Lecture 8: Yin and Yang of Classical Chinese Cuisine
○ In lieu of the other two conditions, the other possibility is a
thriving restaurant culture. With many people who can eat
out often, there is competition among professionals to attract
customers. This is key to 19th-century France and arguably
the modern-day United States, in which there isn’t a strong
extended family anymore and there never was a court. China—with the fi rst and second conditions, with a wealth of
ingredients native and imported, and with an extraordinary series of
stable dynasties—has the potential to be the most varied, complex,
and sophisticated cuisine on Earth. Few other traditions even
come close. The earliest Chinese civilization we know a lot about is the Hsia
period, which is after the advent of agriculture, domestication of
animals, and pottery—all of which happens just slightly after it did
in the Fertile Crescent. By the Hsia period, there were many fl ourishing city-states,
advanced civilizations with large populations, that were
contemporaneous with the Indus River valley, with Dynastic Egypt,
and with Cretan and Mycenaean Greece. Then, around 1500 B.C., just like elsewhere, these civilizations
were invaded from the outside by less “civilized” peoples—in
this case, the Shang, who were much like the Aryans in that they
were pastoralist, warlike nomads who fought on chariots and used
bronze weapons. The Shang came to stay, absorbed the earlier culture, and
eventually developed laws, money, a system of markets, and more
sophisticated pottery. They also began to build walls to keep out
other barbarians. The Shang dynasty developed a pictographic
system of writing that is the ancestor of modern Chinese script.
During this time, they started using huge bronze cooking vessels,
raising silk for clothes, using cracked bones for divination, and
practicing ancestor worship.