1518–1593) contributed to understanding the therapeutic potentials of foodstuffs as part of his massive revision of knowledge on Chinese medical materials; his Compendium of Materia Medica (Bencao gangmu本草纲目) was completed in 1578 (Anderson 1988, 105–106; Anderson 2014, 250–251). Literary activities increased in quality and quantity during the sixteenth century, leaving us a rich set of sources for understanding Ming food cultures, even if the underlying motivation behind recipe collecting remained compilation rather than innovation.

With a preface from 1504, the Cultivation of Life in the Song Clan (Songshi zunsheng 宋氏尊生) is the food and beverage section of the family code (jiagui 家規) for a prominent family in Jiangsu. The Songshi zunsheng mostly deals with alcoholic beverages, vinegars, sauces, and fruit preservation, omitting dishes for the table. Showing a similar pattern of borrowing from previous works, it nonetheless contains a wealth of information on local Jiangsu recipes, integrating these with methods from the north of China (Shinoda 1974, 251–252).

The Ideas Left by Yi Ya (Yi ya yiyi 易牙遗意) illustrates the complexity of dating some Chinese recipe collections (for information on Yi Ya, see Sterckx 2011, 74–76). The compilation is attributed to Han Yi韩奕, who is thought to have lived during the end of the Yuan and start of the Ming. The extant text, however, does not have a preface by him, so we do not know when it was completed and began circulating––or even if the attribution is accurate. Zhou Lüjing 周履靖 (n.d.) included it in his large collection of reprints, the Yimen guangdu夷门广读, which was published during the Ming Wanli reign, between 1573 and 1610. Like other Ming recipe compilations, the Yi ya yiyi has some overlap (fifteen out of 155 recipes) with the Jujia biyong, but the phrasing in the recipes is so different as to suggest another source, or sources. On the other hand, the Yi ya yiyi also contains recipes copied directly from the Wushi zhongkui lu (Shinoda 1974, 254–255). Although dating remains a problem, the collection has much historical value and contains many refined and elaborate recipes, such as a recipe for carp, daidong jiangcu yu带冻姜醋鱼, with a total of sixty-seven procedures! The food of this collection represents the cooking of affluent households, and as a collection it stands on its own, rather than constituting part of a larger work (Ren 1999, 876; Shinoda 1974, 258–260).

Perhaps the most representative recipe collection from the Ming period is the Notes on Food, Drink, and Medicines (Yinzhuan fushi jian饮馔服食牋), compiled by Gao Lian 高濂 (1573–1620), a famous dramatist and poet. This is the culinary section of his larger work, the Eight Discourses on the Cultivation of Life (Zunsheng bajian尊生八笺) (Huang and Needham 2000, 130). With sections ranging from conventional foods and beverages to Daoist elixirs, in 432 headings, the collection is extremely rich. Gao Lian frames his recipes by means of an overarching theoretical concern with nourishing life (yangsheng养生), that is, with maximizing one’s vitality through careful use of food and medicine. He makes little distinction between medical and culinary recipes, and he intersperses theoretical statements with the recipes. The section on tea contains no recipes at all, only discussion. This in no way diminishes the value of the collection for culinary use, as reflected in the ninety-one recipes for wild vegetables, the fifty-eight recipes for sweets, the thirty-eight recipes for congee, and so forth. In contrast with the elaborate food of the Yi ya yiyi, this collection reflects a rural and more moderate approach to food, similar to that of the Song-period Shanjia qinggong (Ren 1999, 880–881).

Almost all of Gao Lian’s collection is drawn from earlier works stretching as far back as the Wushi zhongkui lu. There is virtually no original material. As with other compilers, Gao Lian copied recipes without attribution to the original sources, such that his readers would have had no way to know if the recipe was new or old, his original, or something collected elsewhere. Today we would call this plagiarism, but in Ming China this was the common practice for recipe collecting. Without the pioneering research of the Japanese food historian Shinoda Osamu, who took the time to compare recipes across different collections, we might assume more innovation than was actually taking place at the time. Readers of these Chinese recipe collections need to keep in mind that the presence of a recipe in a compilation does not necessarily mean that anyone of the time was preparing it, since it could merely have caught the attention of a scholar poring through a centuries-old recipe collection, and been included on a whim. We do well to remember that recipes are prescriptive, and not descriptive of actual historical practice (Shinoda 1974, 256–257).

That recipes contained within an encyclopedic work such as Gao Lian’s Zunsheng bajian would be copied and not collected anew makes more sense if we consider that such works resemble the Chinese “category book” (leishu类书), a literary genre of encyclopedic anthologies, topically organized. Such works are compilations made from existing sources, not newly authored works. Popular encyclopedias from the mid to late Ming (sixteenth to seventeenth centuries) show this trend as well, providing sections on foods and beverages that copied recipes from pre-existing sources. Examples include the Essential Preparations for Family Life (Jujia bibei居家必备) and the Illustrated Compilation for the Convenience of the People (Bianmin tuzuan 便民図纂). Another popular encyclopedia, the Erudite Topical Compilation (Bowen leizuan博闻类纂), has relatively more historical value for the study of recipes, since it relies less on earlier collections (Shinoda 1974, 260–261).

Integrating New Foods and Flavors in the Qing

Sweet potatoes arrived to Fuzhou, China, by 1593, in the late Ming (Shinoda 1974, 235). Toward the end of the Ming period and into the Qing (1644–1912), various New World crops entered China and were gradually integrated into agricultural practices. The sweet potato, which could grow in areas that rice could not, supported rural populations and came to symbolize the food of the poor. White potatoes gradually became abundant, and tomatoes appeared in the late nineteenth century. Maize became important as animal feed, especially, but also for human consumption. Peanuts provided a new source of protein and oil, and served as a new flavoring. Chili peppers joined other spicy flavorings and became the pepper of choice in several regional cuisines. Over the course of the Qing period, the food supply shifted region by region as agriculturalists adopted the new crops, affecting local eating practices (Anderson 1988, 115–116; Anderson 2014, 247–248).

Under the Manchu government of the Qing dynasty, literary activity flourished. Scholars continued to take interest in writing about food, and compilers of recipes looked to the past for models, as they had in the Ming. The Secrets of Exemplary Foods (Shixian hongmi食宪鸿秘) and Gu Zhong’s顾仲 (n.d.) Small Treatise on Nourishment (Yang xiaolu养小录) both drew upon Gao Lian’s Yinzhuan fushi jian and other earlier works as sources of recipes, while also adding original material. The Shixian hongmi, attributed to Zhu Yizun 朱彝尊 (1629–1709) but thought by some scholars to be the work of Wang Shizhen王士祯 (1634–1711), describes 450 recipes, including some with exotic ingredients such as bear paw and others for vegetarian faux meat dishes (Huang 2000, 130–131; Ren 1999, 885; Shinoda 1974, 325).

One set of recipes from the middle of the eighteenth century is valuable for being personally collected by the compiler, who also tried out the recipes in his own kitchen. The Memoir from the Garden of Awareness (Xingyuan lu醒园录) contains 139 recipes collected by the government official Li Hua’nan 李化楠 during his travels in the Jiangsu and Zhejiang region (eastern China south of the Yangzi River). His son, Li Tiaoyuan李调元 (1734–1803), an accomplished scholar and literary critic, edited the collection, wrote an introduction, and published it for his father. Only one recipe is familiar material that may have come from an earlier collection; otherwise the recipes are original (Huang 2000, 131; Shinoda 1974, 328–330). Thirty-eight recipes are from Sichuan, yet none of these yet utilize the spicy and numbing (mala 麻辣) flavor combination for which Sichuan cuisine is famous today. Chili peppers reached Sichuan in the eighteenth century, but at first the plants were treated as ornamentals and did not immediately catch on as a culinary ingredient (Wilkinson 2015, 457).

The most famous extant collection of recipes from the Qing period––if not for all periods of Chinese history––is by Yuan Mei 袁枚 (1716–1797), who one food historian describes as “the great eighteenth-century poet, literateur, and hedonist, who delighted in beautiful young people of both sexes as well as in food and drink.” He is also compared with the great French gastronomist, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (Anderson 1988, 120). His Recipes from the Garden of Contentment (Suiyuan shidan随园食单), published in 1792, contains a general discussion on cooking practices to avoid or adopt and descriptions of over three hundred recipes. Yuan Mei does not discuss food processing, but instead focuses on food for the table. His collection, translated to vernacular Chinese, is still popular in China today (e.g., Chen Weiming 2010). An English translation is also available as Recipes from the Garden of Contentment: Yuan Mei’s Manual of Gastronomy (2017).

Less well known than Yuan Mei’s work, The Harmonized Cauldron (Tiaoding ji调鼎集) is nonetheless the most comprehensive and magnificent collection to appear in the Qing. Historians disagree on the timing of its appearance. At least part of it may have begun circulating from the middle of the eighteenth century, but other parts do not seem to have been known until a century later. Some recipes are identical with ones in the Suiyuan shidan, raising questions regarding which compiler borrowed from the other. Anonymous and mysterious, the collection is also massive, describing about 2,700 recipes, including many on food-processing techniques. Despite its size, its organization is clear and allows easy searching based on the main ingredient. It includes recipes from a broad geographic range that includes most of eastern China, as well as Guangdong, Henan, Shaanxi, and the northeast provinces (Huang 2000, 131; Ren 1999, 889).

Modern Resources on Chinese Recipes

Recipe collecting in the Qing and post-imperial China produced an abundance of publications, which for lack of space cannot all be covered here. Notable trends after the Qing period include an interest in home cooking and also some vegetarian recipe collections, such as the Brief Outline of Vegetarian Foods (Sushi shuolüe素食说略) compiled by Xue Baochen薛宝辰 (1850–1926).

This survey of recipe collecting in China has touched on the major works of Chinese culinary history, but has left out some specialized genres, such as collections dealing with wine (jiupu酒谱), tea (chapu 茶谱), and congees (zhoupu 粥谱). Also passed over are texts on dietetics that fall more on the medical than culinary side of recipe collecting, and recipes embedded in the published writings of prominent intellectuals, such as Su Shi (1037–1101) of the Northern Song.

Several modern publications are especially helpful for the study of Chinese recipes. The publisher Zhongguo shangye chubanshe中国商业出版社issued in the 1980s some well-edited reprints of historical recipe collections, under the series title Zhongguo pengren guji congkan中国烹饪古籍丛刊. Some of the volumes in this series include translation into modern Mandarin Chinese and extensive notes on the original text. A useful overview of all aspects of Chinese cooking that includes a section with historical recipes is the Chinese Food Canon (Zhongguo shijing中国食经), a corporate work from 1999 with Ren Baizun 任百尊 as chief editor. This work presents a selection of famous recipes for stews, meat, and fish dishes first by historical period (pp. 341–397) and then by geographical region (pp. 397–482). A second selection of recipes covers starch-based dishes such as noodles and breads, first by historical period (pp. 483–503) and then by region (pp. 503–583). These recipes include examples from some of China’s minority groups. A reference work with an even larger selection of reproduced recipes is the Dictionary of Chinese Cooking (Zhongguo pengren cidian中国烹饪词典), a corporate work with Xiao Fan萧帆as chief editor. In addition to functioning as a dictionary, it also lists around five thousand recipes by historical period, as well as over four hundred recipes from Chinese minority groups (Wilkinson 2015, 464–465). A collection of celebrated recipes that is more practical than scholarly is the 2008 Dictionary of Famous Chinese Dishes (Zhongguo mingcai cidian 中国名菜辞典), edited by Li Zhaoxia 李朝霞, which contains about three thousand recipes organized by major ingredient.

Further Reading 

• Anderson, E. N. (1990). The food of China. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• Anderson, E. N. (2014). Food and environment in early and medieval China. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Anderson, E. N., & Mair, Victor. (2005). Ni Zan, Cloud Forest Hall collection of rules for drinking and eating. In Victor H. Mair, Nancy S. Steinhardt, & Paul R. Goldin (Eds.), Hawai’i reader in traditional Chinese culture (pp. 444–455). Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
• Arthur, Shawn. (2013). Early Daoist dietary practices: Examining ways to health and longevity. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
• Buell, Paul D., & Anderson, E. N. (2010). A soup for the Qan: Chinese dietary medicine of the Mongol Era as seen in Hu Sihui’s Yinshan zhengyao: Introduction, translation, commentary, and Chinese text (2nd Rev. Ed). Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill.
• Chang, Kwang-chih. (Ed.). (1977). Food in Chinese culture: Anthropological and historical perspectives. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• Freeman, Michael. (1977). Sung. In Kwang-chih Chang & E. N. Anderson (Eds.), Food in Chinese culture: Anthropological and historical perspectives (pp. 141–192). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• Harper, Donald J. (1997). Early Chinese medical literature: The Mawangdui medical manuscripts. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Huang, Hsing-Tsung. (2000). Biology and biological technology: Fermentations and food science (Vol. 6, Part V). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Kohn, Livia. (2010). Daoist dietetics: Food for immortality. Dunedin, FL: Three Pines Press.
• Lo, Vivienne, & Barrett, Penelope. (2005). Cooking up fine remedies: On the culinary aesthetic in a sixteenth-century Chinese Materia Medica. Medical History, 49(4), 395–422.
• Mote, Frederick W. (1977). Yüan and Ming. In Kwang-chih Chang (Ed.), Food in Chinese culture: Anthropological and historical perspectives (pp. 193–258). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• Nakamura Takashi 中村喬. (1995). Chūgoku no shokufu 中国の食譜. (594). Tokyo: Heibonsha.
• Ren Baizun 任百尊. (Ed.). (1999). Zhongguo shijing 中国食经. Shanghai: Shanghai wenhua chubanshe.
• Shinoda, Osamu 篠田統. (1974). Chūgoku shokumotsu shi 中国食物史. Tokyo: Shibata Shoten.
• Shi Shenghan 石聲漢, & Jia Sixie 賈思勰. (2009). Qimin yaoshu jin shi 齊民要術今釋. Beijing: Zhonghua shu ju.
• Shih Shenghan 石聲漢. (1958). A preliminary survey of the book Ch’i Min Yao Shu. Peking: Science Press.
• Sterckx, Roel. (Ed.). (2005). Of tripod and palate: Food, politics and religion in traditional China. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Sterckx, Roel. (2011). Food, sacrifice, and sagehood in early China. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Waley-Cohen, Joanna. (2007). The quest for perfect balance: Taste and gastronomy in Imperial China. In Paul Freedman (Ed.), Food: The history of taste (pp. 98–133). Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Wilkinson, Endymion P. (2001). Chinese culinary history. China Review International, 8(2), 285–304.
• Wilkinson, Endymion P. (2015). Chinese history: A new manual (Rev. ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center.
• Xiao Fan 萧帆. (Ed.). Zhongguo pengren cidian 中国烹饪辞典. Shanghai: Zhongguo shangye chubanshe.
• Yao Weijun 姚伟钧: Liu Pubing 刘朴兵: & Ju Mingku 鞠明库. (2011). Zhongguo yinshi dianji shi 中国饮食典籍史. Zhao Rongguang 赵荣光. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe.
• Yuan Mei 袁枚. (2017). Recipes from the garden of contentment: Yuan Mei’s manual of gastronomy (Sean J.S. Chen, Trans.). Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing Group.

Abstract: Variations in cuisine among the Tibetan minority of China are due in part to environmental diversity. Different ecologies yielded varied adaptive strategies of resource use (economies), and resulted in three main types of food production: pastoralism, agriculture, and a mixed economy with both kinds of production. These strategies in turn affect the type of food raised, and consequently consumed. Core foods include tsampa (roasted barley flour), and milk products such as yogurt, cheese, and butter.

Citation:  Anderson, et al. (2021). Encyclopedia of Sustainability (2nd edition). Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing Group.

DOI: 10.47462/941258504

Keywords: Tibetan cuisine; pastoralism in Tibet; agriculture in Tibet; tsampa; yak products; ecological diversity; Tibetan butter tea

Any figures or illustrations or illustrations included here are not finalized for publication. Advance publication date as per post date. Copyright Berkshire Publishing Group.

Back to list of Advance Articles

Tibetan Cuisine

Denise M. Glover, University of Puget Sound

The diversity of cuisines among the Tibetan-speaking population of China reflects in large part local ecologies, and the economies that developed from those environments. Tibetan-dominant areas are on the western and southwestern stretches of the current People’s Republic of China (PRC) and include the Tibetan Autonomous Region as well as parts of Qinghai, Sichuan, Gansu, and Yunnan provinces. The ecological range of these areas includes glacial mountain peaks, high-altitude grasslands, forests, and river valleys. Rainfall is extremely variable, and latitudinal range is between approximately 27° to 39° north.

Three main economies developed in Tibetan-speaking areas: pastoralism, agriculture, and a mixed economy with both pastoralist and agriculturalist features. Agriculture developed in some of the river valleys in central and southern Tibet, and pastoralism reached its apex in the Changthang, or northern plains of the Tibetan Plateau, where nomads survive almost strictly on animal products (and some grain obtained in trade). While most areas inhabited by Tibetans in the PRC have a common component of high elevation (ranging between several thousand to above 10,000 feet), differences in rainfall, soil type, arable land, and naturally occurring flora and fauna have created a mosaic of ecologies, and therefore adaptive strategies of resource use. Mixed economies, agriculturally-based ones, and those economies more pastoralist in orientation may exist in close proximity, due to extreme environmental variations across the landscape. These conditions have resulted in both biological as well as cultural and linguistic diversity, even as some central elements of culture, language, and economy maintain a common thread of Tibetan identity.

In agriculturally based Tibetan settlements such as the Lhasa valley, and in areas with mixed economics (such as southern Khams, or northwestern Yunnan Province and western/southwestern Sichuan Province), use of other non-bovine meat such as pork and chicken, and farmed vegetables, including potatoes, radishes, and mustard, has been prevalent for some time. Additionally in these areas, Tibetan cuisine especially includes wheat-based products such as momos, dumplings stuffed with meat and vegetable filling; thukpa, noodle soup with meat and vegetables, and various types of flatbreads and buns. Buckwheat and millet are also farmed in places, and dishes such as pancakes are made from these grains.

Of course, trade of consumables has existed for thousands of years, and so dried fruits (particularly raisins) and various herbs and spices from South Asia and southern China have been part of Tibetan cuisines for centuries. Trade and other contact with various ethnic groups has influenced Tibetan cuisine, as is typical of inter-cultural contact in many realms. Thus, rice is commonly consumed among many populations of Tibetans in the PRC, particularly those in urban settings. A sweet rice (with sugar, dried fruit, and butter) is sometimes prepared for Tibetan New Year’s celebrations. In some areas, such as in the Ü-Gstang region (TAR), the influence of South Asian cuisine is obvious, as various forms of curry and use of Indian spices (such as turmeric, cardamom, various forms of chile) exists. In addition, Western food (pizza, fried chicken, hamburgers) can be found in many urban Tibetan areas, mostly in restaurants.

Key Cultural Foods

Core foods of Tibetan-speaking populations include meat of the yak, Bos grunniens, or that of yak-cattle crossbreeds, mutton, tsampa (roasted barley flour), and milk products such as yogurt and cheese, made mainly from bovines. The preparation of yak meat can vary, with freeze-dried being more common in the drier regions such as Ü-Gtsang and Dö (in the current Tibetan Autonomous Region). In all regions, yak meat is also braised in stews and often stir-fried, or ground/chopped small enough to be put into pastries or made into meatballs. In pastoralist regions, mutton (of goat and/or sheep) is cooked much the same way as yak or beef, although there is at least one New Year’s dish that uses the cooked head of a sheep (cooked yak skulls are not common).

The importance of tsampa (roasted barley flour) cannot be overstated; this is a staple food and it is consumed in both agricultural and pastoral regions—in many ways it is a unifying foodstuff for Tibetans. Harvested barley grain (Hordeum sp.) is first roasted. There are several ways to achieve this: directly over fire in a wok or frying pan, or through mixing with heated sand in a threshing basket (said to result in less burning). Then the grain is ground into a fine flour. It is sometimes eaten straight as dry flour, but more often is mixed into a dough with butter tea (explained below). Tsampa is also sometimes used ceremonially (offerings are in the form of sprinkling pinches of flour into the air); and during festivals tsampa is often thrown in jest into the air and at revelers.

The types of cheese vary, being sour and soft in some regions and slightly more hard and piquant in others. The cheeses are of course affected by local bacteria, so that variations can be quite marked region to region. But even within one region, soft cheese is made with fresh milk while hard cheeses require some aging. Some cheeses are smoked over hearth fires in cone-shaped forms to cure. Yogurt and butter, being other important dairy products, are also key ingredients in Tibetan recipes and for cooking.

In many ways, these foods reflect the centrality of economies with key pastoralist components adapted to high elevation: bovine herds, adapted to high elevation, and their products supplemented with the grain barley, which grows well at high elevations. These are also symbolic foods, closely connected to Tibetan identity, particularly as it is distinct from the identity of the ethnic majority population of China, the Han Chinese.

Throughout all Tibetan-speaking areas of China, butter tea is a key component of the cuisine. This specialty uses black tea of the Yunnan region mixed with butter made from dri yak milk (dri is the female yak). In general, butter tea is mixed in a small churn, usually made of wood (or bamboo), similar to a butter churn but smaller in size. In many areas, salt and sometimes cream are added to the tea so that it is rather more like a soup. Tsampa is often mixed into the last few spoonfuls of a cup of butter tea, to make a dough-like ball of barley flour that is then consumed. Many Tibetans consume a lot of butter tea. The history of the tea trade is a fascinating one, demonstrating that trade in material goods is this region is ancient. Salt, collected high on the Tibetan plateau, was also a key good traded for many centuries. The salt trek is still an important event for many Tibetan communities; one wonders how the chic trend of using Himalayan salt in Euro-American cooking has effected this trade.

Tibetan beer, or chang, is traditionally made from barley (sometimes rice or millet) grain that is fermented. Variations on preparation include a kind of “instant” beer—putting the fermented grain directly into a container and pouring water over it, it can be drunk within hours or days—to anaerobic fermentation of the barley grain in an air-tight container. At present there are new forms of beer being made in Tibetan areas (for example, in Shangri-la) modeled on German beer-making that have changed the meaning of “Tibetan beer.” Arag is hard alcohol, also traditionally made from barley (or other grains). This is not a central component of Tibetan cuisine, but many families have some arag on hand for important occasions.

Food Preparation

In most Tibetan homes, cooking has traditionally been on wood fired stoves or directly over open wood fire. In fact, it is common to find fires burning in Tibetan hearths day and night, throughout much of the year. If wood is not available (as is the case in some of the less forested tracks of Tibetan lands), dung or coal are used. Some foods, such as potatoes, are sometimes cooked directly in coals, but most food is cooked in pots or woks made of various metals. Animal fat (obtained after butchering), butter, and oil made from pressed mustard seeds are used as cooking oils. As with many other foods of Asia, most Tibetan foods are prepared in bite-sized chunks so that knives are seldom needed at the table. Exceptions to this might include meat consumption in nomadic areas, where meat is sometimes served in large pieces. Vegetables are nearly always eaten cooked (seldom raw), and the use of chopsticks is most common. Wooden or metal bowls are used, and food is served “family style” on plates from which to fill one’s own bowl or eat from directly. Meat and vegetables are boiled, braised, or stir-fried. Refrigeration has traditionally not been an issue, with the majority of Tibetan areas being in cool places, but food was sometimes stored underground to keep cool. The majority of daily cooking has traditionally been done by women, but some of this is changing, especially in urban areas. Professional cooks, on the other hand, have tended to be men more often.

Tibetan hot pot is a popular dish for social gatherings. It consists of a specially designed pot, often made of copper or sometimes earthen-ware, with a chimney in the center. Coal or another source of heat is used underneath the pot (hence the need for a chimney) while the pot itself holds soup, meat, vegetables, noodles, and herbs. As with other hotpots of northeast Asia, the food cooks table-side in the pot as diners fish out cooked food. There is much overlap with other forms of hotpot, although Tibetans maintain that their form is unique, partly based on the design of the pot.

Ethics of Food

Food ethics in Tibetan culture begin with proper slaughtering of animals (if meat is consumed), which includes saying prayers for the animal’s successful rebirth and giving thanks to the animal for its life. In a largely Buddhist culture, where handling of dead bodies is seen as somewhat problematic and polluting, butchers are generally accepted as taking on the “dirty work” to help others obtain necessary nutrition. In some areas of Tibet, such as on the high plains of the Changthang where average elevation is 16,000 feet and little can grow, survival on animal products is practically the only option. Prayers are often said before consuming any kind of food (plant or animal in nature). Table manners include these prayers as well as being respectful of age and social ranking when beginning to eat, allowing guests and those of high rank to help themselves to food first. Belching after eating is considered a sign of satisfaction.

Areas in the southern stretch of the Tibetan-speaking world (northwestern Yunnan Province, southwestern Sichuan Province—the areas that constitute much of the area known in Tibetan as the Khams region) are affected by summer monsoons from the Indian Ocean. This, combined with low latitude in the northern hemisphere and undulations in elevation, has created hotspots of biological diversity. This means that the naturally occurring flora (and fauna) available for consumption, as food and medicine, is perhaps most diverse in this area compared to other Tibetan regions. In this region, consumption of rhododendron flowers occurs, for example (rhododendrons are profuse in this ecology). Additionally, in some of these regions rice and even citrus trees are able to grow. A large percentage of key medicinal plants for Tibetan medicine as well as Chinese medicine comes from this region; most are wild-harvested, many in high-altitude environs highly susceptible to climate change and overharvesting.

Fish and crustaceans are traditionally not eaten by Tibetans. This can in part be explained by the location of Tibetan areas, far from ocean shores. And yet fresh-water fish (traditionally abundant in lakes and rivers) are seldom eaten. Various reasons have been given for this avoidance, including religious ones (most Tibetans are Buddhist and while not strict vegetarians, consumption of small-bodied animals is less desirable since more animal lives must be taken to feed the same number of humans) as well as religious-environmental (some Tibetans practice human water burial and worry that eating food from waterways could be polluting or dangerous). Other small animals available in the environment (rabbit, marmot, wild birds) are not commonly eaten either, again the reason being a Buddhist concern for excessive killing.

Food and Medicine

As in many traditional systems, the distinction between food and medicine in Tibetan culture is not sharply drawn. Foods are commonly known to have properties recognized for healing and balancing of the three humors (wind, bile, phlegm) and the five elements (earth, water, fire, air, and space) in the human body. Many common householders know that certain foods contain “heating” properties, and others “cooling” properties. A meal is sometimes planned based on knowing what some of the health needs of family members might be. People are also aware of the medicinal value of certain plants that can be gathered in their local environment, and often families keep a stash of wild-gathered herbs for medicinal purposes. In the practice of Tibetan medicine, a key point of diagnosis from the doctor’s perspective is to learn about the food and drink one’s patient has been consuming. A key for treatment includes adjustments made to the patient’s diet, in accordance to the healing principles spelled out in the medical system. Thus, the first line of “defense” in dealing with illness in the Tibetan medical tradition is to address diet.

Further Reading 

• Barstow, Geoffrey. (2018). Food of sinful demons: Meat, vegetarianism, and the limits of Buddhism in Tibet. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Dondon, Yeshi. (1986). Health through balance: An introduction to Tibetan medicine. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications.
• Dondon, Yeshi. (2000). Healing from the source: The science and lore of Tibetan medicine. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications.
• Dorje, Rinjing. (1985). Food in Tibetan life. London, UK: Prospect Books.
• Glover, Denise M. (2007). The land of milk and barley: Medicinal plants, staple foods, and discourses of subjectivity in Rgyalthang. In Mona Schrempf (Ed.), Soundings in Tibetan Medicine: Historical and anthropological perspectives. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill Publishers.
• Goldstein, Melyvn, & Cynthia M. Beall. (1990). Nomads of western Tibet: The survival of a way of life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
• Stein, Rolf A. (1972). Tibetan civilization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• Taring, Rinchen Dolma. (1986). Daughter of Tibet: The autobiography of Rinchen Taring Dolma. London, UK:Wisdom Publications.

Abstract: China’s diverse industrial sector is the driving force of the nation’s post-1978 economic “miracle.” While conditions will change in the coming decades as nations in South and Southeast Asia and Africa with lower cost labor and land make inroads, China remains a vibrant manufacturing sector that must be credited with both the nation’s new-found prosperity and growing role on the world stage.

Citation: Brown (2022). Berkshire Encyclopedia of China. Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing.

DOI: 10.47462/228148377

Keywords:

Any figures or illustrations or illustrations included here are not finalized for publication. Advance publication date as per post date. Copyright Berkshire Publishing Group.

Back to list of Advance Articles

Industry in China

Gregory Veeck, Western Michigan University

China’s drive to become the “factory to the world” is a remarkable story. In 1980, 48.2 percent of China’s very small annual gross domestic product (GDP) of 364.5 billion yuan (US$58.8 billion) was derived from the secondary sector (industry and construction). As of 2016, this share dropped by less than ten percentage points to 39.8 percent despite the fact that overall economic output, as measured by GDP adjusted for inflation to constant prices, expanded an astounding 204 times to 74.4 trillion yuan ($11.61 trillion) (National Bureau of Statistics 2017, 4) (see Figure 1). By way of comparison, in 2016, the share of the United States’ GDP credited to manufacturing was 20.7 percent (Statistics Times 2018).

Far and away, China has the largest share of GPD derived from manufacturing of any nation on earth. Over the same time period, the share of GDP derived from China’s primary sector (agriculture and mining) declined from 30.2 percent in 1980 to just 8.6 percent in 2016 (the US primary sector accounts for 1.6 percent of GDP) as the tertiary sector including retail, banking, government, medical, and real estate grows as China transitions to a post-industrial economy. The nation’s economic boom, however, averaging above 8 percent annual growth in GDP over the past four decades, must be credited largely to expansion and innovation within the manufacturing sector. It is the nation’s dramatic rise in both manufacturing productivity and exports that made possible both higher wages and new aspirations of the growing urban middle class. The benefits of a rapidly expanded manufacturing sector, then, extend far beyond the factory gate. China’s society, culture, and economy have all been transformed, with the transformation funded by industrial revenues and wages.

HERE < Figure 1> China’s gross national product and share from industry, 1978–2017 National Bureau of Statistics 2017, table 3-1, 56)

Virtually all of China’s growth in manufacturing occurred within the past four decades, with an overwhelming share of production still concentrated in the most prosperous coastal provinces. Of course, as might be expected given this rapid pace of growth, the industrial sector faces many significant challenges including glaring needs for more effective environmental controls, systematic anti-corruption ordinances—especially in state-owned manufacturing firms, fair-labor regulations and pension assurances, standards addressing uneven product quality and safety, and regulations and enforcements related to the protection of intellectual property.

As the manufacturing sector has expanded both in absolute terms and geographically, typical opinions of citizens have shifted significantly from what might be summarized as “growth at all costs” attitudes of the early 1980s when higher wages seemingly trumped all other concerns, to a more conflicted view of manufacturing that incorporates concerns related to environmental quality, consumer rights, product safety, “quality of life” for factory workers, and even social equity. Leadership in China’s manufacturing sector—once challenged only to raise output and revenues year after year—now face more complex conditions where diverse economic, environmental, and social goals must be met even as firms must successfully compete in an increasingly competitive global marketplace.

A Brief History of Manufacturing in China

China’s industrial history is, in relative terms, surprisingly complicated given its relative brevity. Manufacturing in China concentrated largely on the same products produced for millennia—salt, soy, wines and spirits, sugar, tea, cotton cloth, wool, silk, and porcelain. The technical transformations that revolutionized Europe’s social, economic, military, and political relations in the 1700s did not occur in China until the twentieth century. The reasons for this are complex. There was no shortage of technical or “scientific” understanding and competence, but inventions with potential mercantile applications were not adapted for such in China as they were in Europe and later in North America and Japan. Fundamental understanding of chemistry, physics, and metallurgy in classical China rivaled or exceeded that of Europe in the early 1700s (Needham 1981). This knowledge led to many industrial and commercial applications in Europe (invention to innovation), but for China, a similar “industrial revolution” simply did not occur (Elvin 1973, 297). Shortages of capital and strong central government monopolistic control over the most profitable manufactured goods such as salt, silk, tea, ceramics, and metal goods may partly explain these different trajectories.

During the late dynastic era, most existing industries in China, such as silk and porcelain manufacture, salt and tea production, and food processing (rice mills or vegetable oil-pressing plants), were owned by local elites but closely monitored and taxed by departments within the imperial court bureaucracy. Exports of the most lucrative products, such as silk, tea, and porcelain, were also taxed but sales were further controlled by quotas established by the court and transacted by a limited number of licensed firms that paid for the right to participate in the trade. This system of strict if sporadic control promoted smuggling and limited local initiative for innovation (Braudel 1986, 586).

The political scientist Lucian Pye (1972, 82) argues that capitalism was further limited by arbitrary taxation and excessive regional tariffs (liken) levied as goods moved from one region to the next, discouraging regional trade. The sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein (1976) also notes problems associated with strict court regulation and a largely agrarian economy, but emphasizes a highly stratified social system that limited the rise of a merchant class (in contrast to the mobility initially enabled by European guildhalls and private lenders).

Before 1949, manufacturing efforts in most areas of China often concentrated on small-scale local agro-processing of the consumer products noted above. A major turning point came after the first Opium War (1839–1842) with the advent of the “unequal treaties” period. As foreign governments and businesses occupied coastal areas beginning in the 1840s, output of manufactures such as textiles, tea, glass, and porcelain increased dramatically as the imperial monopolies were broken and foreign firms established larger factories beyond the control of the Qing imperial court and local elites operating as agents of the often-dysfunctional court. Profits from manufacture of these traditional products were siphoned off by foreign speculators rather than reinvested to improve product quality, production efficiency, or diversification into new consumer goods as was occurring in the West at the same time. As a consequence of these conditions, the quality of manufactures and the way they were produced in China remained largely unchanged for much of the hundred plus years from 1840 to 1949.

The dominant role of the foreign powers in controlling China’s early industrial history is quite surprising to most non-Chinese, but also helps explain Chinese antipathy for this era when China was not, in reality, a genuinely independent nation. In 1910, more than 80 percent of Chinese shipping, 30 percent of cotton-yarn spinning, 90 percent of the rail network, and 100 percent of iron production was under foreign control. Under foreign influence, concentration of Chinese industries, including textiles, developed in the Yangzi (Chang) River valley and coastal “Jiangnan” (southern Jiangsu and northern Zhejiang provinces). These regions, together with Shanghai, accounted for more than half of China’s industrial output as late as 1937. Even at the present time, Jiangnan, a triangle of land with Shanghai, Nanjing, and Hangzhou at its points, remains among the most prosperous regions in all of China. In geographic and historical terms, the present is always heavily influenced by the past.

This eastern concentration of capital, technology, and low-cost transport formed during the unequal treaty period represents an important legacy to the present. In the 1930s, the coastal “treaty port” cities of Shanghai, Tianjin, Qingdao, Hangzhou, Suzhou, Beijing, Nanjing, and Wuxi accounted for around 94 percent of the total industrial output of China exclusive of the areas the Japanese controlled in northeastern China. This second industrial base is a legacy of Japanese occupation from 1905 to the end of World War II. Resource-poor Japan controlled the puppet state of Manchukuo (modern day Northeast China or Manchuria), and invested heavily in ore and fuel extraction and ferrous metal production to support the rapid military expansion of the Japanese army and Empire.

New China and Industrial Development: 1949

Immediately after independence in 1949, following the Soviet collective model and encouraged by Soviet advisers before relations with the Soviet Union soured in the mid-1950s, the Chinese central government took the lead role in determining the priorities of China’s industrial sector. New state-owned factories were opened or expanded with priority going to the construction of heavy industry including iron and steel mills, machine tool and die plants, construction material plants, and mining- or metallurgy-related processing plants. In part this was dictated by the perceived needs of the military. Over 80 percent of the nation’s total value of government investment in manufacturing during this period was dedicated to heavy industry. Further, in an effort to counter pre-1949 “unequal treaties”-era investment patterns, approximately 55 percent of total investment and approximately 75 percent of all monies invested in plant construction were allocated to inland areas—in an effort to improve economic conditions in these areas vis-à-vis the wealthier coastal provinces, but also to counter potential losses of production due to an anticipated coastal invasion by joint US/Republic of China (ROC) forces. Many new interior industrial centers that remain prominent to the present grew quickly during this time, including Baotou, Wuhan, Lanzhou, Taiyuan, Xi’an, and Liuzhou.

Few goals of the Eighth Congress of the Communist Party of China, convened in September 1956, were as touted or radical as the introduction of a national plan for super-accelerated industrialization that became known as “the Great Leap Forward.” China’s leadership estimated that three five-year plans would be needed to fully industrialize the nation to the Western standard. As a consequence of these plans, the disastrous Great Leap Forward was introduced in 1958 with the slogan “Twenty years in a day.” In addition to the introduction of the commune system borrowed from agriculture, industrial growth was theoretically to be ensured through local production such as the use of “backyard” furnaces for the small-scale production of pig iron, which then could be further processed in centralized mills or cold worked into farm implements and construction steel.

Unfortunately, despite noble goals, the Great Leap Forward was an unprecedented disaster. All Chinese, urban and rural, grew angry and disenchanted in the face of extreme hardship and mass starvation in many areas. The output from most of the new factories turned out to be of such poor quality as to be useless, but so great was the fear of local officials of punishment that they did not report their reservations or findings until it was too late. Trying to improve efficiency might get a factory manager accused of being a member of one of the “Five Black Categories” (landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists), or even worse a “capitalist-roader” (i.e., a communist party member with corrupt capitalist ideals or goals). The program, conspiring with two years of drought, and subsequent famine, resulted in an estimated 20 to 30 million deaths. Industry fell even further behind Western standards for product quality and best practice as all resources were devoted to mitigating the disaster this degree of central planning had wrought.

In response to the myriad tragedies of the Great Leap, the Communist Party of China (CPC) identified and implemented some fundamental policy changes, giving manufacturing a new focus. Agriculture, was once again described as “the foundation of the national economy” in government documents and assigned top priority for development, as the need for reliable food supplies for all, urban and rural, was clearly understood after the nation-wide catastrophe. New investments in industry were based on pragmatic and cautious planning (“Learn Truth from Facts” was a popular slogan), with a greater emphasis given to those sectors that could support agricultural development and food production. As a consequence, industrial investment shifted from heavy industry production to light manufactures and food—policies that largely remained in place until the 1980s, excepting the transport and energy sectors.

China’s economic development has always been closely linked to domestic political events, an association that, in hindsight, has particularly caused problems with the nation’s industrial development. Economic decisions always have political contexts, but the rapid-fire shifts in government policies and investment from 1949 to 1976 certainly helps explain the nation’s mercurial path to successful industrialization. After the death of Mao Zedong, and the arrest and imprisonment of the Gang of Four, the Cultural Revolution ended and the Four Modernizations program championed earlier by Deng Xiaoping was finally implemented by way of the many policies rolled out beginning in December 1978, with almost continuous experimentation and adjustment to the present. These reforms, broadly referred to as “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” have brought China to the center of the world stage in a mere four decades, with the greatest growth after China joined the WTO in 2001 (Figure 1).

The Industrial Sector in Contemporary China

In 2018, dozens of high-quality, low-cost Chinese products are found in every American home, and in many other nations throughout the world. Conventionally, industrial production is divided into two categories (heavy and light). Heavy industry is what the name implies: heavy products (in terms of weight) that require high capital inputs and have high start-up costs for their manufacture—iron, steel, concrete, glass, chemicals. Light industry represents “white goods” (household linens but also standard household appliances, such as stoves and refrigerators which traditionally were sold only in the color white), clothing, food, and small electronics including cellular telephones.

The different history for the two types effectively illustrates China’s hybrid public-private state-led economy that often inadvertently draws criticism from companies from capitalist nations seeking a “level playing field” in global trade arrangements. State investment and involvement is greatest in China’s heavy industries and the energy sector—and critics argue this involvement of the state, by way of subsidies, distorts production costs and represents an unfair advantage to Chinese firms when they sell these goods abroad. Heavy industrial products are sort of like a canary in a coal mine in that greater production and sales of these products reflect growth in other parts of the economy. Steady growth in the production of steel and cement reflect massive investments in housing, public space, military, and transportation infrastructure—investments often funded by the government—but increasingly part of non-government sectors of the economy as well. So, typically, when concrete and steel production increases, so do sales of cellular telephones (see Figure 2).

On the other hand, there is typically greater value added associated with light-manufacture products so multi-national firms find them more attractive for investment through private firms, “joint ventures” (co-ownership) or foreign funded firms (FDI). Light manufactures tend to be funded privately—and are far more exposed to market forces vis-a-vis heavy industries often heavily subsidized by the government. Global brands such as Boeing, Nike, Adidas, Duracell, Samsung, Ford, General Motors, Tabasco, Apple, and countless others have flocked to the China market, not only for lower land and labor costs, but also to assure successful penetration of the large domestic consumer markets. Aside from national and international brands that have their own factories or are supplied by the massive network of subsidiary or supplier firms in the supply chain, many new manufacturing firms start up every year. As the saying for light manufactures goes, “the big firms make the news, but the small firms make the products.” For example, in 2011, it was estimated that there were over 400,000 food processing firms in China, 90 percent of which were small operations (Shao 2013, 129). It has also been estimated that small-scale food enterprises with ten or fewer employees account for 70–77 percent of produced and processed food production in China (Chung and Wong 2013, 476).

Light manufacturing also links the nation’s factories, factory workers, retailers and wholesalers to the global economy. Few global-scale MNCs lack manufacturing and/or distribution ties with China. Production of consumer white goods, electronics, cloths, printed materials such as books and product instruction sheets, furniture and the like also increased very rapidly after 2000, and the domestic market of such a populous nation keep the factories humming even in the face of global economic downturns such as that from 2008 to 2012. The National Bureau of Statistics conducts an ownership survey of white goods each year. In 2016, there were 89.8 washing machines for every 100 households, 93.5 refrigerators/100, 120.8 televisions/100, 90.9 air conditioners/100, and 235.4/100 cell phones (National Bureau of Statistics 2017, 165). In 1980, for all of these products, equivalent values were all below 10 per 100 families. In China as in all other nations, domestic consumers play a central role in the economy. Higher wages in factories and greater productivity allow for the expansion of retail and service sectors, resulting in more jobs, more sales, and the growth of the tax base which allows expanded services and better schools for more people in more places.

Looking to the Future

China’s industrial products and exports constitute far more than household goods, shoes, clothing, toys, furniture, and consumer electronics. The country’s entry into high-end manufacturing was surprisingly swift and effective. The production of more sophisticated products, particularly advanced communications electronics, military equipment, high-speed computers, and computer components, has brought Chinese firms into fierce competition with leading manufacturers of these products throughout the world—and much earlier than expected. In 2016, China manufactured 314.2 million personal computers (90.6 percent of global annual total), an additional 174 million notebook PCs, and 173.65 million stand-alone monitors (National Bureau of Statistics 2017, 445). Many of China’s factories, especially those producing high-tech goods where the production process requires a sterile environment, state-of-the-art lighting, ventilation, and robotics as well as a highly educated workforce, are exact duplicates of equivalent factories in North America, the EU, Japan, or Korea. Most readers know that Apple iPhones are made in China by Foxconn and its 1.2 million employees, but they might be surprised to find that more of the estimated 150 million iPhones were purchased by consumers in China in 2016 than in the United States, and that much the work was completed by industrial robots so as to assure the highest production standards (Dowd 2014).

As production costs rise due to inflation, higher land rents, and higher costs of living, other developing nations will be able to undercut China’s factories producing light industrial goods. In anticipation of this, twenty years ago, Chinese industrial planners again pinpointed four main high-technology targets (for manufacture): computers, information technology, pharmaceuticals, and new materials (think carbon fiber materials, photovoltaic films). Firms in these areas are among the world’s leaders and state-funded laboratories working in these areas have proven indispensable for the subsequent manufacturing push (DIGITALEUROPE 2015). The coming decades will see more and more of China’s factories move from labor-intensive goods, such as shoes, clothing, furniture, housewares, and cell-phones, into these four areas with higher value added, profitability, and greater patent potential with longer patent duration.

Further Reading 

• Braudel, Fernand. (1986). The wheels of commerce: Vol. 2 of civilization and capitalism, 15th–18th century. New York: Harper and Row.
• Chung, Shan Shan, & Wong, Chris K. C. (2013). Regulatory and policy control on food safety in China. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 67(6), 476-477.
• Dowd, Reilly. (2014, July 14). Introducing the iPhone 6, made in China by a robot. The Week. Retrieved from http://theweek.com/articles/445394/introducing-iphone-6-made-china-by-robot
• Digital Europe. (2015, June). DIGITALEUROPE’s position on China market access issues, June. Retrieved May 30, 2018 from http://www.digitaleurope.org/DesktopModules/Bring2mind/DMX/Download.aspx?Command=Core_Download&EntryId=988&PortalId=0&TabId=353
• Elvin, Mark. (1973). The pattern of the Chinese past. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• National Bureau of Statistics. (2017). Zhongguo tongji nianjian 2017 [China statistical yearbook 2017]. Beijing: China Statistics Press.
• Needham, Joseph, (1981). Science in traditional China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Pye, Lucian W. (1972). China: An introduction. Boston, MA: Little, Brown.
• Shao, Y. (2013). Rethinking food safety problems in China. Acta Alimentaria, 42(1), 124–132.
• Statistics Times. (2018). List of countries by GDP sector composition. CIA Factbook. Retrieved from http://statisticstimes.com/economy/countries-by-gdp-sector-composition.php
• Wallerstein, Emmanuel. 1976. The modern world capitalist system: Capitalist agriculture and the origins of the European world-economy in the sixteenth century. New York: Academic Press.