63 Chinese Cuisines: The Complete Guide (2024)
chinesecookingdemystified.substack.com
chinesecookingdemystified.substack.com
A professor whose research focused on China (social sciences, not food) told me that Americans also tend to imagine China as similar to the US - one large country. They said it was more like Europe, if Europe was all one federal country - different languages, different cultures, different cuisines, etc.
Holding China together has long been a preoccupation of imperial government. You can see the current regime gradually working to do that, from defeating the Nationalists finally in 1949, and trying to bring into the fold Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, .... For decades, the People's Liberation Army's main focus was internal, on its own people as in many dictatorships.
> You can see the current regime gradually working to do that, from defeating the Nationalists finally in 1949...
these two part is not logically connected, PLA's war with KMT army is not about 'holding China together', since at the begining of the war, communits only had about 1/10 of territory, that was a war of __liberation__, it's the Chinese Civil War, it's like a pubg game, winner winner chicken dinner, there're many players, and the one who wins will be the leader of the whole china
> different languages, different cultures, different cuisines
that's also not true, since the Qin destiny, languages were unified in writing, for speaking, there are only dialects
the Qin destiny is the the crossroad of china history made china very different with europe, and that makes westerners hard to imagine china culture, vice versa
> For decades, the People's Liberation Army's main focus was internal, on its own people as in many dictatorships.
for most Chinese, this is quite a praise to CCP, but it's also not (entirely) true
it's complex, in short, the ruler's main goal is to keep its rule, dictatorships do not necessarily need to focus its own people, A simple counterexample: the dictator of the colony.
(In others, not, you know, cus of the much more recent revolution-ing)
> languages were unified in writing
This is definitely true, and was a major breakthrough
> for speaking, there are only dialects
This is extremely wrong.
The language that my family spoke (taishanese) is not in any way mutually intelligible with the language my wife's family speaks (dongbei dialect of mandarin).
Saying various Chinese languages are all dialects is like saying Geordie English and Italian are two dialects of the same language. Actually even farther than that for some Chinese languages.
There definitely are some languages that are mostly intelligible dialects - all the Wu for example. But then you've got Mandarin vs Cantonese vs Taishanese which is an ascending level of hellish difficulty in understanding (4->6->9 tones, a little different grammar structure, etc).
Perhaps you could say there's a subset of the languages which can be mostly written in a mutually intelligible way. That sounds more like the similarities between, say, Portuguese and Spanish, though, where you can probably write a subset of the languages that is pretty comprehensible by both language speakers, yet the languages are distinct.
again, things are very differenct in China, you can not simply define if a language is a dialect or not by if it's intelligible
for example, the vast majority of northern Chinese cannot understand the Jiangxi dialect(in fact, the dialects in different regions of Jiangxi are to some extent mutually unintelligible), yet the Jiangxi dialect is definitely a dialect
In my understanding, writing is politically related, with different regions under the same political entity using the same script, while pronunciation is regionally related, a relatively isolated area (such as a mountainous region) will develop its own distinct pronunciation
While for someone who has not studied languages, German, Spanish and Russian may appear as very different languages, for someone familiar with the evolution of the Indo-European languages it is easy to recognize the word correspondences between these languages, even when seeing some words for the first time.
The same is true for any other group of languages that have separated at most a few thousand years ago, so they are still recognizable as belonging to the same family.
In all languages for which writing has become frequently used, that has slowed significantly the divergence of the languages, at least in their written form, when divergence may have occurred between pronunciations.
Indeed, linguists typically group the varieties of Jiangxi under Gan Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gan_Chinese separate from Mandarin.
Completely agree. Shanghai and Suzhou’s languages are different from each other, let alone Mandarin (for example.)
> I agree with the general premise that China is way more unified than Europe. In some respects, moreso than the US due to the lack of federalism and the 90%+ Han majority.
In some ways yes, in some ways no? How do Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, and until recently, Hong Kong fit into your theory? In Europe, they don't have 're-education' camps; on the other hand, they also aren't trying to impose a strong central government (the EU is nothing like Chinese central government).
Europe mostly has a unified alphabet, and words are often mutually recognizeable - not the same as China, but not nothing.
Yea I agree, and wrote as much (e.g. revolutions)
> How do Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, and until recently, Hong Kong fit into your theory?
I mean, kinda on a similar level as Yugoslavia, Ukraine, and Western Russia?
In Europe stereotypes are not limited to nationality, you have them about one specific part of a country (e.g. scots are stereotypically miserly in UK lore, as are people from Genoa in Italy).
Heck we have stereotypes about people from different areas in a single city :)
I think just till relatively recently people didn't travel too far from their hometowns/villages. So there weren't strong stereotypes about people that were effectively far away
Identity is kind of two-tiered. There is a national identity which is strongly tied to history and literature and more "sophisticated" things - and then there is a local identity tied to dialect, food and historically stuff like local opera, music etc.
You're typically not in any way interacting with other local cultures other than the one in your vicinity (other than ethnic minorities - for which there are stereotypes a bit)
Anyway, I could be wrong. Would be curious to hear from someone who grew up in the environment
That seems usually true in densely populated areas that attract people from all over; e.g., most people in NY or LA don't care where you're from; it doesn't even register as something to question.
It's the people in the less dense areas that object (to people they've seldom encountered). They are the ones that much more often object to immigrants or certain ethnic groups. People from less dense areas are the ones who want 'crackdowns' on urban crime - that is, in a community they don't live in. People in the cities vote for liberals overwhelmingly.
That's mainly because, in China, region-based criticism is considered very, very rude.
people don't talk about this in public even though they do have opinions
> I couldn't even get people to tell me some negative stereotypes
it's kinda like you're asking people to tell you some negative stereotypes of colored people
Which ones would be the most conservative and liberal provinces?
compare that to spain and hungary, for the europe example. or tamil nadu and punjab in india. the right comparison for china isnt shandong and shanghai, it's like shanghai and guizhou or something. i promise you the cultural, culinary, and linguistic differences between shanghai and guizhou are WAY bigger than between texas and california. thats the point being made
Here is an article written by someone who was high in the echelon and was sort of the secretary of Qishan Wang back in the 80s/90s and worked a lot in the banking crisis back in the 90s. It is a very rare insight because such persons rarely share their thoughts publicly. Try ChatGPT and maybe it gives a good translation. IMO, people who want to understand modern China needs to understand 诸侯经济, because it dominates the 3 decades after the fateful year of 1976, and the effort to dismantle of it dominates the 4th decade.
https://www.douban.com/group/topic/73775950/?_i=2828208KaNEX...
BTW the author provided a simple explanation, I'll quote what ChatGPT translated for me:
> The phrase "诸侯经济" was first put forward by Hu Angang. Simply put, it's like siblings starting their own households after a family split. Besides making contributions to the "patriarch" (the amounts and calculation methods vary by province, but each has a fixed value that can be found on the Ministry of Finance's website), they hoard the rest for themselves.
The context is that at the conclusion of the Cultural Revolution, the leaders gave a lot of autonomy to regional governments. My hunch was that they won through a coup d'état thus lacked legality, so they had to give a way a lot of power to the people who controlled the provinces. Anyway, this created a booming economy (in general) for the next 30 or so years, but brought upon other issues that the Chinese could no longer ignore after the 2008 financial crisis.
(Can we compare it to the US currently?)
After, what I've read of Deng Xiaopeng's reforms was that they opened up the economy, starting by privatizing agriculture in some ways, and continuing by privatizing much of the economy and spurring capitalism. And of course eliminating many of Mao's / Gang of Four's economically destructive policies was the lowest-hanging fruit. Deng said "To get rich is glorious", which was not something that the Mao-era CCP would have advertised.
I don't recall reading about devolving power to provincial government as a cause of economic growth.
Yeah, more or less. The people were inspired at the beginning but lost the steam towards the end. Many researchers believe the Cultural Revolution only lasted about 3 years, from 1966 to 1969, and definitely ended when Lin Biao was killed in the plane crash.
> After, what I've read of Deng Xiaopeng's reforms was that they opened up the economy, starting by privatizing agriculture in some ways, and continuing by privatizing much of the economy and spurring capitalism. And of course eliminating many of Mao's / Gang of Four's economically destructive policies was the lowest-hanging fruit.
I think it's a bit more complicated than that. The Gang of Four did have a plan to open up the economy, not from Shenzhen, but from Shanghai, as late as 1975. And Mao did normalize the relationship with the US in 1972, which paved the way for any opening up afterwards. People also argued that the Gang of Four was not entirely against opening up the economy or allowing some private elements, while some colleagues of Deng were actually more "conservative". So I guess it was not a question of whether China should open up, but the questions of who should do it and how to do it.
> I don't recall reading about devolving power to provincial government as a cause of economic growth.
The central government relaxed ideological constraints, regulations and kept their eyes looking to the other way, so that local governments can do whatever they wanted. Basically everyone wanted to get rich, and get rich really fast. Many elder politicians and military leaders, removed and shamed during the Cultural Revolution, managed to claw back because of their support during the coup d'etat in 1976 (which was why it went so smoothly), and in turn they were promised immense amount of autonomy.
I wish I could provide more concrete proofs to all I said, but unfortunately a lot of the material was in Mandarin and TBH a lot of them are my guesses and other researchers' guesses.
Most Americans can easily make themselves understood (in speech or writing) to most other Americans. They watch the same TV shows and movies.
Every state and then some.
> Most Americans can easily make themselves understood (in speech or writing) to most other Americans. They watch the same TV shows and movies.
Intelligibility is not a relevant metric for evaluating statehood. By your measure Canada and the US would already be the same country.
If you wanted to talk about cuisines you would have been better served to talk about cuisines instead of mutual intelligibility in speech and writing. Maybe next time you should say the thing you want to say instead of something else, I guess.
It's also true of large countries like India.
What most people in the West think of as Indian food or Chinese food is usually cuisine from one to a handful of regions, but it's like lumping Swedish and Italian cuisines together as "European food".
And of course you can find ever more levels of culinary granularity down to the level of the town or village.
In the EU, local languages are still much stronger than dialects in China.
Parts of the Europeans also make do with English, a language that is native to none of the countries in Europe.
In particular, going to Hangzhou and trying the food there opened my eyes to how varied Chinese food is. There were a lot of lightly cooked vegetables and thinly sliced meats with subtle flavoring and sauces, the opposite of what I thought of saucy heavily cooked stir fry.
Hangzhou is very vanilla Chinese food, they like seafood without much spice added, also Ningbo is similar, but you’ll find plenty of Sichuan restaurants in both cities if that doesn’t float your boat. As a foreigner you learn the characters for Sichuan very quickly.
Source: Been watching their YT channel for a while.
It’s a great guide for Chinese-focused foodies.
Please note that he mainly focuses on Sichuan cuisine, which is a bit spicy.
Interestingly, they have referenced chef Wang a couple of times, among few other YT channels.
It's nice banter and rough cooking instructions. Since it goes over the process in a more chaotic manner it makes it IMO less intimidating/closer to how people cook their normal food. Look for the videos with english in the thumbnail.
For example, Xinjiang’s representative dish, Big Plate Chicken, was actually invented by a Sichuanese chef in the 1980s, primarily to serve truck drivers
Another example is that both Beijing and Nanjing have roast duck as a signature dish. This is because in the 14th century, the Ming Dynasty emperor moved the capital from Nanjing to Beijing, bringing roast duck along with it.
As with some other commentors, I was surprised to not see a lot of dishes that I thought were staples, and quite a few were under different names.
Nonetheless, really amazing---and made me quite hungry at well-past midnight!
> Shaxian Wontons (沙县云吞). Top left. Similar in many ways to Cantonese style wontons
The locals always use the term bianrou 扁肉 even though it was the Shaxian delicacies chain that popularized it outside of Fujian. I was a little confused when I saw my favorite dish called this.
My wife is from a small town just 50 km southeast of Nanjing, that is now folded into Nanjing proper, with metro and all. The town's language has nothing to do with Nanjing, they cannot understand each other at all. The town's cuisine is completely different, there's no duck at all, no similarities besides focus on rice as a staple.
I applaud the author of the article. Living and traveling China for 13 years drove me to understand that, to me, there's really no "X Chinese Cuisines", every little town has something unique and some cooking methods that are totally different from the next little town. Same with the language.
It's a shame that it's now being destroyed.
> And yet, there is regionality. Jilin - around the city of Changchun - hues to my personal stereotype of ‘Northeastern’ food the closest, with their hearty stews and love of fermented cabbage.
Hahah yuuuup. Every other day we have sauerkraut mixed with something. Literally just ate some random Jilin style sauerkraut dish a couple of hours ago.
> In Yanbian along the North Korean border, there is a large group of ethnic Koreans called the Joseon, which have Korean food similar to what is found in North Korea.
And yes, wow. If you pop down to Yanbian from Jilin/Changchun, you can get really good North Korean food, which is harder to find like anywhere else.