Zhajiangmian (炸酱面, also written zha jiang mian) is a Beijing noodle dish: wheat noodles, a soybean paste fried in oil, usually with pork, and a handful of raw, sliced vegetables mixed in at the table. In English it is usually called “fried sauce noodles,” which is a literal reading of the name. The Korean dish jajangmyeon has a name that sounds very close to it, and the two are often compared, confused, or argued over.
The Short Answer
Zhajiangmian is a Beijing dish. Jajangmyeon is the Korean dish that grew out of it, which is why both are wheat noodles with a dark bean paste and why their names sound alike.
What makes a bowl zhajiangmian is a method rather than a fixed recipe: bean paste fried in oil, wheat noodles, and raw vegetables mixed in at the table. Beyond that, even Beijing households never agreed on one version, and the records below show each household doing it its own way.
In the Beijing accounts, the paste is fried in oil and served in its own small bowl, to be mixed into the noodles by the person eating, along with raw vegetables. Jajangmyeon usually arrives with a glossy black sauce, heavy with onion, already poured over the top.
Jajangmyeon is usually on the sweet side; its sauce is described as having been adapted to Korean tastes. Beijing cooks never agreed on sugar either: some refused to add any, others added a great deal.
The dish went from China to Korea with Chinese immigrants. On the Beijing side, the earliest text we have found that names zhajiangmian was published in 1919.
| Zhajiangmian (Beijing) | Jajangmyeon (Korean) | |
|---|---|---|
| Sauce | Soybean paste fried in oil, usually with pork | Glossy black sauce, heavy with onion |
| How it is served | Paste in its own small bowl, mixed in by the eater | Sauce already poured over the noodles |
| Sweetness | Depends on the cook: some added none, some a lot | Usually on the sweet side |
| Toppings | Four raw vegetables, cut fine | — |
| Where it comes from | Beijing; earliest record we can check: 1919 | Grew out of the Chinese dish, brought by Chinese immigrants |
What “Zha” Means: The Sauce Is Fried, and No Two Cooks Agreed How
The name is a description of a method. 炸 (zhá) means to fry in oil; 酱 (jiàng) is a fermented bean paste; and 面 (miàn) is the noodles, a character with a story of its own, told on our page about the Chinese character for noodles. The paste is not stirred into the noodles raw. It goes into a hot, oiled pan first, usually with diced or minced pork, and is fried before it ever meets a noodle.
Every Beijing writer who describes the dish agrees on that much. Beyond it, each describes a different way of doing it. Liang Shiqiu, an essayist who, in his own words, grew up eating zhajiangmian, was firm that the paste should end up dry:
酱要干炸，稀糊糊的就不对劲。
“The paste has to be fried dry. If it is runny, it is not right.”
Tang Lusun, a writer who recorded the food of his family’s Beijing household in essay after essay, gave a family variation made with tiny dried shrimp and egg, and said the opposite:
酱要炸得稀一点，若是酱太干、面太细，挑在碗里拌不开，就不好吃啦。
“The paste should be fried a bit loose. If it is too dry and the noodles too fine, it will not mix in the bowl, and it is no good.”
Deng Yunxiang, a third writer who grew up in Beijing, described yet another result: paste thinned with water before it went into the pan, fried only briefly, so that the bowl arrived with 中间是酱，四周满清油 — “the paste in the middle, and clear oil all the way around it.” Wang Dunhuang, recalling his family’s kitchen in Beijing, describes a fourth household where two cooks worked side by side and both insisted on 小碗干炸, a small bowl fried dry.
So the name is accurate: the sauce is fried. But four people from the same city, writing about the same dish, describe at least three different textures. There was never one standard zhajiangmian to compare anything with.
Zhajiangmian vs Jajangmyeon: Is One Sweet and the Other Not?
One of the most common questions about jajangmyeon is whether it is sweet, and a common way of drawing the line between the two dishes is to say that the Korean one is sweet and the Beijing one is salty. The Beijing records do not support a line that clean.
Tang Lusun recalls his family’s cook, a man named Liu Shun, giving precise instructions for the paste: eight parts salty yellow soybean paste to two parts sweet flour paste, and then
千万别放糖。
“On no account add sugar.”
Wang Dunhuang’s household did the opposite, and even at one table two cooks made it differently. The family’s cook, whom he calls Grandma Zhang, used half sweet paste and half yellow paste, and 做的时候要加糖 — “added sugar as she cooked.” His father went further:
父亲做炸酱全用甜面酱，加盐一点点，还要加大量的糖。
“My father made his sauce entirely with sweet flour paste, a very little salt, and a great deal of sugar.”
His father’s reasoning was that yellow paste was too salty; Grandma Zhang’s reply was that sweet paste lacked the fragrance of yellow paste, and if you wanted it sweeter you could simply add sugar. Both of them were cooking zhajiangmian in Beijing, for the same family.
Sweetness, in other words, already varied from one Beijing kitchen to the next long before anyone compared the dish with a Korean one. The Korean sauce was made sweeter for Korean tastes, but sugar in fried paste was no stranger to Beijing kitchens either. What you are more likely to notice at a restaurant today is how the sauce reaches the noodles. Jajangmyeon usually arrives with a glossy, blacker sauce, heavy with onion, already poured over the top. In the Beijing records the paste comes in its own small bowl and is mixed in by the person eating, along with raw vegetables. Tang Lusun, eating the dish far from home, complained precisely that the paste had been 浇在面上 — poured over the noodles.
Which Came First? How Far Back the Beijing Records Go
People ask whether zhajiangmian or jajangmyeon came first. Jajangmyeon came from China: modern histories of Chinese food abroad trace it to Chinese immigrants in Korea, many of them from Shandong, and describe its sweeter sauce as an adaptation to Korean tastes. The more interesting question is how far back the Chinese dish itself can be traced.
On the Beijing side, noodles themselves are well documented. In 1758 Pan Rongbi, an eighteenth-century writer describing the customs of the capital through the year, wrote that on the day of the summer solstice
京师于是日家家俱食冷淘面，即俗说过水面是也。乃都门之美品。
“In the capital every household eats cold-rinsed noodles that day, commonly called ‘water-passed noodles.’ They are one of the fine things of the city.”
He adds that Beijing people ate these rinsed noodles for breakfast on almost every occasion — birthdays, weddings, funerals, feasts. The same book names a celebrated restaurant for its 一窝丝, a very fine pulled noodle. What Pan Rongbi does not say is what went on the noodles. There is no paste, fried or otherwise, anywhere in his description.
The earliest place we have found the dish named, in a text that is not a later memoir, is a gazetteer of Jingzhao, the administrative district around the capital, compiled by Lin Chuanjia and published in 1919. Its chapter on food lists it in a single line:
炸酱面 京兆各县，富家多食之。旅行各乡镇，便饭中以此为最便。
“Zhajiangmian: in the counties of Jingzhao, well-off households often eat it. When traveling through the towns, it is the most convenient simple meal.”
Between 1758 and 1919 there is a gap in the record we can check. That does not mean the dish did not exist in between. It means we have not found it named. We keep a dated list of the earliest record we can check for each dish, including this one.
The most famous old restaurant for the dish has the same problem. Tang Lusun writes that Zaowen, a small place on Longfusi Street, was 据说 — “said” — to date back to the last years of the Ming dynasty, and then adds 要是真的话, “if that is true.” Even a writer who praised the place did not claim to know.
Some sources go further and say zhajiangmian itself originated in Shandong rather than Beijing. We have not been able to find the record that claim rests on.
In 1919, a Bowl for Well-Off Households
The 1919 line says 富家多食之: “well-off households often eat it.” That phrase only makes sense once you read the rest of the chapter it sits in. The chapter opens with this:
京兆人民食杂粮者，居十之七八。
“Of the people of Jingzhao, seven or eight in ten live on coarse grains.”
It goes on to say that even comfortable households ate coarse grains too, maize above all, and that 贫民小户，终岁不食香油 — “poor families go the whole year without sesame oil.”
Seen against that, the dish becomes a different thing. Wheat noodles were not what most people in the countryside around Beijing ate. A paste fried in oil, with pork in it, was further out of reach still. In 1919, in the counties outside the city, a bowl of zhajiangmian was a well-off family’s meal, and a traveler’s convenience in the market towns.
Deng Yunxiang, remembering the city itself, calls it 北京人的家常便饭, “an everyday home meal for Beijing people,” and that is how almost everyone describes it now. The two are not strictly comparable: the 1919 line is about the counties outside the city, and Deng is writing about households inside it. But the distance between “well-off households” and “everyday home meal” is worth keeping in mind before treating the dish as the food of the poor.
Made at the Noodle Shop, Not the Restaurant
Inside the city, the memoirs agree that zhajiangmian belonged to small places and to the street, not to grand restaurants. Deng Yunxiang, describing the hand-pulled noodles the dish was made with, says they were sold in small eateries and cheap cookshops, and adds 真正大一点的饭馆，便不卖炸酱面了 — “a restaurant of any real size would not sell zhajiangmian.” The one place he names as famous for it was itself a small eatery.
Chen Hongnian, recalling the old city in a book of Beijing memories, describes an arrangement that is closer to street food than to any restaurant. You bought a copper’s worth of yellow paste and sesame oil at the grocer’s, two coppers’ worth of fatty pork, and handed it all to the man at the noodle shop, and
他能挺好地给您做一小碗飘着一层油的炸酱。
“He could make you a very nice little bowl of fried paste with a layer of oil floating on it.”
The noodle shop sold noodles and flatbreads and no side dishes at all; frying your paste was part of the service. The same pattern runs through other Beijing street foods; the tanghulu sellers of the old city were peddlers with baskets and stalls, not shops with signboards.
It Was Already Changing Before It Left Beijing
Zhajiangmian was never fixed to one recipe, even in Beijing. What the Beijing writers did defend was the basic method, and they objected when it changed. Long before the dish was compared with anything from another country, they were complaining about what was being served under its name elsewhere in China.
Tang Lusun ordered “Beiping zhajiangmian” (Beiping was the name Beijing went by for part of the twentieth century) in a northern-style restaurant in Hengyang, in Hunan, and got cut noodles with the paste poured over the top, 全是香豆干 — “all seasoned dried tofu.” In Baotou, far to the north, the paste was 尽是花生仁儿, “nothing but peanuts.” After that, he says, in any trading city away from Beijing he did not dare order it. In another piece he names the offenders more widely:
武汉三镇，上溯皖南苏北，炸酱面里真有不少加豆腐干的，还愣说是北平做法，那真是天晓得了。
“In Wuhan, and up into southern Anhui and northern Jiangsu, plenty of places put dried tofu in their zhajiangmian and still insist that it is the Beijing way. Heaven knows.”
He also complained that after the war, small northern-style eateries had begun padding the paste with diced tofu and 甚至还加辣椒 — “even adding chili.”
Chen Hongnian gives one reason the dish drifted as soon as it left home: the paste itself would not travel. 吃炸酱面的黄酱，在北平算什么呀？可是一离故土，在任何一省，算找不到了！ — “The yellow paste you need for zhajiangmian was nothing special in Beiping. But once you left home, in any other province, you simply could not find it.”
Look at what they objected to: paste poured over the noodles instead of mixed in, shop-cut noodles, fillers like dried tofu and peanuts, chili. On sugar, and on how loose to fry the paste, each household simply did it differently. What they defended was a method, not a single recipe.
Noodles, Water, and the Four Toppings
Two details of how the dish was eaten run through every account.
The first is the water. Tang Lusun explains that Beijing people ate zhajiangmian two ways: rinsed in a basin of cold or warm water after boiling, which made the noodles slick and easy to mix, or lifted straight from the pot into the bowl, called 锅儿挑, which was harder to mix but richer. He preferred the second. Deng Yunxiang calls the rinsed version 面批. The rinsing is the same “water-passed noodle” Pan Rongbi described in 1758, which is as far back as that part of the dish can be traced in the records we have.
The second is the toppings, raw vegetables cut fine and mixed in by the eater. Liang Shiqiu insists on four:
四色面码，一样也少不得，掐菜、黄瓜丝、萝卜缨、芹菜末。
“Four toppings, and you cannot leave out a single one: bean sprouts with the heads and tails pinched off, shredded cucumber, radish greens, minced celery.”
Chen Hongnian also says it must be four — 无论如何它得凑足四个面码儿, “whatever happens, it has to add up to four toppings” — but his list is sprouted beans and bean sprouts, then green garlic, cucumber, or radish, whichever was in season. The number was fixed. What made up the four was not.
Liang Shiqiu adds one more rule: the noodles had to be pulled by hand. 用切面吃炸酱面，没听说过 — “zhajiangmian with shop-cut noodles? I never heard of such a thing.” (How Beijing noodles are stretched is its own subject, covered on the biangbiang noodles page.)
Frequently Asked Questions
What is zhajiangmian called in English?
It is usually translated as “fried sauce noodles,” or sometimes “noodles with fried bean paste.” Zha (炸) means to fry in oil, jiang (酱) is a fermented soybean paste, and mian (面) means noodles. The “fried” refers to the paste, which is cooked in oil before it goes on the noodles.
Is zhajiangmian sweet?
It depends on the cook. Beijing households disagreed about it. One family’s cook insisted on never adding sugar, while in another family the father made his sauce from sweet paste with a great deal of sugar. Every version in these records is built on fermented soybean paste; how much sugar goes in varies from kitchen to kitchen.
Is jajangmyeon Chinese?
It came from China. Modern histories of Chinese food abroad trace jajangmyeon to Chinese immigrants in Korea, many from Shandong, who brought the dish with them; its sauce was later made sweeter for Korean tastes. That is why the names sound so close and the two bowls look alike.
Is zhajiangmian the same as Chongqing zajiang noodles?
No. The Chongqing dish is written 杂酱面, zajiang mian, with a different first character, and is a different dish. Because both names are sometimes translated into English as “fried sauce noodles,” they are easy to confuse.
Is zhajiangmian spicy?
The Beijing version described in these records is not. Tang Lusun specifically complained about eateries that added chili to it. Green garlic sometimes appears among the raw toppings, but the sauce itself carries no chili.
Sources
The Chinese passages above are quoted from the editions named, all in simplified characters as printed.
Pan Rongbi 潘荣陛, Dijing suishi jisheng 帝京岁时纪胜 (1758) — the fifth month, on the summer solstice; and “Huangdu pinhui” 皇都品汇.
Lin Chuanjia 林传甲, Dazhonghua Jingzhao dilizhi 大中华京兆地理志 (1919) — part 16, chapter 68, “Yinshi” 饮食. Modern edition ed. Yang Lian 杨镰 and Zhang Yiqing 张颐青.
The following are recollections, written down decades after the events they describe:
Tang Lusun 唐鲁孙 — “Chi chen tiao mian” 吃抻条面; “Qing nin shi yi shi xinfa zhajiangmian” 请您试一试新法炸酱面; “Xiao fanguan” 小饭馆; “Beiping ren san da zhushi: jiaozi, miantiao he laobing” 北平人三大主食：饺子、面条和烙饼.
Liang Shiqiu 梁实秋 — “Miantiao” 面条; “Zai tan ‘Zhongguo chi'” 再谈“中国吃”, in Yashe tan chi 雅舍谈吃.
Chen Hongnian 陈鸿年, Beiping fengwu 北平风物 — “Qiemianpu” 切面铺; “Youyandian” 油盐店; “Huntun tan” 馄饨摊.
Wang Dunhuang 王敦煌, Chizhur 吃主儿 — “Zhajiangmian” 炸酱面.
Deng Yunxiang 邓云乡, Yunxiang hua shi 云乡话食 — “Yanshan mian fu” 燕山面赋.