Chop Suey : A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States Read Online Free Page A

tributary kingdoms lay the zone of pacification, where the people were in the process of adopting Chinese civilization. For some, this process was remarkably rewarding. The ancestors of the Qing Dynasty’s Manchu emperors were Jurchen tribesmen, seminomadic farmers and hunter-gatherers in northeastern China. Over the centuries, the Jurchen chiefs carefully studied the Chinese imperial system. When the Ming Dynasty fell apart in theearly seventeenth century, the Jurchen roared down from the north and occupied Beijing. They renamed themselves the Manchu and founded the Qing Dynasty, on a basis of strict obedience to the Chinese imperial system, in effect becoming more Chinese than the Chinese.
    Beyond the tribal lands and tributary kingdoms, the rest of the world was encompassed by the outer two circles of the Yü Emperor’s map, called the zone of “allied barbarians” and the zone of “cultureless savagery.” The allied barbarians were the peoples who had regular contact with Chinese civilization but did not have the wisdom to adopt it. This title encompassed many of the tribes on the empire’s northwest frontier whose regular raids across the border had led to the construction of the Great Wall. The rest of the world’s peoples lived in the zone of “cultureless savagery,” of which the ancient Chinese had no direct experience. Instead, their knowledge was based on tomes like the
Shanhaijing
, “Guideways through Mountains and Seas” (fourth century BCE –first century CE ), a kind of guidebook to Heaven and Earth that blends geography, cosmography, mythology, and natural history. Much the way Greek, Roman, and medieval European works describe unseen lands, the
Shanhaijing
describes those who live in the far corners of the Earth as looking not like, well, people. Beyond China’s borders lie the Land of Hairy People, the Land of Feathered People, the Land of People with Perforated Chests, the Land of Three-Headed People, the Land of Giants, the Land of Midgets, and so on. The book tells readers nothing about how these weird inhabitants actually live. For that, the Chinese would apply what they had learned from their interactions with tribes on the margins of the empire, as in this passage from the
Li Chi
, a book of ritual form that Confucian scholars drafted (fifth century–221 BCE ):
The tribes on the east were called I. They had their hair unbound, and tattooed their bodies. Some of them ate their food without its being cooked. Those on the south were called Man. They tattooed their foreheads, and had their feet turned in towards each other. Some of them [also] ate their food without its being cooked. Those on the west were called Zung. They had their hair unbound and wore skins. Some of them did not eat grain-food. Those on the north were called Tî. They wore skins of animals and birds, and dwelt in caves. Some of them also did not eat grain-food. 13
     
    Qing Dynasty accounts also often speak of alien peoples—including Europeans and Americans—and their customs in similarly belittling terms, describing their primitive taste in food, almost animal-like physical appearance, and so on.
     
    Over the millennia, this streak of antiforeign bias in Chinese culture was balanced by intense curiosity about the outside world. From the Han Dynasty (206 BCE –222 CE ) on, the Chinese did have regular contact with the rest of Asia. Chinese ambassador Zhang Qian roamed across Central Asia and even as far south as India, documenting the regional cultures and economies for his Han emperor. Regular trade between China, India, and the West began with the opening of the Silk Road by 100 BCE (and likely earlier). Traffic in goods and ideas also traveled by sea, on oceangoing junks sailing to Japan, to many ports in Southeast Asia, and across the Indian Ocean to East Africa. Perhaps the most lasting result of those contacts was the dissemination between the second and seventh centuries CE of Buddhism, which originated in