This site is written by Gu Shiyan. I work on Chinese street food from Chinese-language primary sources rather than from English secondary coverage, and I am part of a Chinese food-history editorial team, based in China.
A note on the name
Gu Shiyan is a pen name. Everything else on this page is accurate: the sources are real, the passages are read in the original editions, and nothing here is borrowed from another writer’s research without saying so.
If you are a journalist or an editor who needs to confirm an identity before quoting someone, write to me and I will share my legal name with you privately. It simply does not appear on the byline.
How the research is done
Most English-language writing about Chinese food history is built on other English-language writing. That is how the same origin stories circulate for decades without anyone opening the book they supposedly come from.
The method here is slower and it runs in one direction: the Chinese text first.
Each subject starts with a search through a library of Chinese sources — Han-dynasty dictionaries, sixth-century agricultural manuals, Song-dynasty records of city life, late-Qing municipal surveys, regional food histories. A promising passage is located in searchable text, and then read again in the original printed edition, page by page. That second step is not optional. Optical character recognition is dependable for common characters and unreliable for exactly the rare ones that carry the meaning, and a food history assembled from OCR errors would look entirely plausible and be wrong.
Only after that does a passage enter an article, with the book, the compiler, the period and the chapter named, so that anyone can go and check it.
Modern reference works are used to find out which classical text to open. They are not treated as authority, and they are not listed as sources at the foot of an article. What appears there is the primary text itself.
What this has turned up so far
Four examples, each of which can be checked against the source named in the article.
Dan dan noodles are usually said to have been invented in 1841 by a peddler in Zigong. The most detailed survey of Chengdu street food ever compiled — Fu Chongju’s Chengdu Tonglan, printed in 1909 and 1910 — lists around a hundred and fifty street foods with their prices and records which ones were sold from a shoulder pole. Pole-carried noodles are there. They are sweet water noodles, six wen a bowl. Dan dan noodles are not in the survey at all.
China has two ways of making a long noodle, and English has heard of one of them. The sixth-century Qimin Yaoshu describes a noodle die cut from ox horn and drilled with holes “just wide enough for a chive leaf,” sewn into a silk bag and squeezed over boiling water. The manual notes that one such plate lasted twenty years.
Rou jia mo is not a Chinese hamburger, and its name reads backwards. The three characters say that the meat sandwiches the bread. The usual explanation for that is repeated everywhere and documented nowhere, which is worth saying out loud.
The character biáng has three different stroke counts in circulation — 56, 58 and 43 — and all three are correct, because they count different things.
What this site will not do
Three rules, kept even where they make an article less satisfying to read.
Where a claim has no source, the article says so. “Usually explained as” means exactly that, and it does not get upgraded to a fact because the alternative sounds hesitant.
Where the record has a gap, the gap is described rather than filled. There are eight centuries of silence between the two documents behind the pressed-noodle article. That silence is a fact about the evidence, and it is more interesting than a story invented to paper over it.
A dish is not aged by dating its ingredients separately. Wheat bread is ancient and braised pork is ancient; neither tells you when someone first sold the two together under a name. Most of the very old ages attached to Chinese dishes in English are produced this way.
For journalists and editors
I am glad to help with Chinese food and food history, the naming and etymology of dishes, and the regional cooking of Shaanxi, Sichuan and Chongqing. I can usually supply the original Chinese passage behind anything I tell you, with a translation, so that your fact-checker has something to work from.
I will also tell you when I do not know, and when a widely repeated claim cannot be supported. If that is useful to you, write to [Email].