At the Chinese Table: A Journey Through History, Culture, and Culinary Wisdom
Introduction
Food has always been more than mere sustenance. It is a reflection of culture, history, and identity. Nowhere is this more evident than in Chinese cuisine, which stands as one of the world’s oldest and most sophisticated culinary traditions. Through the work of Fuchsia Dunlop, a British writer who has dedicated her life to understanding and documenting Chinese food, we gain not only insight into the remarkable diversity and complexity of Chinese cuisine but also a window into the Chinese soul itself. As Leslie T. Chang writes in the New York Review, “To understand the Chinese through their culinary history is to see them in their best lights, as inventive, adaptable, egalitarian, and open-minded.”
Cooking as Civilization
In her book “Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food,” Dunlop makes a profound observation about the unique place of cooking in Chinese culture: “Only the Chinese have placed cooking at the very core of their identity. For the ancient Chinese, the transformation of raw ingredients through cooking marked the boundary not only between humans and their savage ancestors, but between the people of the civilized world (that is, China and its antecedent states) and the barbarians who lived around its edges.”
This perspective helps explain why Chinese cuisine developed such extraordinary diversity, sophistication, and subtlety. Food was not merely about nourishment, it was about civilization itself. The Yellow Emperor, the mythical ancestor of the Chinese, was said to have been a farmer who taught people how to steam rice, a connection between food and governance that would persist throughout Chinese history.
The relationship between food and statecraft runs deep in Chinese tradition. The cultivation of grain was the overriding concern of the Chinese state since the earliest dynasties. Grain fed the people, financed the government through taxes, and provisioned imperial troops. Every spring, the emperor would mark the start of the sowing season by plowing furrows in a sacred field.
This connection between food and governance was beautifully expressed by a political adviser from the sixth century BC, who compared the work of government to seasoning a stew:
“Harmony may be compared to a geng. You have water, fire, vinegar, mince, salt and plums, with which to cook the fish and the meat… The cook blends the ingredients, equalizing the stew by means of seasonings, adding whatever is deficient and carrying off whatever is in excess. So it is with the relations between ruler and minister.”
Even Laozi used cooking as a metaphor for governance: “Governing a country is like cooking small fish.” His point was that attention to detail matters.
The Song Dynasty: The Birth of True Cuisine
During the Song dynasty (960-1279), what Dunlop calls “the world’s first true cuisine” emerged. New varieties of rice from Vietnam revolutionized farming by allowing two crops per year, and innovations in cultivation increased yields. The Chinese population boomed, and sophisticated commercial networks developed to transport rice, sugar, tea, wine, dried hams, and condiments around the country.
The Song capital of Kaifeng supported a thriving restaurant scene, with civil servants, merchants, and artisans patronizing establishments that would not appear in Paris for another six centuries. The material abundance of this era spawned a complex gastronomic culture in which food was not only cooked and enjoyed, but also elaborated, discussed, and documented.
In 1127, when Kaifeng fell to invaders, the imperial court fled south and established a new capital in Hangzhou, which became the largest and richest city in the world. This mix of natives and refugees created something of a melting pot, reflected in its cooking. Northern dishes were remade with southern ingredients: shrimp substituted for mutton, pastries became lighter and flakier. This fusion of regional styles created a truly national cuisine, though not everyone was pleased. As one scholar complained, “Food and drink have become all confused, with no longer any distinction between southern and northern.”
Fuchsia Dunlop: The Foreigner Who Became Chinese Food’s Greatest Champion
Dunlop’s path to becoming one of the world’s foremost authorities on Chinese cuisine is as remarkable as the cuisine itself. Educated at the University of Cambridge, she first went to China in 1994 on a scholarship to study government policy toward ethnic minorities at Sichuan University in Chengdu. She found herself in a region with one of China’s most distinctive cuisines and began taking notes on the food.
“Almost everyone in Sichuan seemed to love talking about cooking and eating,” Dunlop recalls in her memoir, “Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper.” She quit her studies and enrolled at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine as one of its first foreign students, beginning a journey that would span three decades and produce seven books.
Perhaps most remarkably, Dunlop has gained a large following by explaining Chinese food to the Chinese themselves. Her memoir sold about 200,000 copies when it came out in China in 2018, and “Invitation to a Banquet” has sold 50,000 copies since its publication there. Among Chinese food lovers and chefs, Dunlop is praised for her deep understanding of the country’s culinary history and is known by her Chinese name: “Fu Xia.”
As China rapidly modernizes, traditional ways of eating and living are disappearing. It has fallen to Dunlop, an outsider, to study the history, sift through the tradition, and taste the dishes as if for the first time. “It kind of shames us, because it’s our own culture,” He Yujia, her Chinese translator, told Chang. “She helps us rediscover what we’ve neglected for too long.”
Chinese Culinary Philosophy: Balance, Freshness, and Harmony
Central to Chinese culinary philosophy is the concept of benwei, or “root flavors.” Ingredients should be cooked in small quantities using refined methods that reveal their essential character. Educated gentlemen through the ages searched obsessively for the freshest bamboo shoots, the finest vinegar, or the perfect bowl of congee (which tastes best, according to one connoisseur, when made with rainwater in early spring).
Many supposedly modern ideas about eating have been accepted in China for centuries. Consuming the freshest meat, fish, and produce, local and in season, has been important since the earliest dynasties. “Certainly to have a fresh fish and to cause it to become unfresh is a terrible act,” wrote Yuan Mei, an eighteenth-century gourmet and poet.
The passage of seasons was marked by the fruits and vegetables available in markets, starting with apricots and cherries in early summer, followed by peaches and melons, then chestnuts, grapes, and oranges at the Mid-Autumn Festival. Everyone knew that the best handmade tofu came from the Sichuanese town of Xiba, just as Nanjing was the place for salted duck, Pixian for chili bean paste, and the hills around Hangzhou for the most delicate leaves of Dragon Well green tea.
“Concern for the provenance and terroir of ingredients, so important to modern western gourmets, was not the invention of the French or Californians, but has been a preoccupation in China for more than two thousand years,” Dunlop writes.
Pleasure in eating has always been paired with the need for restraint in Chinese tradition. “Even if there is plenty of meat, a gentleman should not eat more meat than rice,” counseled Confucius in the Analects. The ideal has always been to achieve moderation and balance (yin and yang, heating and cooling ingredients, main dishes and rice), in order to nourish the body while living in harmony with nature.
For most of recorded history, ordinary Chinese ate whole grains, legumes, and vegetables, using small quantities of meat and fish for flavor, and throwing almost nothing away. In rice they found a staple grain that supplies more calories per acre than any other cereal crop, while myriad preparations of the “miraculous” soybean deliver as much protein as dairy and meat but more economically.
This nutritional efficiency has allowed China to support a large population on limited arable land, with food that is healthy, satisfying, and environmentally sustainable. “If we’re not all to become vegan,” Dunlop writes, “Chinese eating may be one of the solutions to the world’s environmental problems.”
The Global Journey of Chinese Cuisine
One of Dunlop’s goals is to rescue Chinese food from its reputation in the West as “popular, but cheap, low-status and junky.” The earliest Chinese restaurateurs abroad, beginning with those who went to California during the Gold Rush in the 1840s, were uneducated laborers with no culinary training. The dishes they made, like deep-fried wontons and sweet-and-sour everything, were nothing like the sophisticated cuisine back home.
Chinese food in the West remained a bastardized form of Cantonese cuisine, and this fed a stereotype of the Chinese as slovenly and undiscriminating eaters. Lord Macartney, the leader of a 1793 British diplomatic mission to China, described the Chinese as “foul feeders and eaters of garlic and strong-scented vegetables.” In 2002 the Daily Mail called Chinese food “the dodgiest in the world, created by a nation that eats bats, snakes, monkeys, bears’ paws, birds’ nests, sharks’ fins, ducks’ tongues and chickens’ feet.”
Dunlop takes pains to point out that the Chinese are discerning about ingredients and have always emphasized the links between food and health. The quest for nutritious produce in China created a far more diverse array of foods than is known in the West. She devotes five pages to the “vast clan of cabbages” before moving on to “the punchy Alliums, the tribe of onions and garlics,” and then to bamboo shoots, roots and tubers, gourds, mushrooms, and seaweeds.
An entire chapter explores the unfamiliar world of vegetables harvested from water, such as water chestnuts and lotus plants, a category that doesn’t exist in Western cooking. She describes the fantastic range of flavors and textures that the Chinese have wrought from tofu, which can be silken or firm, smoked or spiced, stir-fried, deep-fried, frozen, toasted, pressed into sheets, soaked in brine, or molded and fermented into “a delicious state of dishevelment, as high and wild as Stilton on the brink between ripeness and decay.”
Contrary to the perception of Chinese cuisine as closed or insular, Dunlop traces the surprising openness of the Chinese to foreign foods throughout history. During the Han dynasty, exotic foods such as grapes, pomegranates, walnuts, sesame, onions, peas, alfalfa, coriander, and cucumbers entered the country from Central Asia. In the Ming dynasty, corn, peanuts, white potatoes, and sweet potatoes arrived from the New World. Two other New World transplants, the chili pepper and the tomato, were adopted more recently and further transformed the cuisine.
The Vanishing World of Traditional Chinese Food Culture
Dunlop’s initial encounters with China took place in what she calls “this prelapsarian world of cooking.” In the early 1990s, families in Chengdu still cooked dinner on charcoal braziers, made their own pickled cabbage and smoked sausage, and shopped every day for meat and vegetables in open-air markets. She met knife sharpeners and tofu vendors, ate delicious noodle lunches for pennies, and tasted classic Sichuanese dishes like fish-fragrant eggplant and twice-cooked pork for the first time.
As China’s economic progress accelerated, Dunlop witnessed the demolition of Chengdu’s old wooden houses, streets, and entire neighborhoods to make way for highways and high-rises. “My culinary researches began as an attempt to document a living city,” she writes in her memoir. “Later, it became clear to me that, in many ways, I was writing an epitaph.”
In the three decades since Dunlop first went to China, the country’s food system has been transformed. Western fast-food restaurants arrived, followed by supermarket chains, leading to increased consumption of processed foods, saturated fats, and sugary beverages. “Just like much of the US,” writes Thomas David DuBois in “China in Seven Banquets,” “it was becoming easier for Chinese urban consumers to buy out-of-season fruit from thousands of miles away than it was to get fresh produce from the farm just outside of town.”
A generation ago, most Chinese people knew how to cook. But rising living standards and a hypercompetitive work culture have changed that. Many Chinese in their twenties and thirties don’t know how to cook or are too busy to. According to recent surveys, more than half the population now eats most of its meals outside the home or relies on food delivery services.
The health consequences have been significant. Consumption of whole grains, legumes, and vegetables is in steep decline. According to a 2021 article in the journal Public Health Nutrition, the Chinese now get 30 percent of their calories from animal products and 29 percent from industrially processed foods. In 1990 the figures were 9.5 percent and 1.5 percent, respectively. The prevalence of obesity has increased fivefold.
Food as Cultural Heritage
Dunlop’s work is more than a celebration of Chinese cuisine; it is an act of cultural preservation. In documenting the rich history and sophisticated philosophy of Chinese food, she has helped preserve a tradition that might otherwise be lost in the rush to modernize.
Through her writing, we come to understand that Chinese cuisine is not merely a collection of recipes but a complex system of knowledge, philosophy, and cultural values that has developed over millennia. It reflects the Chinese genius for balancing opposites, for extracting maximum flavor from simple ingredients, and for adapting to changing circumstances while maintaining continuity with the past.
The food has been eaten; the buildings and people are gone. Only the words remain. And in those words, preserved by Dunlop and others who value culinary heritage, the essence of a culture continues to nourish and inspire.
Source
- “At the Chinese Table” by Leslie T. Chang, New York Review of Books (2025)
- “Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food” by Fuchsia Dunlop
- “Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China” by Fuchsia Dunlop
Crepi il lupo! 🐺