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Written by Wei Shuihua Header image | TuChong Creative One day in 819 AD, a memorial from Han Yu, then the Minister of Justice, was placed on the imperial desk of Emperor Xianzong Li Chun. At that time, Li Chun was absorbed in studying Buddhism. From top to bottom, the Tang Dynasty was a country full of Buddhist worship. Comrade Li Chun never dreamed that just because he liked to worship the Buddha and pray for peace, someone would jump out and sing a different tune. Minister Han was the one who was not afraid of death. In that memorial, Han Yu wrote: "Buddhism first appeared during the reign of Emperor Ming of Han. Emperor Ming was in power for only 18 years. After that, chaos and destruction followed one after another, and the dynasty did not last long. After Song, Qi, Liang, Chen, and Yuan Wei, Buddhism became more and more cautious, and the reigns were particularly short. Only Emperor Wu of Liang was in power for 48 years. He sacrificed his life three times to Buddha. He did not use animals for sacrifices in the ancestral temples, and ate only vegetables and fruits during the day. Later, he was forced by Hou Jing and starved to death in Taicheng. His country was also destroyed. He worshipped Buddha to seek blessings, but he got disasters. From this point of view, it is clear that Buddhism is not worth worshipping." The talented Han Yu quoted many anecdotes and summed it up in one sentence: Emperors who worshipped Buddha all died in the end. The furious Li Chun issued an order to banish Han Yu to Chaozhou on the coast of the South China Sea, meaning that he should get out as far as possible. In the history of the Central Plains, this is of course a trivial matter. But for the delicious Chaozhou, this was the first time that a senior official from the center of the empire was airborne here. It profoundly changed the cultural heritage and historical direction of Chaozhou, and built the spiritual background of Chaozhou people today, which attaches equal importance to the belief in gods and Buddhas and personal destiny, respects traditional culture and advocates outward-looking development, which is both contradictory and unified.
The many wonderful flavors of Chaozhou also flourished under the nourishment of this spirit, and eventually, the Chaozhou cuisine that is admired today was built.
No.1 After Han Yu arrived in Chaozhou, local officials held a banquet to welcome him. This Henan native, who was used to eating wheat cakes and mutton, was not calm after seeing a table of Chaozhou dishes. With great fear and shock, he wrote this poem: "First South Food Yi Yuan Eighteen Harmony" The horseshoe crab is like Huiwen, with bones and eyes on each other. Oysters stick together to form a mountain, hundreds of them grow separately. The tail of cattail fish is like a snake, with mouths and eyes not connected. Clams are toads, with the same fruit and different names. Zhang raised the horse armor column, and the fight was strange. The rest of the dozens of species are all amazing. I came to resist the evil spirits, and I should taste the southern cooking. Season with salt and sour, stir with pepper and orange. The fishy smell began to rise, and the face was sweaty when chewing and swallowing. Only the snake was old, and it was really afraid of its fierce mouth and eyes. Open the cage and let it go, depressed and still not flat. It is not my fault to sell you, but it is not my love not to slaughter you. I don't pray for spiritual rewards, but I'm lucky to have no grudges. I wrote a poem to record it, and also told my colleagues. Horseshoe crab is an ancient animal, a close relative of trilobite. It is extremely rare in the wild and has been listed as a national second-class protected animal. Today, the most common place to see it is in aquariums.
But in ancient Chaozhou, people would mix blue horseshoe crab blood with rice paste, then wrap horseshoe crab meat and fry it in hot oil, which was called horseshoe crab cake. The freshness of the seafood elevates the taste of this carbohydrate bomb. Although it is no longer available today, Chaozhou people have invented a compound flavor of minced meat, mushrooms and quail eggs instead of horseshoe crab meat as filling, also called horseshoe crab cake, which is equally delicious.
Using rare and precious ingredients to make street snacks is a scene that can only be seen in the sophisticated Chaozhou.
Oysters are raw oysters. As Han Yu said, Chaozhou people like to pile up the shells when eating oysters, otherwise it would not be refreshing enough. Minced garlic fried into golden garlic is a good companion to raw oysters. Whether it is cooked in soup or baked, raw oysters are definitely one of the most important mainstays in Chaozhou cuisine.
Puffer fish may be a sea ray, similar to the so-called devil fish. This ugly-looking seafood can be made into fish rice, deep-fried, or stir-fried with pickles, so that the fragrance of pickles and the richness of seafood complement each other.
"Clams are shrimp toads", this sentence is quite intriguing. In the Tang Dynasty, toads in the Central Plains were called "shrimp toads", and clams referred to clams. When Han Yu heard about "clams", he finally felt that there was something to eat, but he didn't expect that this thing was served. The minister was frightened. Today, Chaozhou people call edible frogs "frogs", which means that they are born in paddy fields and taste like chickens. It reflects the long-standing farming tradition in the Chaozhou area and the eclectic concept of selecting ingredients. A famous Chaozhou dish "Crystal Frog" is made by using pig fat as the core, chopping frog meat, shrimp meat, mushrooms, ham, and celery, mixing them evenly, and then spreading them on the surface of the fat, and steaming them thoroughly. The finished dish is crystal clear, and the fat oil seeps into the frog meat, which is extremely fragrant and smooth. "Zhang Ju Ma Jia Zhu" is octopus and scallops. Although it is no longer a strange species today, in Han Yu's opinion, they are like other Chaozhou foods, with strange appearances and unpalatable.
What Han Shilang didn't know was that this table of seafood and pastoral dishes was a great honor from the Chaozhou people to this knowledgeable and educated man from the Central Plains. Although Chaozhou is located on the coast, it was not easy to go fishing in the sea in those days. In many cases, fishermen often paid the price of their lives.
The Mazu worship that is still popular in Chaozhou is essentially the fishermen's reverence for the sea and their beautiful wish for a safe return from fishing. Accordingly, seafood has always occupied a high position on the Chaozhou people's dining table. It is naturally different from the traditional aquatic contempt chain of "one river, two lakes, three rivers, four seas and five ponds" in the ancient Central Plains. Today, in the Chaozhou cuisine world, the most expensive and most popular ingredients, such as gongs and fish maws, are all gifts from the sea.
No.2 Chaozhou has a very special geographical location. The Hanjiang River and the Rongjiang River, two rivers originating from the deep Nanling Mountains, merge into the sea here, bringing a large amount of humus and creating a small but extremely fertile delta. For agricultural civilization, such land has a natural attraction. Many years before Han Yu, people from the Central Plains crossed mountains and ridges to settle here. But the biggest difference between Chaozhou and the Pearl River Delta is that because the Pearl River system is long, the Pearl River Delta has long been connected to the Yangtze River system through the Lingqu Canal dug by Qin Shihuang. However, the Rongjiang and Hanjiang rivers have very small drainage areas and no waterways. If you want to get here, you can only cross mountains and take land routes.
The overlapping hills in the south formed a natural barrier. Especially in the southern mountainous areas of Hunan, Jiangxi and Fujian provinces, the gullies and ravines are crisscrossed and the terrain is complex, which has always been a breeding ground for bandits. Only the Yue people who failed in the struggle for hegemony in the Central Plains, the people in Zhejiang and Fujian who were impoverished in the land annexation, and the people in the Central Plains who lost their homes due to wars such as the Five Barbarians' Invasion of China, would come here to settle down.
To this day, Chaozhou still preserves a lot of Hakka dietary habits. For example, the famous braised goose and beef balls come from the poor conditions of food supply, storage and cooking along the way when the ancestors crossed the mountains to the Nanling Mountains. This was a trick to extend the shelf life. After arriving at the coast, people relied on the abundant catch and created Chaoshan fish rolls and fish balls based on meatballs.
In essence, these foods are typical examples of foreign cultures becoming popular. Another example is rice products. The Teochew people call kueh and the Hakka people call bang, which are actually the same thing. From a cost-effective analysis, grinding and deep processing of rice is obviously a superfluous act - the original rice grains can be directly cooked to obtain an excellent taste, and grinding and shaping it will not improve the taste.
But comparing the various kinds of rice cakes and rice noodles in Chaozhou with the noodles, steamed buns, dumplings and buns in the Central Plains, it is not difficult to come to a guess: Perhaps after the ancestors came to the south where wheat and yellow rice were less grown, they missed the food of the Central Plains, so they used local materials and rice as the raw material to make rice versions of noodles, dumplings, steamed buns and buns.
Today, in the villages in the countryside of Chaozhou, every household hangs plaques such as "Jiangxia Old Residence", "Yingchuan Hometown", and "Longxi Mansion", and the genealogy enshrined in the ancestral hall still clearly records the paths of people's migration. This emphasis on clan culture is rare in other parts of China. It shows that Chaozhou people attach importance to the traditional Chinese family concept and miss the ancient glory. A large number of medieval eating habits have been preserved and continued to this day.
In Chaozhou dialect, we don't say "steam" but "cook", just like the "cook" cake sold by Wu Dalang. This is to avoid the name of Song Renzong Zhao Zhen; we don't say "fry" but "boil", this is because before Song Dynasty, frying pans were not widely popular and boiling was the main cooking method; other things, such as saying "mi" instead of "porridge" and saying "zhu" instead of "chopsticks", all follow the style of ancient Chinese.
As for food, sashimi and raw pickled crabs are exactly the same as the silver thread sashimi of the Tang Dynasty and the hand-washing crabs of the Song Dynasty. The former is to slice freshwater fish into patterns with fine knife skills to take advantage of its tenderness; the latter is to pickle crabs with a variety of spices and sauces to take advantage of its freshness. They do not need to be baptized by fire, and the original flavor is authentic Tang style and Song bones.
Another example is the popular daleng in Chaozhou, which is a mixed salty dish eaten cold with white porridge. On the one hand, it shows the quality of the ancient Han people who lived a simple life with rice and water, and used every bowl of rice to the fullest; on the other hand, the abundant sea salt production in coastal areas has made it more suitable for the preservation of various vegetables. Chaozhou-style pickled vegetables with a lot of garlic: winter vegetables, are a must-have delicacy in every Chaozhou family.
A heavy sword has no edge, and great ingenuity is not elaborate. This is a summary of the Chinese food style before the Tang and Song dynasties, and it is also the most commendable highlight of Chaozhou cuisine today.
No.3 After the Ming and Qing Dynasties, China implemented the most stringent maritime ban policy. But for Chaozhou, this meant a new opportunity. Through hundreds of years of reclamation by our ancestors, most of the land in Chaozhou has become cultivated land. Rice, sugarcane, vegetables, citrus, longan, guava, all grow in this thriving land. Even the surrounding mountains are planted with soybeans and tea. The most typical farming area of Han civilization.
However, the land in the Hanjiang-Rongjiang alluvial plain is limited after all. The disorderly population growth under the dominance of the clan has led to an increasingly serious situation of too many people and too little land in Chaozhou, and the maritime ban has blocked the main route for Chaozhou people to go north to make a living.
The Chaozhou people, who were seriously involuted and had nowhere to go, began to look to the ocean. The predecessor of today's Shantou Special Economic Zone: Chenghai County developed because of this. Although it is close to the sea and the soil is highly salinized and not suitable for farming, the ocean gives people space to survive: with the blessing of scientific and technological progress in the Ming and Qing dynasties, the technology and equipment for fishing at sea at that time were no longer the same as the era when Han Yu was exiled. More and more people left the farmland and began to work in the sea; since the government banned the sea, it would be better to go south and sail overseas. The vigorous movement to Southeast Asia began.
Today, people in Shantou, Jieyang and other places respectfully use the word "Chao" as the prefix of all local cultures. In these places, drama is called "Chao opera", embroidery is called "Chao embroidery", wood carving is called "Chao carving", dishes are called "Chao dishes", the language is "Chaozhou dialect", and people are "Chaoshan people". Deep down, they have a full sense of identity with Chaozhou Prefecture. In today's Southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia and Singapore, the "Chaozhou Guild Halls" that can be seen everywhere on the streets have become a landscape. Many names that are well-known in Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, including Stefanie Sun, Wakin Chau, Adam Cheng, Chua Lam, and Li Ka-shing, also originated from Chaozhou overseas Chinese.
Even King Thonburi the Great, the "national hero and great man" who led the Thai people to defeat the Burmese invaders, was a Teochew.
The interesting thing is that the huge influence of the Chaozhou ethnic group overseas has also had a reverse impact on the customs and food of Chaozhou. When the Chaozhou merchants returned to their hometown, they built numerous buildings that combined Chinese and Western styles and were full of Southeast Asian style, and brought modern medical and educational concepts.
In the early 20th century, Chaozhou had become the capital of the southern Fujian and eastern Guangdong regions. When it comes to food, the famous Chaozhou seasoning: shacha sauce is an authentic Southeast Asian product. Its prototype is an Indonesian barbecue sauce called "satay". Since tea in Chaozhou dialect is pronounced "tie", this sauce, which is fermented from small fish and shrimps and has a unique flavor, was brought back to Chaoshan and became "shacha" by word of mouth.
Another example is fried rice, a fusion of medieval Chinese food and Southeast Asian pilaf, paired with Southeast Asian specialties such as salted fish, chicken cubes, pineapple, prawns, ham, barbecued pork, and scallops, which is a local delicacy that the Chaoshan people are proud of. More things that were not popular in Chaozhou, such as kaya sauce, white coffee, and bak kut teh, were brought here and eventually became part of today's Chaoshan cuisine.
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Soon after taking office in Chaozhou, Han Yu received a letter from his colleague Liu Zongyuan. At that time, Liu Zongyuan was in Liuzhou, Guangxi, fighting with sour bamboo shoots, snails, dog meat and various insects. He complained to Han Yu that he was not used to life in the south and the food was not good. Han Yu replied: "I couldn't swallow it at first, but I can eat it a little bit now." It's delicious! |
