From rice to dessert

Rice is 米 mǐ, and the character draws it: grains on either side of a stroke. But careful, 米 has not always meant rice. The 说文解字 Shuōwén jiězì defines it as “the grain of millet”: in ancient northern China, the everyday cereal was millet, which is now called 小米 xiǎomǐ, literally “little grain”. 米 in fact refers to any husked grain, ready to cook, and rice took over the word as it took first place. (For a century now, 米 has also been the metre: it is the first syllable of 米突 mǐtū, a transcription of the French “mètre”.) This page completes “Foods”, after fruit, vegetables and Meat and fish.

People speak of the “five grains”, 五谷 wǔgǔ, but nobody agrees on the list. Depending on the commentator, rice is on it, or hemp in its place. One plant comes up in every list, and it is not a cereal: 菽 shū, the soya bean. That is why tofu is on this page. In chapter 18 of the Analects, an old farmer reproaches Confucius’s disciples for not being able to tell the five grains apart, 五谷不分. The jibe is aimed, a little, at every scholar.

People like to contrast the South, which eats rice, with the North, which eats wheat: 南米北面. The line roughly follows the Qinling Mountains and the Huai River. The 面 miàn of the North means flour and noodles. Note in passing that 面 is also the face, the one in 面子 miànzi. These are two different words, which simplification merged into a single character: flour used to be written 麵, with the wheat radical, 麥. So in Taiwan people still eat 麵. In Beijing, they eat “faces”.

In the north, the 馒头 mántou is a steamed bun with nothing inside, and the 包子 bāozi is filled: 包 means “to wrap”. But in Shanghai, small filled buns are still called 馒头. As for its origin, a stubborn legend traces the 馒头 back to 诸葛亮 Zhūgě Liàng: on campaign in the South, he is said to have replaced the human heads sacrificed to the spirit of a river with heads modelled in dough. The story dates from the Song, eight centuries after the events, and the pun on 蛮头, “barbarian’s head”, probably came later still. A nice story, nothing more.

Tofu, 豆腐 dòufu, also has its legendary inventor: 刘安 Liú Ān, prince of Huainan in the 2nd century BC, who was searching for the elixir of immortality. 朱熹 Zhū Xī was already reporting this tradition in the 12th century. On the other hand, the first text to name tofu dates only from the 10th century: it tells us that the people of one district, having no meat, called it 小宰羊, “the little butcher’s sheep”. As for the 腐 in 豆腐, it means “rotten”, which has put nobody off; I think it should rather be heard as a soft, curdled paste, but I am not sure. 臭豆腐 chòudòufu, 臭 “stinking” + 豆腐 “tofu” ⟶ “stinky tofu”, makes no apology for its name.

Today, an egg is a 鸡蛋 jīdàn, “hen’s egg”, but the classical language said 卵 luǎn, which you find in 以卵击石 yǐ luǎn jī shí, throwing an egg at a stone. The 皮蛋 pídàn is what English menus call the “century egg”: in reality it ages for only a few weeks, coated in clay, ash and lime. The tea egg, 茶叶蛋 cháyèdàn, is sold in every convenience store, simmered for hours in tea and soy sauce.

A proverb lists the “seven things” a household needs every morning: 柴米油盐酱醋茶, firewood, rice, oil, salt, sauce, vinegar and tea. Salt, 盐 yán, was a state monopoly from the Han onwards. Sugar, 糖 táng, has a more surprising history: in 647, Emperor Taizong of the Tang sent envoys to India to learn the technique of boiled sugar, and the annals add, not without pride, that Yangzhou sugar soon surpassed that of the model. As for the 酱 in 酱油 jiàngyóu, soy sauce, it was first a fermented paste of meat or fish. Soya came later.

Milk, 牛奶 niúnǎi, long remained foreign to Han cooking, and many Chinese adults digest lactose, 乳糖 rǔtáng, poorly. But China was no stranger to dairy: the Tang court was fond of creams and butters from the steppe. The most refined of them, 醍醐 tíhú, even gave Buddhism an image of awakening, 醍醐灌顶, “pouring clarified butter on the crown of the head”. Today, in Beijing, yoghurt, 酸奶 suānnǎi, literally “sour milk”, is drunk through a straw from earthenware pots.

A Chinese meal does not end with dessert. Sweet things are eaten separately: as 点心 diǎnxin early in the morning or at teatime, as sweet soups in the South, as treats between meals. What is eaten on fixed dates, dumplings, glutinous rice balls, mooncakes, is on our page Festivals. 点心, literally “touch the heart”, would be what you swallow to keep going until the meal; the explanation is plausible, no more. The word 甜点 tiándiǎn came with Western-style meals and their cakes, 蛋糕 dàngāo, 蛋 “egg” + 糕 “flour cake” ⟶ cake.

Everyday language is full of rice. A job for life is a 铁饭碗 tiěfànwǎn, literally “iron rice bowl” ⟶ a bowl that does not break; the reforms of the 1990s broke a good many all the same. A man who lives off his partner “eats soft rice”, 吃软饭 chī ruǎnfàn. And someone who passes by without getting involved says he has only come for 打酱油 dǎ jiàngyóu, “to buy soy sauce”: it is the answer, now famous, of a passer-by interviewed in 2008 by a Guangzhou television station. 加油 jiāyóu, “add oil”, is the cry of every stadium. The lamp or the engine? Nobody really knows where it comes from.

Two lines that every schoolchild knows by heart remind us where the bowl of rice comes from: 谁知盘中餐，粒粒皆辛苦, “who knows that, on the plate, each grain has cost hard work?” It is the end of a quatrain by 李绅 Lǐ Shēn, which we present on the page Compassion for the peasants. It is said that the poet, once he became a minister, lived in the greatest luxury; the anecdote is late and I pass it on for what it is worth. 陶渊明 Táo Yuānmíng, for his part, kept his word: magistrate of a small district, he resigned rather than bow to an inspector, and refused, as he put it, to “bend his back for five pecks of rice”, 不为五斗米折腰. His salary was grain.

The last sentence on the list comes from chapter 6 of the Analects. Confucius praises 颜回 Yán Huí, his favourite disciple, who lived in a wretched lane with 一箪食，一瓢饮, “a bowl of food and a spoonful of drink”, as Couvreur translates it (on our page Chapter 6 of the Analects of Confucius). The 箪 dān was a round bamboo basket, and the 食 it held, cooked rice, is read sì here, as in 箪食壶浆 dān sì hú jiāng, “rice in the baskets, broth in the jugs”. Our page for the chapter gives it as shí, the reading most Chinese people would give today (something for us to correct, then). Anyone else would have been crushed by it. Hui never lost his joy. A bowl of rice was enough for him.

Click on any character on the page: its stroke order is shown stroke by stroke, with the arrow that gives the direction of the movement.