Chop Suey : A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States by Andrew Coe Page B

Chinese cuisine has changed greatly over the centuries and has continually been open to outside influences, it has always been composed of the same basic building blocks. Like all cuisines, it is based on the combinations of specific raw ingredients, flavorings, preparations, and manners of serving and eating dishes. It is also intimately entwined with the country’s vast and varied landscape, its climate, and many millennia of human history. In fact, you cannot explain China’s cuisine without also describing its geography and the way agriculture came to assume a particularly central role in its culture and history. In themid–nineteenth century, the emperor of China held sway over more of the Earth’s surface than any ruler except the queen of England and the czar of Russia. Beyond the eighteen provinces of China Proper, the Daoguang emperor also ruled over Manchuria, which was the Manchu tribal homeland to the northeast, and an enormous swath of colonial possessions. These included the vast “western Regions”: Tibet, Mongolia, and the arid steppes of Central Asia, all the way to present-day Kazakhstan and Kirghizia. (With the exception of Mongolia and parts of Xinjiang, the People’s Republic of China now encompasses nearly the same territory.) In its size and complexity, China in many ways resembled western Europe, with its provinces corresponding in size and cultural variation to Europe’s nations.
    The emperor thus ruled over a wide range of landscapes and climate zones, ranging from rocky high-altitude desert to frozen steppe to tropical rain forest. Surprisingly, very little of China’s land is arable. More than a third of it consists of mountains and steep, untillable hills, and most of its northwestern quarter is an arid zone with only isolated areas fit for growing crops. These mountains and deserts form a natural barrier that for centuries protected China from outside invaders. But this terrain also forced the people very early to develop intensive agricultural practices that made the best of what land they had, mostly along its great rivers. Many of the largest waterways rise in the Tibet Plateau, which is capped by Qomologma, or Mount Everest, the “Mother Goddess of the Earth.” To the north of this region of snow-capped peaks and arid basins lie deserts and rocky steppes—the route of the Silk Road linking China with the Middle East. To the east, where the Tibet Plateau slopes down toward the Pacific Ocean, the great rivers of East and Southeast Asia begin, including the Huanghe, or Yellow River. From its source in themountains, the Huanghe follows a long, looping course, carrying with it enormous amounts of yellowish loess—sedimentary deposits that have been spread for millennia on the North China Plain, a sprawling area of flat lowlands. Three thousand or more years ago, this fertile area became the birthplace of Chinese civilization, and it remains one of the most humanized landscapes on Earth. The Huanghe’s legacy has not always been benevolent; periodic floods with devastating effects on the human population have earned the river the name “China’s Sorrow.”
    The Tibet Plateau is also the source of China’s Yangzi, the third longest river in the world. After leaving the mountains and traveling along the southern border of Sichuan’s fertile “Red Basin,” the Yangzi enters a region of steep valleys, at the eastern end of which the Chinese government has erected the controversial Three Gorges Dam. Downstream, the river flows through a series of wide valleys and plains before finally disgorging into the China Sea. The cities and agricultural regions along this stretch are among the oldest and most important in China. Traditionally, the lower Yangzi has marked the boundary between the northern and southern halves of China Proper, with their differences of climate, agriculture, and culture. (Northerners have long looked down on the South, calling it a zone of heat, humidity, and