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Culinary history of Pan China

The history of Chinese cuisine is marked by both variety and change. The archaeologist and scholar Kwang chih Chang says "Chinese people are especially preoccupied with food" and "food is at the center of, or at least it accompanies or symbolizes, many social interactions". Over the course of history, he says, "continuity vastly outweighs change." He explains basic organizing principles which go back to earliest times and give a continuity to the food tradition, principally that a normal meal is made up of grains and other starches and vegetable or meat dishes .

Not long after the expansion of the Chinese Empire during the Qin dynasty, Han writers noted the great differences in culinary practices among the different parts of their realm. These differences followed to a great extent the varying climates and availabilities of foodstuffs in China. Many writers tried their hands at classification, but since internal political boundaries over the centuries did not coincide with shifting cultural identities, there was no way to establish clear cut or enduring classifications or ranking of foods and cooking styles. Different ethnic groups might occupy only small areas, but their cuisines were included in systematic lists from early on. Certain broad categorizations are useful, however:

The primary and earliest distinction was between the earlier settled and relatively arid North China Plain and the rainier hill country south of the Yangtze River which were incorporated into the Chinese empire much later. First canals and now railroads and highways have blurred the distinction, but it remains true that rice predominates in southern cuisine and flour products (principally various noodles and dumplings) in the north.

Eventually, four of these branches were recognized as distinct Chinese schools themselves: Hunan's cuisine (called Xiang for its local river), Fujian's (called Min for its native people), Anhui's (abbreviated as Hui), and Zhejiang's (abbreviated as Zhe).

Although no reliable written sources document this era of Chinese history, archaeologists are sometimes able to make deductions about food preparation and storage based on site excavations. Sometimes artifacts and (very rarely) actual preserved foodstuffs are discovered. In October 2005, the oldest noodles yet discovered were located at the Lajia site near the upper reaches of the Yellow River in Qinghai. The site has been associated with the Qijia culture. Over 4,000 years old, the noodles were made from foxtail and broomcorn millet.

Legendary accounts of the introduction of agriculture by Shennong credit him for first cultivating the "Five Grains", although the lists vary and very often include seeds like hemp and sesame principally used for oils and flavoring. The list in the Classic of Rites comprises soybeans, wheat, broomcorn and foxtail millet, and hemp. The Ming encyclopedist Song Yingxing properly noted that rice was not counted among the Five Grains cultivated by Shennong because southern China had not yet been settled or cultivated by the Han, Commonly eaten fruits and vegetables included chestnuts, pears, plums, peaches, melons, apricots, red bayberries, jujubes, calabash, bamboo shoots, mustard greens, and taro. Domesticated animals that were also eaten included chickens, Mandarin ducks, pigs, geese, sheep, camels, and dogs. Turtles and fish were taken from streams and lakes. The owl, pheasant, magpie, sika deer, and Chinese bamboo partridge were commonly hunted and consumed. Seasonings included sugar, honey, salt and soy sauce. Beer and yellow wine were regularly consumed, although baijiu was not available until much later. During the Han dynasty, Chinese developed methods of food preservation for military rations during campaigns such as drying meat into jerky and cooking, roasting, and drying grain. Chinese legends claim that the roasted, flat italic=no bread was brought back from the Xiyu (the Western Regions, a name for Central Asia) by the Han dynasty General Ban Chao, and that it was originally known as barbarian pastry The italic=no is believed to be descended from the italic=no. Shaobing is believed to be related to the Persian and Central Asian naan and the Near Eastern pita. Central Asians made and sold sesame cakes in China during the Tang dynasty.

During the Southern and Northern Dynasties non Han people like the Xianbei of Northern Wei introduced their cuisine to northern China, and these influences continued up to the Tang dynasty, popularizing meat like mutton and dairy products like goat milk, yogurts, and kumis among even Han people. It was during the Song dynasty that Han Chinese developed an aversion to dairy products and abandoned the dairy foods introduced earlier. The Han Chinese rebel Wang Su, who received asylum in the Xianbei Northern Wei after fleeing from Southern Qi, at first could not stand eating dairy products like goat's milk and meat like mutton and had to consume tea and fish instead, but after a few years he was able to eat yogurt and lamb, and the Xianbei Emperor asked him which of the foods of China (Zhongguo) he preferred, fish versus mutton and tea versus yogurt. 280 recipes are found in the Jia Sixie's text the Qimin Yaoshu.

The fascination with exotics from the diverse range of the Tang empire and the search for plants and animals which promoted health and longevity were two of the factors encouraging diversity in Tang dynasty diet. During the Tang, the many common foodstuffs and cooking ingredients in addition to those already listed were barley, garlic, salt, turnips, soybeans, pears, apricots, peaches, apples, pomegranates, jujubes, rhubarb, hazelnuts, pine nuts, chestnuts, walnuts, yams, taro, etc. The various meats that were consumed included pork, chicken, lamb (especially preferred in the north), sea otter, bear (which was hard to catch, but there were recipes for steamed, boiled, and marinated bear), and even Bactrian camels. Some foods were also off limits, as the Tang court encouraged people not to eat beef (since the bull was a valuable draft animal), and from 831 to 833 Emperor Wenzong of Tang banned the slaughter of cattle on the grounds of his religious convictions to Buddhism. From the trade overseas and over land, the Chinese acquired golden peaches from Samarkand, date palms, pistachios, and figs from Persia, pine seeds and ginseng roots from Korea, and mangoes from Southeast Asia. In China, there was a great demand for sugar; during the reign of Harsha (r. 606–647) over North India, Indian envoys to Tang China brought two makers of sugar who successfully taught the Chinese how to cultivate sugarcane. Cotton also came from India as a finished product from Bengal, although it was during the Tang that the Chinese began to grow and process cotton, and by the Yuan Dynasty it became the prime textile fabric in China. During the earlier Southern and Northern Dynasties (420–589), and perhaps even earlier, the drinking of tea became popular in southern China. (Tea comes from the leaf buds of Camellia sinensis, native to southwestern China.) Tea was viewed then as a beverage of tasteful pleasure and with pharmacological purpose as well. During the Tang Dynasty, tea became synonymous with everything sophisticated in society. The Tang poet Lu Tong (790–835) devoted most of his poetry to his love of tea. The 8th century author Lu Yu (known as the Sage of Tea) even wrote a treatise on the art of drinking tea, called the Classic of Tea (Chájīng). Tea was also enjoyed by Uyghur Turks; when riding into town, the first places they visited were the tea shops. Although wrapping paper had been used in China since the 2nd century BC, during the Tang Dynasty the Chinese were using wrapping paper as folded and sewn square bags to hold and preserve the flavor of tea leaves. The emperor had large ice pits located in the parks in and around Chang'an for preserving food, while the wealthy and elite had their own smaller ice pits. Each year the emperor had laborers carve 1000 blocks of ice from frozen creeks in mountain valleys, each block with the dimension of In the Song, we find well documented evidence for restaurants, that is, places where customers chose from menus, as opposed to taverns or hostels, where they had no choice. These restaurants featured regional cuisines. Gourmets wrote of their preferences, showing that food and eating had become a conscious aesthetic experience. These Song phenomena were not found until much later in Europe. Many of the peculiar names for these dishes do not provide clues as to what types of food ingredients were used. They catered to capital officials whose native provinces were in the southeast, and would have found northern cuisine too bland for their tastes. Descendants of Kaifeng restaurant owners ran most of the restaurants in Hangzhou, but many other regional varieties were also represented. This included restaurants featuring highly spiced Sichuan cuisine; there were taverns featuring dishes and beverages from Hebei and Shandong, as well as those with coastal foods of shrimp and saltwater fish. The memory and patience of waiters had to be keen; in the larger restaurants, dinner parties with twenty or so dishes became a hassle if the server made even a slight mistake. If a guest complained, the waiter could be scolded, have his salary docked, or in extreme cases, even fired. They included fried tripe, pieces of mutton or goose, various soups, hot pancakes, steamed pancakes, and iced cakes. Night markets closed at the third night watch but reopened on the fifth, and also gained a reputation for staying open during winter storms and the darkest, rainiest days of winter. Although grape based wine had been known in China since Han Dynasty Chinese ventured into Hellenistic Central Asia, it was reserved for the elite. Dairy products, common in the Tang dynasty, became associated with foreign cultures, which explains the absence of cheese and milk in their diet. Beef was also rarely eaten, since the bull was an important draft animal. Freshwater fish from the nearby lake and river were also brought to market, Common fruits included melons, pomegranates, lychees, longans, golden oranges, jujube, quince, apricots and pears; in the region around Hangzhou alone, there were eleven kinds of apricots and eight kinds of pears. Special and combination dishes included scented shellfish cooked in rice wine, geese with apricots, lotus seed soup, spicy soup with mussels and fish cooked with plums, sweet soya soup, baked sesame buns stuffed with either sour bean filling or pork tenderloin, mixed vegetable buns, fragrant candied fruit, strips of ginger and fermented beanpaste, jujube stuffed steamed dumplings, fried chestnuts, salted fermented bean soup, fruit cooked in scented honey, and 'honey crisps' of kneaded and baked honey, flour, mutton fat and pork lard. Dessert molds of oiled flour and sugared honey were shaped into girls' faces or statuettes of soldiers with full armor like door guards, and were called "likeness foods" (guoshi). Su Shi a famous poet and statesmen at the time wrote extensively on the food and wine of the period. The legacy of his appreciation of food and gastronomy, as well as his later popularity can be seen in Dongpo pork, a dish named after him. An influential work which recorded the cuisine of this period is Shanjia Qinggong by Lin Hong (林洪). This recipe book accounts the preparation of numerous dishes of common and fine cuisines. The dietary and culinary habits also changed greatly during this period, with many ingredients such as soy sauce and Central Asian influenced foods becoming widespread and the creation of important cookbooks such as the Shanjia Qinggong and the Wushi Zhongkuilu showing the respective esoteric foods and common household cuisine of the time.

During the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368), contacts with the West also brought the introduction to China of a major food crop, sorghum, along with other foreign food products and methods of preparation. Hu Sihui, a Mongol doctor of Chinese medicine, compiled the Yinshan Zhengyao, a guide to cooking and health which incorporated Chinese and Mongol food practices. The recipes for the medicines are listed in a fashionable way which allow the readers to avoid lingering over the descriptions of the cooking methods. For instance, the description included the step by step instructions for every ingredients and follow by the cooking methods for these ingredients. Yunnan cuisine is unique in China for its cheeses like Rubing and Rushan cheese made by the Bai people, and its yogurt, the yogurt may have been due to a combination of Mongolian influence during the Yuan dynasty, the Central Asian settlement in Yunnan, and the proximity and influence of India and Tibet on Yunnan.

China during the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) became involved in a new global trade of goods, plants, animals, and food crops known as the Columbian Exchange. Although the bulk of imports to China were silver, the Chinese also purchased New World crops from the Spanish Empire. This included sweet potatoes, maize, and peanuts, foods that could be cultivated in lands where traditional Chinese staple crops—wheat, millet, and rice—couldn't grow, hence facilitating a rise in the population of China. In the Song Dynasty (960–1279), rice had become the major staple crop of the poor; after sweet potatoes were introduced to China around 1560, it gradually became the traditional food of the lower classes. Because of the need for more food, prices went up and more of the lower class citizens died.

Jonathan Spence writes appreciatively that by the Qing Dynasty the "culinary arts were treated as a part of the life of the mind: There was a Tao of food, just as there was Tao of conduct and one of literary creation." The opulence of the scholar official Li Liweng was balanced by the gastronome Yuan Mei. To make the best rice, Li would send his maid to gather the dew from the flowers of the wild rose, cassia, or citron to add at the last minute; Li insisted that water from garden roses was too strong. Yuan Mei takes the position of the ascetic gourmet, in his gastronomic work the Suiyuan shidan, he wrote:
I always say that chicken, pork, fish and duck are the original geniuses of the board, each with a flavor of its own, each with its distinctive style; whereas sea slug and swallows nest (despite their costliness) are commonplace fellows, with no character – in fact, mere hangers on. I was once asked to a party by a certain Governor, who gave us plain boiled swallows nest, served in enormous vases, like flower pots. It had no taste at all If our host’s object was simply to impress, it would have been better to put a hundred pearls into each bowl. Then we would have known that the meal had cost him tens of thousands, without the unpleasantness of being expected to eat what was uneatable." After such a meal, Yuan said, he would return home and make himself a bowl of congee. The records of the Imperial Banqueting Court published in the late Qing period showed there were several levels of Manchu banquets and Chinese banquets The royal Manchu Han Imperial Feast is one that combined both traditions. The specialty dish Dazhu gansi was highly commended by the Qing emperor Qianglong.