Thomas David DuBois’ deceptively chatty introduction to China in Seven Banquets artfully digests a bunch of important food-studies concepts for the general reader, including the nature of sources, the metadata of meals, and precedents in the study of foodways. Before giving examples from China, he dazzles the reader with a bunch of examples that are liable to be closer to home, including Irish folklore that prevented butchers from obtaining meat from cows that were away with the fairies (i.e. “mad”), and an old working-man’s stipulation that labourers should not be fed something so common as lobster for lunch… this was back when lobsters weren’t so scarce.

With only seven meals to distil the 5000-year span of Chinese history, DuBois takes what I suspect to be a tutorial delight in using different research methods. Sure, anyone can take a recipe from a Ming dynasty cookbook, but DuBois wants to investigate where the ingredients came from, and which ones were new. He pokes around the foods seen on display in Ang Lee’s film Eat Drink Man Woman to illustrate what constituted a home-cooked meal in the yuppie 1990s, and in a lovely 21st century touch, deconstructs the menu for a modern phone-based hotpot restaurant.

DuBois even gets his hands dirty with forensic archaeology, trying to recreate Zhou dynasty booze in his home with some millet, barley and mold. I would have liked to have seen more of such experimentation, along the lines of Serra and Tunberg’s Viking cookbook, in which our earnest academic tries to get to grips with ancient cooking methods, and is forced to confront ancient standards in taste.

DuBois is particularly good at reading between the lines, with abductive analyses of everything that’s missing from cookbooks and recipes. He points out, for example, the basic processes that are omitted from classical texts, because it is assumed that the average reader already knows them, as well as the rudiments that have to be reintroduced in the 1980s for housewives who have never had a chance to learn. He also luxuriates in the many processes and techniques that today we farm out to third parties – a traditional Chinese cook might make their own pickles and ferment their own sauces, transforming the nature and time-stamp of food preparation in all sorts of ways.

For his second chapter, he jumps ten centuries ahead, to a China reeling from the impact of Silk Road contacts – tea-drinking Buddhists, dairy-loving Persian traders, and new food stuffs from the barbarian West, as well as a shoreline that introduced a diversity of new seafoods, and even exotica like romaine lettuce, arriving from Japan and hence still known today as Woju – i.e. lettuce from the land of the dwarves of Wa. He also points to the absolutely revolutionary impact of fast-growing rice in the Song dynasty, doubling or even tripling the annual output of Chinese farms.

When it comes to the “Columbian Exchange” – which is to say, the transformative Ming dynasty, when new crops flowed into China from the New World – DuBois reminisces about his student days in north China, where he was forced to subsist on a diet of maize-based porridges and derivatives. He notes how corn remained a largely foreign element in cookbooks, but still became an integral part of the Chinese diet, flung into local recipes to create enduring hybrids like the baba cakes of Guizhou and Yunnan.

DuBois makes welcome statistical forays into Chinese recipes, observing, for example, that the ingredients for a particular Manchu dish would amount to a vanishingly small amount of spice per diner by the time it was eventually served. It is a recurring theme in his history – that today’s chili- or pepper-heavy dishes, our salty fast food and sugary snacks, would be almost entirely alien to many of our forebears, and possibly even inedible to them.

As he enters modern times, DuBois alludes to the “culture war” as China was exposed to European ways and technologies, such as the sudden spread of canned condensed milk after its invention in the 1850s, introducing a particular kind of sweetened dairy product to far-flung places that had never seen it before. Chinese authors scoff that foreign food is “raw and primitive” and that even the most lavish meal at Buckingham Palace pales in comparison to a “budget banquet” in Shanghai. DuBois takes an entertaining detour through the 1925 book Secrets of Western Cooking, which tries to educate Chinese chefs about exotica like cold salads, bread pudding and fried chicken.

He mentions the desire of Chinese arrivistes to be seen in Western restaurants, even if they found the food unpleasant – a comment which suddenly instilled in me a powerful memory of winter 1991, when my students at the China Trust bank in Taipei decided to give me a send-off by taking me out for an expensive meal at an American steakhouse, and I was forced to smile wanly through the very opposite of the kind of food I liked, looking longingly across the street at a Sichuan restaurant.

Feigning ignorance of the concept of the Chicken Kiev (or these days, Kyiv), DuBois recounts the preparation of one at Beijing’s Moscow Restaurant as it must have looked to incredulous Chinese eyes, wastefully packing a chicken breast around a puck of butter, and repeatedly frying and rebreading it. He observes that butter in the 1950s was only available to foreign customers at the Friendship store, rendering a home-cooked version of the meal as likely as a sprinkling of moon dust.

As China opens up, DuBois is present in person to remember some of the anecdotes that might have otherwise been lost to history. He recalls, in his student days, the national excitement over the opening of a Nestlé factory in north China, and the subsequent migration all over the country of unopened tins of powdered milk, repeatedly gifted and regifted as prestige items with no obvious use. For DuBois, the continued success of McDonald’s in China is partly due to a sense of nostalgia among the grown-up “Little Emperors” for whom a childhood trip to the newly arrived Golden Arches was a rare and welcome treat.

After China joins the WTO in 2000, DuBois identifies a “firehose” of exports, indirectly changing local foodways by putting more money in everybody’s pockets. He also identifies some of the perils of industrialised food production and franchising, and has a refreshingly cynical eye when it comes to certain legal clampdowns. He scoffs at the possibility that street markets might be shut down for reasons of food safety – far more likely that it’s hard to get them to pay tax. He adopts a novel business-based approached to the famous duck restaurant Quanjude, discussing not its signature meal, but the catastrophic attempt to grow it into a franchise big enough to float on the Shenzhen stock market. The whole point of Quanjude was that it was bespoke; you couldn’t just open one in every town like a Pizza Hut and expect to keep the same quality or cachet. I was also fascinated to read about the business models of the Luckin coffee bars, which charged exorbitant prices on the premises, but actually functioned as home delivery points, offering coffee to your door so cheaply that it was cheaper to order one than make one yourself, with the bonus feeling that you were getting something at a high discount. Even then, seven years after being founded, Luckin still isn’t in profit.

In the 2020s, DuBois has plenty to say about modern trends, such as the waimai custom of ordering out, and the army of delivery drivers that has sprouted up to support it. There is a melancholy cast to the recipes in his penultimate chapter, which lack the verve of days past and instead favour sad little hacks to pimp up a Cup Noodle, and the concept of the “distracted diner”, who is too busy gazing at her phone to pay much attention to the food anyway.

He mounts an impassioned defence of the hotpot as a dish to savour outside the home – DuBois argues that they belong in restaurants, because of the ridiculous faff of having to get all the ingredients yourself. He supports his thesis with a potted history of the Haidiliao chain, which not only industrialised “chefless kitchen” hotpot meals at franchises all over China, but even diversified abroad – I was quite boggled, walking along London’s Piccadilly one day, to find the local branch advertising for a ”Noodle Dancer.” Today, Haidilao will even come to your house, and pick up the hotpot when you’re done.

He finishes by looking into his crystal ball at what Chinese meals might look like a decade hence, steered by food security, food safety and green concerns. He points to the highlighting of “Green Biomanufacturing” as a key R&D issue in the last Five-Year Plan; localised hydroponics, and A.I. steering algorithms that condense big data on everything from weather patterns to football matches to predict which food products need to be ordered on a daily Just-in-Time system. DuBois foresees the ultimate end of waimai trends – the removal of kitchens entirely from newly built apartments, by architects desperate to save space.

Inspired by the sight of Russian economic trends post-Ukraine, DuBois imagines supplies sourced entirely from friendly nations, and familiar retail sites thinly rebranded as patriotic chains with names like “Rising China”, even if they still have the old McDonald’s interior designs. As China’s surveillance society even begins to invade eating habits, he wonders if some futuristic café will greet each arrival with a personalised menu, based in part on what its algorithms have decided the customer needs after what he was up to last night, and what he had for breakfast this morning. With a perceptive science fictional eye, DuBois imagines sitting down to a meal made with “freshly printed shrimp.”

Jonathan Clements is the author of The Emperor’s Feast: A History of China in Twelve Meals. China in Seven Banquets: A Flavourful History by Thomas David DuBois, is published by Reaktion Books.

In January 1946, a crew of Chinese military engineers arrived in Nanjing at a fortified concrete-domed grave near the mausoleum of the Founding Father of the Republic of China, Sun Yat-sen. The smaller grave commemorated Wang Jingwei (1883-1944), who served for the last four years of his life as the head of state of the Reorganised National Government of the Republic of China. They packed 150 kilograms of explosive into the concrete dome and blew it apart; the body of Wang was removed and incinerated, his ashes scattered anonymously, all possibility of a commemorative site annihilated. But as noted by author Zhiyi Yang in her recent book on Wang’s complex life, “coerced forgetting begets remembrance in the form of haunting.” Wang Jingwei’s ghost has haunted Chinese history ever since.

Wang’s Reorganised National Government (RNG) was a puppet state of the Japanese – a thin veil over the fact that the Japanese military had overrun huge parts of China during the Pacific War. Now, with Japan’s defeat and control of China restored to Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, Wang was an unwelcome reminder of collaboration and betrayal, a national traitor who deserved no memorial.

This was not how things started out. In his twenties, Wang had been sent abroad by the Qing imperial government as one of the bright young hopefuls for the twentieth century. Studying in Japan, he had come to see his imperial sponsors as part of the problem, and became a committed revolutionary. In 1905 he changed his given name from Zhaoming to Jingwei, in reference to the a mythical creature also celebrated in the poetry of Qiu Jin, a Canute-like bird devoted to holding back the sea one pebble at a time.

Although already widely respected as a writer and orator on republican issues, Wang’s most conspicuous revolutionary act was a plot to assassinate Prince Chun, the regent for the under-age “Last Emperor”. Wang happily pleaded guilty, using the dock as a pulpit for his beliefs. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1910, but released a year later as part of a general amnesty.

Wang refused to participate in the rival Chinese delegations at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, instead fuming from the sidelines as the victorious powers refused to hand the German colony of Shandong back to China, despite the entreaties of the delegate Wellington Koo. Recalled to China in 1920 by Sun Yat-sen, he became a key figure in the struggling new republican government. Widely recognised as the most accomplished and eloquent public speaker of his era, he ghosted many of Sun’s speeches and proclamations, imparting classical allusions and winning turns of phrase to much of the documentation that even today forms the basis of “Sun Yat-sen Thought.”

With Sun’s death, Wang became the centre of one of the two factions contending for his legacy. His biggest rival was Chiang Kai-shek, the military leader devoted to stamping out Communists, while Wang cautiously tried to cooperate with them. Their struggle reached ludicrous heights of proclaiming different capitals of China, with Chiang raising the flag in Nanjing, while Wang attempted to run the country from Wuhan. Throughout the early 1930s, Chiang and Wang were comically unsuited allies within the Republican government, eternally disagreeing about the best way to solve China’s internal and external problems. While Chiang resolutely pursued military expenditure to fight coming battles, Wang arguably pursued diplomacy to keep the battles from happening at all, leading to his appearance on the cover of Time magazine in April 1935. Dubbing him with the unhelpful sobriquet “Whalebone Wang”, time called him the “versatile and brilliant Premier of China,” saddled with the awful difficulties of domestic instability and Japanese aggression.

In November the same year, Chiang Kai-shek beckoned Wang aside at a government photo-call and announced he was leaving. The constant to-ing and fro-ing was a shambles, he said, and risked turning into a security hazard. Chiang’s instincts told him to retreat to an anteroom until everything was in place, and he advised Wang to do the same. Wang refused, and was subsequently shot three times by a would-be assassin, meaning that, as Yang comments wryly, he “literally took the bullet for Chiang.”

Yang’s book zeroes in on an overlooked element in Wang’s life – his poetry. She argues that posterity, in the hands of his Communist enemies and his Nationalist rivals – universally writes him off as a collaborator and a traitor, whereas his poems tell a different story. Repeatedly, Wang’s poems refer to the tense geopolitical stand-off of the Song dynasty, when northern China was over-run with invaders, while the emperors in the south pursued a generations-long policy of appeasement. Wang also compares himself to the assassin Jing Ke, whose daring suicide mission was China’s last hope of holding off the First Emperor.

She points to clues in Wang’s writings that he saw collaboration with the Japanese invaders as a necessary evil, and his stance as the head of state of the Reorganised National Government as a temporary measure that would save Chinese lives. But she also points to the many signs that Wang was left swindled and heart-broken by his attempts at diplomacy, particularly with regard to the broken promises of the Japanese leader Konoe Fumimaro, who twice resigned from government in order to avoid having to follow through on treaties and deals, leaving Wang at the mercy of his militarist successor, General Tojo. Throughout the four years of Wang’s reign, he was irritable and often tearful at public occasions, tormented by his enduring injuries and his ongoing betrayals.

Wang died before the end of the war, railing against the Communists as a “Trojan horse” within China, suggesting that working with them would be like “quenching thirst by drinking poison.” Nor did he have any love for Chiang Kai-shek, whose scorched-earth military tactics, in his view, brought death and destructions to millions of innocent Chinese.

Yang suggests that if Wang had been executed in 1910, he would have been remembered as a martyr of the revolution. If he had died from the assassin’s bullets in 1935, he would have been a lauded statesman. Instead, he has become a mere footnote to the Second World War, the quisling who handed half of China over to the invaders. She picks through Wang’s poetic self-identification as a “fallen leaf” (a common analogy for patriotic rebels), but also the criticism of his peers. It’s all very well, noted the politician Liang Hongzhi, that he likens himself to Jing Ke, the would-be assassin who arrived in the king of Qin’s court with an offer to hand over his nation’s lands. But that was only a feint – there was a dagger hidden in the map, with which Jing Ke intended to kill his enemy. Liang remonstrated with a poem of his own: “Today the map has been unrolled / yet a dagger there hides not.”

At the end of the war. Chiang’s Nationalist government put Wang’s RNG on trial – Yang notes that while only 177 Nazis were ever tried for war crimes in Europe, some 50,000 people were purged by the Nationalists. Wang’s fiery wife Chen Bijun, a Malaysian millionaire’s daughter who had plighted her troth to him on the eve of his attempted assassination of Prince Chun, remained defiant in court. She damned Chiang Kai-shek’s military men for losing half of China to Japan in the first place and placing her husband in an impossible position. She also raked over the coals of one of Wang’s particular demands – that it was vital for China to rise up on its own, and stand to its own defence, not to go cap in hand to the British and Americans like Chiang.

With the judge angrily banging his gavel to shut down applause in the court, Chen was marched away to life imprisonment, signing autographs on her way out of the building. In 1952, she was offered amnesty if she would denounce her husband, but she refused.

Seven years later, the 67-year-old Chen woke in the night in her hospital bed and proclaimed that her husband was a beautiful man, who loved her for her mind, and not her looks. She died the next day.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China and Japan at War in the Pacific. Zhiyi Yang’s Poetry, History, Memory: Wang Jingwei and China in Dark Times is published by the University of Michigan Press.