I have a friend, Brother Xiang, who knows food inside and out. We used to watch The Flavor of Laoguang together, and listening to his commentary was always a joy. As a food KOL, his favorite restaurant in Shanghai is a Chaozhou cuisine place.
I took a weekend trip to Chaozhou, tried dishes featured in the documentary, wandered aimlessly through the old city, learned how to brew tea, and most unexpectedly, met a few interesting new friends.
But there was still one question in my mind that I hadn’t fully answered for myself: is Chaozhou really that delicious?
Over the past two years, Chaoshan has increasingly become a pilgrimage destination on China’s culinary map. The line people quote most often is Chen Xiaoqing’s: “The Chaoshan region is a precious culinary island in China.” Maybe under Chen’s influence, everyone who visits Chaozhou comes back five pounds heavier.
Traditionally, Chaoshan—historically known as Chaozhou Prefecture—includes what are now the three cities of Chaozhou, Shantou, and Jieyang. Since Emperor Wen of Sui named it for being “a land of tides, where the waters ebb and flow,” the name Chaozhou has been in use for more than 1,400 years.
My first impression of Chaozhou was indeed its age—all 1,400 years of it. My second impression was how slow life moves here. On every street and alley, people sit around drinking gongfu tea and chatting; grandmothers squint in the sun at their doorsteps. The trip itself slowed down at once.
I didn’t get out of bed until late in the morning, then found my way to a rice noodle roll shop tucked into an alley. Chaozhou-style cheung fun comes with generous fillings: one order with bamboo shoots, one with shiitake mushrooms, plus a bowl of pleasantly chewy beef tendon ball soup—a fine way to begin my first meal in Chaozhou.
The owner came over especially to ask what vegetables I wanted in the soup. I chose bean sprouts, which turned out to mean only a few strands.
Even close to noon, customers kept coming into the cheung fun shop. Locals pulled up on little scooters to pack a few orders to take home for lunch. The owner worked nonstop, quick and efficient.
After filling up, I walked over to Paifang Street to see the old city.
On the streets of Chaozhou, I was surprised to find that not only is the Chaoshan dialect very similar to Southern Min, but the food, architectural styles, and many local customs are also remarkably close.
Looking down at a map, Chaoshan is backed by the Lianhua Mountains and faces the South China Sea—a true island in every practical sense. For the early settlers, instead of crossing mountains to western Guangdong, it made more sense to sail over and find friends in Fujian. As a local Chaozhou saying goes: “The land may be divided between Fujian and Guangdong, but the customs of Zhangzhou and Chaozhou are no different.”
That is why Quanzhou has a Kaiyuan Temple, and Chaozhou also has a very similar Kaiyuan Temple, right at the entrance to the old city.
The weather was nice that weekend, and tourists and worshippers came in a steady stream. Compared with Kaiyuan Temple in Quanzhou, this one is obviously much smaller. But once the lights come on after dark, it glows brilliantly.
This trip was also when I learned that Chaozhou has a long history of ceramic craftsmanship. On Bijiashan across the river are the ruins of the Song-dynasty Chaozhou kilns. The exquisite eaves of Kaiyuan Temple are decorated with Chaozhou’s distinctive inlaid porcelain technique.
At one end of Paifang Street there is a Songfa Lifestyle Store. At first I thought it had something to do with bak kut teh, but it turned out to be a showroom for the local listed company Songfa Ceramics.
The three-story building is filled with beautifully made porcelain in all kinds of styles. After hesitating for two days, I finally made an impulse purchase before leaving: a set of small tea cups.
Then I suddenly felt hungry again and wanted to try raw fish. Locals said they usually eat it at night, but as a first-time visitor, I wasn’t too concerned about proper order.
There are quite a few restaurants in the old city selling raw fish, and the differences between them are not huge—most hover around the passing mark. I picked one at random. Chaozhou raw fish generally falls into two schools: Guantang and Anbu, which differ somewhat in fish selection, knife work, and dipping sauce. Probably because Anbu is too far from the old city, the places here all serve Guantang xx raw fish.
Guantang raw fish leaves no red flesh and is sliced extremely thin. You pick up a slice or two, add your preferred condiments to the bowl, then drizzle on a little oil-based dipping sauce. It offers both the freshness of the fish and a rich variety of textures.
The reason Chaozhou people eat raw fish at night is that, unlike Shunde, which emphasizes killing and eating the fish immediately, Chaozhou hangs the whole fillet out to air-dry for a while, so only by evening does it develop that dry, clean texture.
The restaurant also sold fish rice, a dish mentioned in The Flavor of Laoguang.
In the past, along the coasts of southern Fujian and Chaoshan, there was a group of people who lived year-round on boats and did not go ashore, known as the Tanka. For them, rice was more expensive than fish, so they had no choice but to boil their catch in seawater and use fish in place of rice—just enough to fill their stomachs, with any extra sold when they came ashore.
Fish boiled in seawater comes with a natural saltiness. The intern actually forgot to bring the Puning broad bean sauce that helps remove any fishiness and adds flavor, but it still made me think that the Tanka diet sounds almost heavenly.
One serving of raw fish cost 90 yuan, and one serving of fish rice 48 yuan. Food that was once cheap has doubled in value in this tourist area, but it still counts as part of Chaozhou’s fish flavors.
Strolling through Chaozhou’s old city, two pleasures are looking at cuo and looking at paifang.
Cuo means houses. In the old city, there are more than a dozen mansion compounds from the Ming and Qing dynasties that are now protected cultural relics. In the ten alleys known as “You, Zao, Yi, Xing, Jia; Jia, Shi, Gu, Zheng, An,” the countless houses built during the Republican era are part of everyday life. The original owners of these homes were mostly shop managers and proprietors of prosperous old brands of the time. “Building a grand house” has long been one of the life goals of Chaoshan men.
To this day, some of these houses have been worn away by wind and rain, some have changed hands several times and been taken over for public use, while others are still quietly inhabited by the descendants of their original owners.
Each house tells the story of a small family’s changes over time. Behind this recycling company, for example, who knows what kind of story might be hidden.
Leafing through a borrowed book, Old Images of Chaozhou, the story that left the deepest impression on me was that of the businessman Wu Xuexun.
In the 1940s, Wu Xuexun was the owner of Chaozhou’s largest department store, with branches as far away as Shanghai and Hong Kong; today people would probably respectfully call him Chairman Wu. After the War of Resistance ended, he spent 2,000 taels of gold and more than two years building an exquisite, meticulously designed Wu residence on Yijing Lane. Then the times changed abruptly. After living there for only a little over 20 days after its completion, Wu Xuexun moved his whole family to Hong Kong.
When the Wu family said goodbye to their old home and homeland, they must have been deeply reluctant to leave. Today, the Wu residence has been turned into a guesthouse and a Chaozhou restaurant. So much of the past has vanished like smoke.
The arcades lining Paifang Street house plenty of food, drink, and handicraft shops. Streets like this are similar all over China: with no shortage of foot traffic, the food often lacks refinement, and the handicrafts can feel repetitive, as if sourced from the same wholesaler, so there’s not much real appeal. Still, now and then, a small shop makes you stop.
This elderly man, though—he always seemed to be sleeping with his head tilted to one side. He was even asleep in other people’s photos too. Amazing.
After walking until I was exhausted, I ducked into a random drink shop on the street to rest my feet. I bought a serving of licorice-seasoned fruit, had a bowl of sea stone flower jelly, and ate a sugar onion pancake. The sugar onion pancake was another food I had first seen in a documentary, a traditional Chaoshan “candy.” To the older generation of Chaoshan people, it is probably what Oreo is to us.
The flavors of Chaozhou always seem to mix savory and sweet together: rice dumplings that are half-savory, half-sweet; fruit with a salty-sweet taste; pancakes that are savory outside and sweet inside. I wonder how that suits your palate.
The owner of the drink shop was reading a book titled The Thinking, Methods, and Path to Financial Freedom.
Chaoshan people are very wealthy, but the wealthy Chaoshan people are not in Chaoshan.
Chaoshan is something of an island. Precisely because of those isolated conditions, people there had no choice but to band together, value commerce, and take risks in order to survive. In that way, they are a lot like people from Wenzhou—never hesitant to leave home and venture out.
My strongest impression upon arriving in Chaozhou was that the city has not really developed. I had assumed that since Chaoshan people are so good at making money, Chaozhou would be relatively prosperous. Instead, the city felt old, messy, and lacking any real planning. Judging from the data, the Chaoshan economy also sits in the lower-middle tier within Guangdong.
As for why it has not developed more—whether because of limited resources or people’s mindset—I honestly do not know.
There are many little street shops selling guo. Guo is a distinctive ingredient and category of food in Chaoshan and southern Fujian, made from rice or sweet potato. It can be cake-like or noodle-like, savory or sweet. Mix and match shapes, fillings, broths, and other variables, and Chaozhou now has more than 100 kinds of guo. They are an affordable choice, whether you need something filling in the morning or a snack at night.
Walking along Dongmen Street, just outside the Guangji Gate tower, is Guangji Bridge. I had never seen a bridge like this before: only the beginning and the end are fixed, while the middle is connected by small boats. At set times, the boats come together and then separate again, creating the effect of a drawbridge.
For a moment, it felt like I had wandered into misty, rainy Jiaxing.
Even more surreal was the seemingly mythical nighttime light show. Whether it happened or not on any given day was completely random; even the street vendors kept saying they were not sure.
Crowds gathered by the riverbank as the rumored showtime spread quietly from person to person. We patiently waited through one announced time after another, and by then, whether the light show would actually happen no longer seemed all that important.
That night, we did not get to see the light show.
Back at the guesthouse, we drank gongfu tea. I feel tea matters even more in Chaoshan daily life than guo or congee. At any hour, you can hear people saying, “Come, sit down and have a cup of tea.”
When even the owner of a roadside food stall invited me for tea after I finished eating, I more or less understood that in Chaoshan, this phrase is basically the most everyday form of greeting.
The local tea in Chaoshan is called Phoenix Dancong, and the flavor is strong. The first time I drank it, I brewed it the way I would green tea, and it turned out distinctly bitter.
The guesthouse manager told me that Chaoshan tea should be poured, not steeped. Once the hot water is added to the tea bowl, you only wait a brief moment before decanting it into the tiny cups, so it does not become too bitter. All right then—Chaozhou tea culture 101.
The tea leaves came from the guesthouse owner’s own tea farm. The owner, whose surname is Xie, is a classic Chaozhou businessman. He has spent his entire life working with ceramics. When he was young, he worked at a village porcelain factory, saved his first pot of gold by recycling and reselling defective pieces, opened his own factory, and later went to Shenzhen in the 1980s to do trade. Now well past 60, he is a very successful businessman.
As the manager put it, when the guesthouse first opened, Old Xie invited a whole circle of his former young followers to support the launch—and those “little brothers” are all big bosses themselves now.
By sheer coincidence, I only decided to stay here shortly before the trip. According to Old Xie, this was the ancestral home where several generations of his family once lived together. Later it sat empty for years and fell into disrepair. Two years earlier, out of a bit of personal sentiment, he designed it himself, drew up the plans, hired a construction crew, and slowly turned it into what it is today.
The house is a classic old Chaoshan “pa shi” style residence, with a central hall, rooms on both sides, a courtyard in the middle, and a layout that is lower in front and higher in back. In many parts of the design, you can tell that although he had no formal training, he put real thought into it.
Many ceramic panel paintings hang on the walls of both the guest rooms and the common areas. Old Xie proudly told me that every one of them was created by his daughter, who is now pursuing art in Canada. She paints on clay panels, and he uses his professional expertise to fire them at high temperatures. The works throughout the house are a father-daughter collaboration.
Old Xie placed his daughter’s portfolio in the most prominent spot in the guesthouse living room. Whenever he talked about her, he stopped sounding like a successful businessman and became simply a deeply proud father.
Outside every guest room, there is a small pavilion and a tea set. So instead of going out to a tea house in the city, you can comfortably sit in the courtyard, look at the greenery, and drink gongfu tea.
The greenery in the courtyard is not even at its fullest yet. By summer, when the ivy really covers the entire wooden frame, it should be even prettier.
In Chaoshan culture, people especially like placing a lotus vat in their home courtyard. It represents both the ideal of remaining unstained while rising from the mud and the wish expressed in the phrase “lotus brings noble sons,” a hope for having more boys. In the past, preference for sons over daughters was quite serious in Chaoshan.
At night, once the lights are turned on, a few night-blooming jasmine plants moved here from elsewhere fill the whole courtyard with a sweet fragrance.
The guesthouse had only just opened, and the linen service company had not yet taken over. So Old Xie and his wife did everything themselves—washing, drying, and ironing. The older generation in Chaozhou really knows how to endure hardship. His wife was especially talkative and kind.
The guesthouse is not large: two courtyards and eight guest rooms in total. It is best suited for a group visiting Chaozhou to book out the whole place.
Over tea and conversation, Old Xie could not hide his envy of the rates charged by YU Hotel. My consultant instincts kicked in, and I started offering him ideas, hoping that before long this place will become a widely recommended destination for experiencing traditional Chaozhou residential culture.
Then I wanted beef hot pot again. Paifang Street still had a fair number of people, but without the afternoon crowds, it was much more pleasant to walk through.
Chaoshan beef hot pot is famous and has spread all over the country. Freshness is everything when it comes to the beef. The most authentic places are said to be the hot pot restaurants near the Guantang and Shaxi slaughterhouses, but given the strength of the local supply chain, the ones in the old city are usually good too—it just depends on whether the restaurant is willing to put in the effort.
We picked one at random. It wasn’t cheap, and the taste was decent enough, but you can’t expect too much in a tourist area. A place starts out with high quality, then gets featured and hyped up, people flood in, and it can no longer maintain its original standards. That’s the dead-end cycle of internet-famous restaurants.
That got me thinking about something else. People joke that today’s livestream shopping is basically the same as TV infomercials from twenty years ago. By that logic, following a guide to check in at internet-famous restaurants doesn’t seem all that different from the older generation’s style of group travel: sleep on the bus, snap photos after getting off.
By the time I got to this point in the writing, I suddenly understood something. Rather than saying I’ve been questioning Chaozhou’s food all along, it’s more accurate to say I’m skeptical of travel guides that all repeat the same talking points.
Late at night, the old city gradually fell quiet. Vendors who had been busy all day were closing up and getting ready to head home.
Some longtime neighborhood regulars had already pulled down their rolling shutters and begun their late-night battles.
Around midnight, the only thing still restless in Chaozhou was the tourists’ appetite. I had long heard about the Cantonese habit of eating late-night congee, and I couldn’t resist going out to look for some.
At a roadside congee stall, I greedily ordered stir-fried bobtail clams and sea bream rice, then still wasn’t satisfied and brought over a serving of marinated raw shrimp from somewhere else. Washed down with plain congee, it was perfect.
After finishing the congee, I walked down the quiet streets late at night, my stomach completely satisfied. As for the question raised at the beginning of this piece, there’s no need to rush. I’ll take my time and answer it for myself the next time I go to Shantou.
About the Author
This article comes from my friend’s WeChat public account. The author is Basically Harmless. If you’re interested, feel free to follow.
