I meet the people I dubbed Victor and Margaret in the hotel elevator, where he is shouting at her.
“For God’s sake, woman. You have to tap the card on the thingy or it won’t go anywhere.”
She fumbles in her purse and he stares, fuming, at me, as if to say I don’t believe it.
“It’s all right,” I say. “If you’re heading down, the lift is already going that way, so you don’t need to tap your card.”
“How about that, dear?” says Margaret. “He speaks Chinese.” And she finished with a little smirk that I translate as: And he knows how the fecking elevator works.
The 260 express bus goes straight from Central, Hong Kong’s version of Liverpool Street, through the Aberdeen tunnel to the south side of the island. Where there were once skyscrapers and teeming millions, there are suddenly winding mountain roads and secluded beaches. The bus goes past Deepwater Bay, where the beach is protected by a shark net, and two superyachts lurk ominously in the roadstead, and then Repulse Bay, where what first appear to be bungalows turn out to be the tops of twenty-storey towers, reaching up the steep slopes from a tiny bit of flat land at sea level.
This is where the smarter bankers and brokers live, in little villas on the hill-tops. And there, at the end of the bus line, is Hong Kong’s Leigh on Sea, the seaside town of Stanley. A little shaded pier juts into the bay – it is ten o’clock in the morning and it is already crowded with half a dozen fishermen. There’s an old colonial government building now converted into a seafood restaurant, and – surprise, surprise – a pub called the Smuggler’s Rest that offers fish and chips.
I’m here because the internet makes it sound like a shopper’s paradise, “the place to buy all your souvenirs.” But it isn’t. There are exactly none of the souvenirs I want, nor is there the promised calligraphy master, as someone on the internet has confused “calligraphy master” with “guy who will write your name on a grain of rice.” There are polyester cheongsams and Bruce Lee T-shirts, and I want exactly none of it.
I share the bus on the way back with a soft-spoken broker from Edinburgh and his half-Chinese son, whose name I don’t catch, but I presume to be But Why, because it’s all he ever says. They’re off to Specsavers for But Why’s first ever eye test, and his Dad is explaining why there are men cutting down trees, and why there are cars in the road, and why the bus has stopped at traffic lights. What a life it must be, living by the sea but being able to be in Bank of China building 40 minutes away… except that is surely true of anyone who lives in Leigh as well.
“Zhao Tuo accepting the title conferred by the Han empire” — oil painting by Pan Jiajun, Liao Zongyi, Chen Keng, Zhai Shutong and Xu Guosheng, from Guangzhou’s Museum of the Palace of the Nanyue King.
Zhao Tuo was a general in the service of the First Emperor of China, whose march south left him as the satrap of much of what is now Guangdong. By the time the Qin empire fell, Zhao Tuo had practically gone native, proclaiming himself the ruler of a newly envisioned “Nan (Southern) Yue” – a federation of several of the peoples he had conquered, sprawling across Guangdong, Guangxi and into what is now north Vietnam. For this, he is remembered in Guangdong as the first proponent of Guangdong as an independent state beyond China, and in Vietnam as the first ruler of “Vietnam” – Nanyue, in fact, is pronounced Namviet this far south, and when rulers centuries later wanted to come up with a name for a kingdom a little bit further to the south of here, they reversed the characters to make Vietnam.
Zhao Tuo lived to be 103, and he was succeeded by his grandson, who ruled for ten more years, and was himself buried in a marvellous jade suit. By then, there had been some wily diplomacy from what was now the Han empire to the north, including a diplomatic marriage to a Chinese princess, which meant that the court and royal family were all at loggerheads about whether to go even more native, or to give up and allow themselves to be rebranded as the lords of China’s southernmost province. Eventually, it all ended in tears, with a palace coup and a war with the Han, and it all came apart soon after.
Zhao Tuo and his courtiers lived in an opulent palace, of which very little remains today except smashed pots and a few bits of wood. The museum signage tries very hard to make it sound fun, but glum Cantonese people mope around the site looking at holes in the ground. The most amazing thing for me is the king’s garden, because although none of the shrubbery remains, there is a very clear outline of his sculpted watercourse, a veritable babbling brook that snaked through the garden, and around a bend deliberately designed to create a little whirlpool. It turns out to be the first documented landscaped garden in Chinese history – I can feel the first chapter of a history of the Cantonese people taking shape.
For roughly a century, Guangzhou (Canton) was the centre of a little kingdom with its own unique style, mainly in doubled animal icons where one creature was blatantly visible, and its counterpart was twisted and hidden within the curlicues. Nanyue was known for its swords, and what appears to be evidence of sea trade with ancient Persia.
As with similar sites, like Chengdu, the presence of a quasi-independent state, however brief, and the finding of an iconic symbol to represent it – in this case, an entwined dragon and phoenix – is a hot political potato in China. Nobody wants to talk openly about the possibility of a federal China (an idea once supported by a young Chairman Mao), or of the linguistic reality that it is composed of eight separate “nations”. Ten years ago, such historical curiosities were celebrated as part of China’s glorious ethnic diversity. In the hardline 2020s, as mosques are homogenised and domestic differences denied, such discussions veer towards the Party’s forbidden realm of “historical nihilism.”
And so the museum at the Tomb of the Nanyue king tiptoes around the fact that this 1st century BC ruler, son of the long-lived first king, was the ruler of an independent southern Chinese state. Nor does the museum literature dwell on the actual history of Nanyue, instead wandering off on a time-wasting tangent about a collection of ceramic pillows that helps bulk out the museum collection.
We drive an hour or so through the Xinjiang countryside and the vineyards of the Turfan Depression, to the Loulan Winery, which is not actually in Loulan at all, but has purloined its name. A private Chinese enterprise, it started up in the immediate years after the Deng Xiaoping economic reforms, transplanting French and Italian vines to Turfan soil. The chef de domaine is French: Grégory Michel, a man from Provence who could not possibly have wanted to live here, except for the handy fact that he is married to a Chinese woman and hence regards it as something of a cushy posting.
Grégory shows us around the huge factory, with giant steel vats towering thirty feet above us. We all wear little white coats, mine looking particularly petit since it is designed for a little girl, or so it seems. It’s a far cry from Ismayil’s hand-cranked meat grinder, repurposed to mash grapes. Grégory’s industrial-size, conveyor-belt macerator is big enough to throw a whole person into.
The Loulan Winery is clearly pushing for the luxury tourist market. We wander faux caves decorated with Buddhist art, and sit in an elegant VIP room, with posh chairs of knotted rope, and a giant slab of a Viking table.
Grégory plainly has no idea that a convoy of Buicks is about to descend on his factory, but brightens with each passing moment when he realises that we are the advance party for an entire posse of journalists, who are shadowing our travels in a long crocodile of cars. “I shall get zem drunque!” he promises me, as we wander the pipes and vats.
We do the interview to camera in French, which ought to help the programme look suitably cosmopolitan, and puts a smile on Grégory’s face, which is very difficult with a Frenchman.
The advance car of the convoy turns up at lunchtime, and we snatch the chance to get some shots of me driving it past some vineyards. Meanwhile, the usual too-many-cooks cacophony of the publicity team is at full throttle. Even though they approved my speech outline two days earlier, they have now decided that they wish that my speech was 20 minutes longer. Luckily for them, I am precisely the sort of guy who can write an extra page about Wine on the Silk Road in sixty minutes.
I do my speech about the stories associated with wine on the Silk Road, including the arrival of grapes in the Han dynasty, the sozzled poetry of Li Bai in the Tang, the Mongols drinking themselves to death, and so on. It fills the time nicely and gets several laughs. Grégory then takes to the stage while his minions pour samples for the crowd, and within another 20 minutes, everybody is thoroughly munted on Chinese wine.
The Loulan Cabernet Sauvignon is very nice. This being China, I have never actually been able to have it chilled before, and it is perfectly drinkable. Grégory has plainly done a good job on quality control, although it remains to be seen if he can turn a profit. He says that the cost of making a bottle of wine in China is roughly the same as making one in France, but the local market won’t bear high prices, and the country is so big that simply putting a bottle in every off-licence costs 1000 times as much. Most of the price label of a bottle of Loulan wine is taken up with marketing.
We are invited to dinner, but need to be in Urumqi for the evening, so we hitch a lift with our local fixer, Ali. Halfway to Turfan, the producer calls for a toilet break (we have long since learned not to ask for any more details), and I lurk outside the bogs with Ali, while he sucks on a cheroot that smells like someone has set fire to an old sofa.
“I realised yesterday,” says Ali, “how difficult your job is. You really have only a few seconds to get it right, and there are people on their phones, and shouting at the crew, and there are radios in the background, and people knocking on the door, and the sun moves – you actually become aware of the fact that the sun is moving and there are clouds in the sky… it’s very hard.”
He doesn’t know that he makes it worse by subjecting me to the Gipsy Kings for a two-hour drive through the desert, but I suppose it is his car.
Today, Mr Jiao is supposed to be showing me the remaining parts of the process for making hempen Bai Yi clothes. We’ve been shooting the process out of order, so it’s only on day two that we get to harvesting the hemp itself. He takes us to a tiny little patch of weeds at the edge of a cornfield – it is no bigger than a minibus, but turns out to be the only hemp in the village. The director’s plans to have us wandering through acres of it has to be rewritten on the spot.
She decides instead to do an aerial drone pass of the pair of us reaching the patch, where three Bai women in their black wimples and blue tabards are hacking at the copse with sickles. But they are so quick at it that the director has to beg them not to cut it all down before we can get to the wide shot. I am told to stand in the field with Mr Jiao and talk to him about hemp, not the world’s most riveting subject. Our drone is supposed to sail over our heads, recording us and the village above us. Except suddenly I hear a sound like a hedge trimmer hitting a bucket of turtles, and realise that the overhead shot has failed to take into account the presence of terraces. Our Yuneec Q500 Typhoon has scythed its way several feet into a stand of corn before coming to a halt, meekly bleeping a distress signal. Mr Jiao fishes it out and returns it, minus one propeller. Luckily, we have spares.
Meanwhile, the wimple-wearing sickle-girls have got bored. One has wandered off entirely, and the other two are stripping some of the hemp stalks to make a basket. They have to be herded back to work. I manfully wade in with a sickle, and hack out a bunch of hemp stalks, stripping their leaves away and casting aside the long stalks. I put the leaves in a basket and head up to Mr Jiao, feeling pleased with myself.
“What are you doing with those?” he asks.
“These are to make the thread, right?”
“No,” he says. “We feed the leaves to the pigs. It’s the stalks that we use to make the thread.”
There is the sound behind me of furious crossings-out in the director’s notebook. As we move on to the huocao stripping and the hemp bark stripping. We are running so late now that the director just puts the camera on the ever-changing numbers of women in wimples, and tells them to get on with it.
“I can’t help but notice,” I hiss to her behind the camera, “that we have basically spent two days filming a documentary about string.”
At last, we have the result, or rather, one they made earlier. To great fanfare, I hold up Mr Jiao’s Bai Yi traditional tunic, a grotty thing which has not seen a steam iron in the last decade. Making it takes up half a harvest of hemp from their little plot, which turns out not to be theirs at all, but shared by the whole village, who must now wait six months for another crop.
He proudly puts his tunic on, while explaining that it used to be daily wear, but in a common refrain, “nobody can be arsed” and so now they only wear them on special occasions. He tops the ensemble with a blue belt and a man-bag made of leather, which he keeps his phone in.
“Suits you,” I can’t help saying, and he giggles in response.
We are already two hours late for the three-hour drive to Xizhou. The director pleads that we can’t stay for dinner, so we are waved off with a sack of pomegranates, some fresh-made poppadoms, and some nan bread. There is a cup of home-made chili sauce that goes with them, but our fixer drops it in a cowpat on the climb up the hill back to the minibus.
“Clements delves into the creation myths and languages of Taiwan’s different indigenous groups and discusses their similarities with certain Pacific island peoples but also with some tribes in southern China. He describes the complexities of Chinese migration to Taiwan since the 17th century and the different settler groups’ interactions with each other and with indigenous groups.
“The reader encounters the powers that over the centuries landed on Taiwan’s shores and made shortlived attempts at setting up colonies — the Spanish and the Dutch — or otherwise exploiting its natural riches and strategic location — the British and the French.
“Clements, a British writer who has authored both fiction and history books about east Asia and benefits from his literacy in Mandarin and Japanese, makes all this come alive through the key characters whose stories he tells.”
Mr Jiao, the chieftain of the Yi village, wants to have dinner with us to discuss the shooting tomorrow. I dread these occasions, but it goes very well. He turns up wearing a regulation issue tribal nylon anorak, brings his big brother, who is the designated driver. Our own driver, unlike the sullen anti-socials we have had before, joins the talk (a huge benefit having another Mandarin speaker at the table), and they are clearly pleased with the attention they are getting. The chief is a small, small man with dark brown skin, more Burmese than Chinese, and with a high-pitched voice that could easily be mistaken for a woman’s. He will be interpreting for me, because his mother-in-law, who is the hemp spinner, only speaks Yi, an antiquated version of Chinese that sounds like someone throwing a pot of alphabet soup down some stairs.
The food is Chinese, but recognisably distinct – lantern-shadow beef, fried squid, a soup of river fish and mountain greens. Mr Jiao orders a bottle of Damaijiu, a local malt firewater that is supposedly 45% proof, and from which the crew recoil in terror. It is smooth and tasty, like vodka, and between us we down the whole (small) bottle until he is red-faced and giggly.
Our director looks Chinese, but she grew up speaking Teochew and Malay, and her Mandarin is understandable but error-riddled, such that if she gets tipsy she sounds like the policeman in Allo Allo. On the last shoot, she apparently mixed up her vowels so much that she ended up wishing a departing artist “a trip in which you suffer from permanent influenza.” Our fixer pleads with her not to open her mouth at all. Tonight at dinner with the village chief, she realised that he was making his own personal documentary about his tribe’s way of life, and offered to share with him whatever drone footage we got tomorrow. However, owing to some chance mispronunciations, she ended up saying: “And tomorrow, if you like, we will masturbate all over your village.” I thought he was going to spit out his tea.
But he seems nice enough, and toasts me with a story of his international friends. “You are only the third English person I have ever met,” he says to me. “The second was an ethnomusicologist who came to study our songs. And the first was Margaret Thatcher, your Iron Lady.” Apparently, she came to see some sort of ethnic dance he was in many years ago.
Today we are shooting the collection of wild huocao, literally fire-grass, i.e. tinder. It looks like a white-backed dock leaf, and forms the weft of their traditional clothing. The warp is hemp, which we will also have to harvest.
Mr Jiao has assured us that collecting the huocao is a two-man job. But by the time we set out, we have somehow acquired a dozen Bai Yi women in black wimples and blue tabards, clutching baskets and giggling at the thought of being on telly. The director is ready to blow a gasket, because she knows what will happen next. The Yi women’s love of telly will proceed in inverse proportion to the amount of time they are to stand there, no there, no over here, no, please be quiet. Nobody say anything; please stop moving; go and do that thing again; now go and do it over there. Only one of them actually speaks Mandarin; the rest only speak Yi, which means all the spoken directions wander at a leisurely pace through several stages of Chinese whispers, and are often countermanded before they reach the last in line.
Meanwhile, two men, wearing traditional hemp clothes over their tracksuits, burst into song on the mountainside. It’s a yodelling song, about how happy one is collecting huocao, wondering if there is anyone else on the mountainside of the opposite sex, who wishes to sing a refrain in response. It’s all very idyllic for about ten seconds, but then the women’s refrain drifts up as well, ruining the immediate sound recording. We go for another take, but now the men are singing in response to the women, and by the time we have shut them up, the women are singing back. This medieval tinder hook-up continues until it starts to rain, but Alvin the cameraman grabs some footage of the women puttering around in the grass, and of them trying to teach me their song with comedy clumsiness.
Gwyneth, my name for the only woman who speaks Chinese, is determined to stand close by, because she is the one who can show me what huocao is. Meanwhile, a cowherd wanders across the back of the shot with clanging cowbells. The director is starting to regret ever saying that she was looking forward to shooting in the countryside, since there is soon just as much noise pollution as in a built-up urban area, except here we are also hot and clammy with mosquito repellent and sun lotion, and there is nowhere to have a piss. You would think there would be handy bushes everywhere, but behind every one is a black-wimpled woman in a blue tabard, singing a song about grass.
Dinner is back at their quaint farmhouse, sitting on benches in the courtyard. The women eat separately, chattering in Yi about whether or not this will make them famous. The men dish out the Damaijiu malt firewater, and serve Yunnan food – succulent local ham, chicken and garlic, pumpkins and potatoes, and punguent home-made pickles. A sullen two-year-old boy wanders between the tables, gnawing balefully on a chicken’s head. He’s teething, explains his mother, and the beak is good for him.
“I can’t help but notice,” I say, “that your tribe is called the Bai Yi, meaning ‘white clothed’, but everybody’s wearing blue.”
“Ah yes,” says Mr Jiao brightly, “making the white clothes is such a faff, we can’t be arsed any more.”
I’m popping up at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies on Wednesday 29th May (7pm at the Khalili Lecture Theatre) to talk about one of Taiwan’s most famous residents:
Jonathan Clements discusses the life, death and strange afterlife of the “pirate king” Koxinga (1624-62), the Ming loyalist and conqueror of Taiwan, variously derided as a pirate and a rebel; lauded as a resistance leader and prince, twice deified, spuriously reclaimed as both a Japanese patriot and a Chinese “People’s Hero”.
Along the way, there are some unlikely legends, some suspicious shenanigans, and his co-option into a 2010 mayoral campaign that threatened to turn into a fistfight among historians.
*All SOAS Centre of Taiwan Studies events are open to all and not needing to register.
An 0545 start, up for breakfast and in the van for the two-hour drive to Weinan, the home town of Xi Jinping’s dad. For this reason, this city in the middle of nowhere has an incredibly swish hotel, in which every room looks like a suite. I have another robot bathroom with automatic, motion-sensitive lights, and two complimentary condoms, courtesy of the Weinan Health & Safety Initiative. What on earth do they imagine goes on this hotel? Not a lot tonight, because the film crew will be the only people staying.
Our merry band of nine (the crew and two drivers) has now swelled to eleven, since the guy from the Buick dealership (our sponsors) has decided to bring his parents along. Christ knows what he must have said to them when he got home yesterday, but presumably they were very excited to sample the glamour. It’s a ridiculously unprofessional thing to do, and makes us look like a convoy of muppets.
They are underfoot all morning, soon as bored as only a spare wheel on a film location can be, and largely have to be left at a remote farmhouse while the rest of us shuttle backwards and forwards on a mountain road through fields of corn.
The morning is dedicated to getting shots of me driving the Buick up hairpin turns on mountain roads – a disastrous prospect remedied by getting the driver to do all the hard work, and me to do all the bits that are straight lines and close-ups. We are in the foothills of the Qinling mountains, in sight of Huashan, with the peaks in the misty distance, and endless fields of ripening corn. It’s going to look great, although we still manage to attract eleven dicks on mopeds who stand around pointing at us and asking what we are doing.
Mickey the Mic is the sound man, so spends all day with eight kilos of recording equipment strapped to his front like a cybernetic beer-gut. You can tell which one he is, because his regulation-issue floppy sunhat has holes cut in the brim for his headphones. He is Singaporean, with the odd lilt that makes him sound Indian lah, and has the Singaporean habit of injecting the Chinese particle denoting a change in circumstance into the end of any sentence where it would be relevant. I have started to pick up the pidgin English of the crew, and was heard at one point today saying: “Soon be dark lah.”
Mickey is also the drone man, which means that he swaps his sound rig for a complex remote-control tray, with which he joysticks our robot team member Yuneec Q500 Typhoon, a squat, sleek metal dragonfly with four rotors and a gimbal-mounted camera with a 16-gigabyte memory card. Unfortunately, its batteries only last for ten minutes at a time, which means the crew need to be absolutely, totally sure where everybody is, and that the shot is ready, before they send the Typhoon into the air. It can hover with almost perfect stillness if the wind is low, and even has a nifty function called Follow Me, whereby it will zip along at a pre-set distance from whoever is holding a thumb-operated remote-control beacon.
This is how we pay the bills. Buick are fronting the cost for the entire series, as long as their vehicles get 30 seconds of screen time in each episode, which apparently still works out cheaper for them than making an actual TV commercial. We’ve given their car advert-level exposure as it roars up the mountain road and skids around corners, occasionally with me at the wheel, occasionally with my stunt double while I duck in the back seat with a walkie-talkie, yelling instructions in Chinese.
We are up in the hills to see Master Wei Jinquan, who performs Huaxian Shadow Plays. I am dreading it, but he turns out to be very chatty and a perfect interviewee, ready to rattle on without pause for five minutes after the most minimal of prompting. He is the nth generation of his family to make, paint and perform shadow puppetry and lives in a village that was once home to dozens of performers. Today, it is a cluster of huts populated almost solely by the elderly and their grandchildren – the adult generation having migrated to the city to work.
We talk for an hour on his roof terrace in the sun, and then he leads me down to his workshop, where he attempts to teach me how to cut the translucent cowhide that makes the puppets. The hide has the look and consistency of an A4 sheet of human fingernail, and he tuts and fusses over me while I hold the knife wrong, put it at the wrong angle, and fail to move the leather (you move the leather, not the knife) on the wooden palette. The crew are all snickering as he calls me a moron, and I protest to the camera that every time he instructs me, he adds an “and one more thing…” that I could have done with knowing before I start. I am also mic’ed up and able to mutter asides regarding my fear that he is going to stab me with his awl if I get it wrong again. It should be quite funny, and only two days in, we are already establishing a general tone of arch sarcasm that I think I can probably keep up.
At one point, the crew are repositioning the camera to zoom in on my hands at work, so I attempt to explain to him what’s going to happen.
“Now I’m going to do it wrong again,” I warn him.
“Well, you don’t seem capable of doing it any other way,” he mutters.
For me, the great relief is that I am able to function fully in Mandarin all day without holding up a professional film crew, although I am probably operating right at my ceiling of competence. It doesn’t help that I keep forgetting the word for shadow puppet, which is pi’ying. The clock sneaks towards six, and I realise that we are done for the day, suffusing me with a great sense of relief and tiredness, and what appears to be ten or fifteen minutes of material for the final edit – a good haul for a day in which we banked maybe three hours of footage.
Then it turns out that there has been a miscommunication. He hasn’t realised that we are staying the night in Weinan, and thought we would be filming a performance at a Xi’an theatre tomorrow. No, says the director, we will film you here tomorrow. But if she wants it traditional, it has to be at night, and by tomorrow night we will be on our way to the airport. Reluctantly, she decides to stay and shoot a performance in the village, which means waiting until after dark while Master Wei’s teammates set up the travelling theatre in the car park in front of his house.
The local villagers come out to gawp, and a gaggle of little girls sit in a line on a log for a while, looking cute until one of them initiates a farting competition. Others lurch and stamp around the car park, trying to catch crickets in their hands. Alvin the cameraman sets up the back-up camera to shoot in time-lapse, as four old men lash together a rickety series of trestles to create a giant punch-and-judy shed, faced by a white cloth the size of a very large widescreen television. They all clamber inside, with screechy Chinese instruments and gongs, with Master Wei sitting at the centre, his puppets at the ready. They then start clattering out a wailing Chinese song, and the shadows start moving, with the story of Pigsy Eats Some Watermelons, and some martial arts thing about two generals and a comedy horse fighting each other until someone dies.
Alvin clambers into the staging area to film among the team as they perform, and so we get the same play from two different angles. Reaction shots, however, are all going to be mine, because the crowd seems indifferent. The little girls are soon ignoring the play and instead crowding around each other to take selfies of themselves not-watching the play. A boy on roller skates trips over the power cable, and a small sausage dog starts eating someone’s discarded snotrag. Master Wei finishes to no applause, which seems to be how these things are done, and the crowd melts away back to their shacks.
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.”
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.
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