From foodways to intangible heritage: a case study of Chinese culinary resource, recipes and restaurants

It is widely known that Chinese foodways is a complex mix of regional elements including a wide range of ingredients and culinary skills, and is considered a system of knowledge not only inherited from the past but also determined by socio-political changes in different eras. Great differences can be found between northern and southern ingredients and culinary skills, even though there have been common characteristics shared among food and eating in various regions through internal migration of the population and importation of cooking elements from elsewhere in the world. Regarding the regional variations, Chinese food has been commonly classified into four major regional cuisines, in terms of east, west, north and south. The northern cuisine, which is famous for its cooking skills, is represented by the early establishment of Shangdong cuisine which influenced the Imperial Court cuisine as well as the later Beijing cuisine; western cuisine is represented by Sichuan cuisine, which is hot and spicy; eastern cuisine, which emphasizes on the cutting skills, is represented by the Jiangsu cuisine which influenced the Shanghai cuisine established in the 1920s when Shanghai became the modern financial center in the new China; and southern cuisine is represented by Guangdong cuisine, with an emphasis upon freshness. Apart from studying Chinese foodways as regional traditions, I suggest we can see it as a kind of intangible heritage we would like to preserve and pass down to our future generations. In particular, the ways how ingredients were produced, procedures taken when the food is prepared, and knowledge of cooking skills was inherited from the past should not be overlooked in the 21(st) century. In this paper, I aim to investigate Chinese foodways in relation to the preservation regarding culinary resource in the production system, the cooking recipes and learning system inherited through restaurants, in order to have a better understanding of food heritage in the many fast changing societies in the modern Chinese world.