We Live in a Different China

We are born here, we get old here, we get sick here and we die here. But we are not from here. We are the foreign residents of China, our lives here forever temporary, no matter how long they last. We give birth here but our children are not Chinese. We get old here but never retire. We have heart attacks or get cancer here, and whether we survive or not, we must return home. No matter how much of our lives may have been here, foreign residents in China can not be buried here. We will all leave eventually.

You see us in the street or in your city but we live in a different China. No matter how good our Chinese or how well we’ve integrated into our communities, no matter who we’ve married or how long we’ve been here, for the most critical stages of life, we can always go back to our bubbles.

Birth

If China and the world agree on anything, it’s how to make a baby, but once that’s done, differences quickly arise. Pregnant Chinese moms are often cautious and treated delicately; in North America, Europe and some countries, women have run marathons while eight or even nine months pregnant.

Having A Baby In China.com slips into that gap, trying to bridge the cultural differences between the individualistic western approach to pregnancy and birth – where people talk about “the birth experience” – and the top-down approach of most doctors and hospitals in China, where being pregnant and delivering a grandchild is, as one foreign birth worker described it to me, almost considered a job.

“Having a baby overseas can be scary!” the website reads. “WE’RE HERE TO HELP.” I do not have kids, or know anything about having them, and even though many of my foreign friends have had kids in China, the internet was my first resource for information on the first stage of life.  

Started by an American couple in Tianjin with five kids (four born in China), Having A Baby In China includes a weekly podcast; a section of Chinese pregnancy vocab from breast pump (吸奶器) to umbilical cord prolapse (脐带脱垂); and a 199 RMB course  (“Our goal is ‘Peace of Mind for the Expat’ as you experience the amazing joy of giving birth in China”) that addresses topics such as ‘Choosing a Hospital in China’ and ‘Advocating for yourself During Pregnancy in China’.

The site is a glimpse into what’s important for foreign would-be moms and couples, and how some are trying to recreate the western experience — The Birth Bubble — in Chinese hospitals.

Enter the foreign doula.

*

As an idea, the doula goes back to the beginning of history, when experienced women and midwives would help others through pregnancy and birth. As a modern concept, the idea of the doula — a Greek word for female servant, coined in the 1980s — is less than fifty years old, started by American doctors who recognized that women who received physical and emotional support during their pregnancy and childbirth had better outcomes.

As an idea in China, it’s just beginning to take hold.

“There are about six of us,” Ruth Greene, an American doula in Qingdao, tells me. “I keep saying there has to be more. I constantly try to seek them out. We just added another one in Beijing two months ago, so that was really exciting.”

The path to being a doula in China looks like this: have a child here, become a resource for other pregnant moms by sharing your hard-earned information, and then formalize the experience with an international certification.

Greene, who has four kids, received certification in 2014, and has been helping new moms navigate the Chinese birth process since then. She, like most of the doulas, speaks fluent Chinese, including medical terminology related to pregnancy and birth.

Andrea’s path is similar. She moved from Germany to Ningbo, on a gap year in 2004 and has been there ever since. Her first child, a daughter, was born on the way to a Shanghai hospital, in a car at a rest stop on the side of the Hangzhou Bay Bridge.

Not wanting that experience again, she checked into a Shanghai hospital early for her second child, and during her stay, began a WeChat group for foreign moms in Ningbo. The technology, new at the time, finally gave her the opportunity to connect a lot of people in a single group — previously, it was one-on-one SMS messages.

The group morphed into a pregnancy center, where she has helped new moms with breastfeeding and post-partum depression, and finally a doula certification in 2020.

Their role is somewhere between translator, advocate and coach for the mom. They help at ultrasounds and sonograms, and even at the actual birth (which they sometimes attend by WeChat video call), but they are not medical professionals.

“I help them prepare for their birth,” Greene explains. “We walk through what the couple wants for their birth. C-section, a natural birth, an induction… We walk them through those decisions, and then I attend the birth in whatever capacity is possible for the situation.”

It’s also the doula’s responsibility to tell a client when a birthing method that might be common in their own country, like having a child at home, is strongly discouraged in China, or support the nurses and midwives when the mom wants to give birth in a different position than just laying on her back on the bed.

Andrea tells me a story about how the Chinese love for standardization and fixed procedures sometimes clashes with what the mom actually wants. She had a client who was a midwife herself, and wanted to move around during labor and then choose a birthing position she was comfortable with.

“But in China, they tend to just ask you to go to the bed and recline,” she tells me. Woman on her back, giving birth, like you see in movies — “this is the standard setting.” It’s what the nurses and midwives are trained in. They rarely see other positions.

“This woman decides to sit on a birthing chair,” she recalls. “The midwife (who worked for the hospital) got very confused, about how to sanitize the woman, how to cover her.” She spent a lot of time thinking about how to follow her protocol; with the woman in a chair, she couldn’t handle it. She consulted the doctor.

“Just take the situation as it is,” Andrea told her. “The mom doesn’t want to go to bed. She feels comfortable like this. So just, you know, get on your knees and help her to have this baby.”

In the end, everyone else was out of the room when the baby was born. Andrea caught the baby herself. “The mom was fine, the baby was fine,” she says. “But the midwife was stuck somewhere because of what she learned or what she’s not used to.”

“She’s never been trained on that,” Andrea says. “The standard protocol is being on the bed, and Chinese women just follow the instructions.” But the birthing chair didn’t fit the standard Chinese birth method. It was totally new. “The midwife couldn’t handle this new situation,” Andrea tells me. “It’s a cultural difference. This is still a challenge for us when we talk to Chinese doctors or midwives.”

The doulas work in both public hospitals, if the doctors are welcoming (they usually like the free help, though the doulas official status is ambiguous) and the couple can’t or doesn’t want to pay the high fees of private clinics; and in the private sector, where a fancy hospital’s checkups and birth fees can cost over 100,000 RMB.

“Chinese hospitals have zero tolerance for death,” Jacquelyn Carman tells me. Carman and her husband started the website I landed on, and are at the center of the foreign birth community, which exists almost exclusively online. “That’s great,” she says about the focus on moms surviving childbirth, “but the mom’s feelings and individual experience are not necessarily their first interest. This is where the cultures clash.”

“We want to be able to make our own decisions and we want to — it sounds a little strange — enjoy the pregnancy experience. We want to at least feel like we’re heard,” Carman says. “How the individual is feeling through this process is not the number one priority in China.”

Greene goes farther, saying that the birth experience can be traumatic for the mother. “Decisions and authority are typically taken away from the mom,” she says. “If they voice any objection, they are seen as being troublesome or even valuing their own feelings over the safety of the baby.” The undermining of confidence is a major factor in postpartum depression, says Greene.

She relates a story in which a pregnant mother was left alone in a room, not monitored, not allowed to have her husband with her, and “in so much pain she thought she might die — but didn’t have the strength to press the call button.” After the birth, the mother was told, “this is just part of the birth, you must 吃苦,” says Greene. “She carried that fear and pain for years.”

Today, Greene and Andrea are both in the early stages of formalizing their community-led experience into official businesses, though they emphasize that their passion for improving birth experiences is the driving factor over any financial potential. Often, they are not even paid for their services.

I ask Greene what she wants the outcome to be for foreign moms having kids in China.

“It’s the same for every mom,” she answers. “That they would be respected as human beings, not just a baby incubator.”

Illness

Aitor Olabegoya had just registered his marriage when a kite string slit his neck wide open.

The Spaniard, then in his thirties, was driving a scooter home from the wedding office in Beijing, his new wife on the back seat. They were both still in their wedding clothes. As the couple approached Chaoyang Park on the Fourth Ring Road, a taut string slammed into him.

The string paused for a second in the buckle of a bag across his chest before jumping up to his neck. As the scooter moved forward, the tension increased and the string cut into him. He felt nothing. By the time he stopped, onlookers were staring in horror. A man flying a kite in the park had been reeling it in at too low of a height at the exact moment Olabegoya was driving by. He took a selfie with his phone to see what had happened. His neck was sliced from side to side.

*

We can be divided into many different demographics, many different classes, but what level of access we have to health care is almost a defining feature of foreign life in China.

As long as we’re working — and almost all our existence here depends on working, for visa reasons — we all have Chinese medical insurance (医保). We can visit public hospitals the same as any Chinese citizen, though figuring out what they specialize in, how to run the maze, how to get an appointment, and how to communicate with the doctor are just the beginnings of our problems. Doing it while probably sick and vulnerable is really too much for most of us.

Entrance to the Medical Bubble, where doctors speak dozens of languages, appointments can be made by phone, and the staff can handle everything from a newborn to near-death, is expensive. Olabegoya was paying 15,000 RMB a year for private medical insurance, the key that unlocks this bubble, when his accident happened. Top-level insurance, which might include medical evacuation by air to another country in case China can’t treat you, can cost several times more. 

It’s not that we doubt the skills or knowledge of doctors in China’s major cities; many of my friends use the public hospitals for routine medical procedures. But when something goes really wrong, we want the comfort of being able to communicate (if our Chinese isn’t good enough) or the reassurance of a shared cultural background and shared medical expectations (even if our Chinese is good) — if we can pay for it.

Olabegoya, a chef with a decent income, could afford it. So the day of the accident, he held his neck wound closed with one hand and drove the scooter with his other hand, his wife on the back in her wedding dress, to Beijing’s United Family Hospital.

*

When it opened in 1997, almost twenty years after its American founder, Roberta Lipson, moved to Beijing, United Family was the first foreign-invested hospital in China. Today, it has hospitals in Beijing, Qingdao, Tianjin, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, and a medical center in Bo’ao.

UFH’s original Beijing hospital has more than 25 medical departments, including 24-hour emergency facilities and operating rooms equipped to handle surgical trauma, heart attacks, strokes and brain hemorrhages. Three of its four emergency medicine physicians are American. Its nurses speak fluent English. And it’s just one of several international healthcare operators in China.

In 2023, Singapore’s Parkway Pantai (百汇医疗) opened a 450-bed Shanghai hospital, following Jiahui Health’s (嘉会医疗) 500-bed international hospital a few miles away, funded in part by the Singapore government’s investment firm and a private equity company. In Shanghai alone, other options include Global Health Care (全康医疗), DeltaHealth (上海德达医院), Raffles (莱佛士医疗) and Columbia (哥伦比亚中国).

They are not aimed only at foreigners — the few hundred thousand foreigners in China are not nearly enough to support them alone — but they are almost always the first stop for foreigners in a medical emergency. 

*

Olabegoya was quickly rushed into surgery. Doctors sewed his neck back together with 47 stitches. The rough cut stopped just short of his carotid artery and jugular vein, but now infection from the dirty string, among other complications, was a serious risk. The hospital kept him in intensive care for two days before discharging him. It took him three weeks to recover. Insurance paid the 160,000 RMB bill. He calls himself blessed to have had insurance.

Two ragged lines circle his neck, from his Adam’s apple outward. Doctors offered cosmetic surgery to remove the traces of that day but he keeps the scars as a memory.

They never found the person flying the kite.

*

Olabegoya’s first instinct was to go to a private hospital, where he knew he would be treated immediately. He worried that, even with a slit neck, there might be worse injuries at the public hospital and he would be stuck in line.

It’s impossible to second-guess someone in his situation, but as we spoke, I wondered what might have happened if he hadn’t had insurance, or if he had gone to the closest public hospital instead. So after talking to him, I began asking around among my friends for people who had been in a similar life-or-death situation but chose a different path. Mark came forward. 

Mark abhorred The Bubble. An American professor at a university in northern China , he started studying Chinese as a teenager. He has lived in China on-and-off since the early 1990s and teaches Chinese students, in Chinese.

“Six months ago, if you had called me an expat, I would have objected strongly to the suggestion,” he told me recently. “I never wanted to have anything to do with expats… I’ve always idealized the idea of working with Chinese academics as equals.” He speaks derisively about The Bubble, about the foreigners in Sanlitun who don’t speak any Chinese.

A few months ago, that all changed.

A routine health check at a private hospital, an unexpected gift from his partner’s employer, found traces of a recent major heart attack — a heart attack he didn’t even know he had had. His initial bemusement and disbelief at the diagnosis faded quickly when, after being transported to one of the country’s top public cardiovascular hospitals by ambulance, the disinterested doctor told him he needed immediate, life-saving treatment.

But the doctor wouldn’t provide the treatment. In order to receive it, he would have to be checked in to the hospital. When he asked when there would be a bed available, the reply rattled him to his core. “I’m not a fortune teller,” Mark recalls the doctor answering before brushing him off for another patient.

The casual rejection from the doctor left him feeling utterly helpless and disillusioned. Fearing for his life, “there was no suggestion of trying another Chinese public hospital,” he told me. Mark and his Chinese partner quickly evaluated their options, and chose a well-known international hospital, where he received life-saving treatment. He did not have private insurance and the hospital fees came to 150,000 RMB. He paid out of pocket.

Mark is no stranger to the Chinese medical system. In his early days in China, he volunteered as a translator at a public hospital on the east coast. Now in his fifties, he speaks better Chinese than the vast majority of the foreign residents in China, is completely integrated into society, and has some social prestige as a professor. He always assumed that if he encountered a truly life-or-death situation in China, he would be okay.

He has no illusions that things would have been easier in America, where, without insurance, an emergency like this could have bankrupted him. Mark is still unnerved by the first doctor’s indifference but says, “in a way, thank goodness that it happened in China.” He knows he is privileged by “unusual resources” to be able to afford the type of treatment he received.

He goes to public hospitals for his follow-up care. He has made a full recovery and continues to teach.

Like Olabegoya, I was a chef when I came to China in 2005, working at a five-star hotel in Shanghai. I was young and the salary was low but the job included fancy health insurance, which was a luxury to me — until then, working in restaurants in America, I had not had insurance for years. I used my new Chinese insurance sparingly but enjoyed every visit to the doctor, at a private hospital in Pudong, knowing that someone else was paying the bill.

I left that job the following year, and I was back on my own, uninsured. For the next several years, I avoided doctors and hospitals, and hoped that nothing serious would happen to me. The Chinese hospital system was too complicated and I was too embarrassed to ask a friend to translate for me; the private hospitals were far beyond my budget. When I got sick, and I did, often, usually with stomach problems, I spent hours in the bathroom and prayed it would pass.

I woke up one night in 2009 with a severe stabbing feeling in my stomach. It was one in the morning. My wife at the time was deep asleep and just nodded when I told her I was going to the doctor. I didn’t have time to explain. This was not food poisoning or a simple stomach problem. I couldn’t pray or shit this away. I took a taxi to Parkway’s 24-hour clinic, doubled over in the back seat of the car.

I knew I couldn’t afford it but the pain was sharp and deep and I was scared. I didn’t have the money for Parkway — I was living on a writer’s small salary by then, after changing careers — but neither did I have the patience or Chinese skills to deal with a public emergency room.

In the end, I don’t remember what the diagnosis was, but after several hours of intravenous medicine and observation, the stabbing sensation went away. It was painful but thankfully not serious, and now my biggest fear was the bill. What had I done? I wondered, and how was I going to afford this?

The total came to something like 6,000 RMB, about half my salary at the time. It hurt my bank account but I paid it. When I left the hospital, it was sunrise, and I swore, from that day on, I would stop praying my illnesses away. I needed insurance. When I asked for a raise at the media outlet I was working for to cover insurance — 1,000 RMB a month — and the owner refused, I quit on the spot.

In retrospect, I didn’t consider the public hospital system. I was spoiled by that first year of private medical insurance and private hospitals, and scared of the horror stories about Chinese hospitals that circulated through the expat community (and may or may not have been true). I didn’t understand how the system worked until many years later, when I had more Chinese friends and, for a few years, even dated a Chinese doctor.

Today, I have insurance and I use it regularly. I have a long-term relationship with several of my doctors, and the pharmacists at my clinic know me by name. I can still barely afford it — several thousand RMB a month now that I am aging into my 40s — but for me, it’s non-negotiable. I know my situation is privileged, and that there are great doctors at many of China’s hospitals. But healthcare is one Bubble I won’t step out of.  

“I understand why most foreigners leave the country for serious medical treatment,” Catherine tells me. “Medical terminology is difficult to understand in our native language, let alone in a foreign language.”

She is the rarest of the expat community — a wise elder. Catherine has been through three of the four major stages of life in her 38 years in China — birth, aging and the death of friends. Now illness shadows her. She has stage four, triple-negative breast cancer, which has metastasized and spread to her colon.

She is comfortable dealing with private issues in Chinese. She has an entire network of family and friends here and abroad who provide support to her and her family. She has stayed in China for treatment.

Catherine is an exception of the highest order. When foreigners get seriously sick in China and it’s not an emergency that must be dealt with on the spot, like Olabegoya’s freak accident or Mark’s heart attack, we almost always leave.

We hear about them after the fact. They disappear from our WeChat groups and our social circles, and rarely come back. For the younger generation, it might be mental illness that sends them home, like in the case of Abe.

Abe was an acquaintance of mine who was convinced that a popular Japanese tonkatsu restaurant was selling sex services from the kitchen between the lunch and dinner shifts. When he brought up his theory in a taxi one day, we all laughed at him and moved on. When it became clear he was serious, we backed off and changed topic. That was the first sign something was wrong. A few months later, Abe disappeared back to America, supposedly diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

For the older generation, it might be heart problems or cancer, like in Catherine’s situation. Her case is not as dramatic as a slit throat or a silent heart attack (though just as, or even more, serious); she has had time to consider her options. She could have easily flown to Hong Kong, Bangkok or even the U.S. (though her insurance doesn’t cover her there). But she stayed in Shanghai. Her roots here run very deep.

Catherine moved from the U.S. to China in the 1980s, first teaching English and learning Chinese in an inland province, before a life in the manufacturing industry. She traveled the country by bus and slow train in the 1980s from Heilongjiang to Xinjiang and Tibet, gave birth in the early 1990s in a Chinese public hospital, had a successful career in Shanghai and, after several decades in China, has aged into semi-retirement.

Catherine has good private insurance, but returning back to the U.S. would have been extremely difficult. Like most healthcare insurance sold to expats, Catherine’s insurance plan covers treatment in every country in the world except the U.S., where medical costs are extremely high and the billing system complex. In China, it covers the majority, if not all, of the fees at both public and private hospitals, and she receives treatment from both types of hospitals for her cancer. She does not have additional insurance for the U.S..

Neither is she scared by second-hand information about the pitfalls of Chinese hospitals.

“I've been working in Chinese hospitals for 25 years,” she tells me, sponsoring and supervising surgeries for orphan children with issues like cleft palate, spina bifida and heart valve problems through one of the non-profit organizations she works with. “I've seen the medical establishment here change and evolve over a long time, and I am aware of and pay attention to medical developments.”

She brings up her son’s birth in 1994, a 25-hour ordeal that ended in emergency surgery but left her with a good impression of Chinese doctors.

“The doctor had been doing this for 30 years and delivering, like, 20 babies a week,” she recalls. “It was great that I had a woman with that experience.”

Her cancer treatment takes place in a mixture of public and private hospitals, in and out of the Bubble — she is a highly educated and advanced consumer of healthcare in China, and knows how to find the right doctors at the right public hospitals, has the social connections to get access to them, when to do her own research, and when to reach out to specialists in the U.S. through tele-medicine.

She has connections overseas, with doctors and medical specialists in America who are able to offer second or third opinions, and help direct her care here through her team of Chinese oncologists and surgeons.

Catherine’s experience in the system, coupled with her relentless research and self-advocacy, has been paying off. Her diagnosis cannot get worse but she still has treatment options. The color has returned to her face and she is upbeat throughout our long conversation. Her doctors, at both the public and private hospitals, are optimistic about her future.

Aging

The older we get, the less China knows what to do with us.

Charles came to live in China for the fourth time when he was 52. He is a classic British gentleman and has run five-star hotels around the world for decades. Now 68, he has spent the past 16 years managing a prestigious hotel in Shanghai often used by the city leaders and high-ranking visitors.

Charles is active in the city, exploring its bars, restaurants and cultural offerings, and has a wide range of friends of all ethnicities and ages. He travels for fun in China and around the world, visiting wine regions. His apartment is very obviously a home and he cooks often for himself and friends. His mind is sharp and he is engaged with life.

But he shouldn’t really be here. He is too old.

*

Foreigners must be at least 18 years old to work in China. There’s no agreed-upon upper limit. Whether we must retire at 55 or 60, like Chinese citizens, is an issue for the courts. For now, Charles is protected by his green card.

In 2004, China began issuing permanent residence to a highly select group of foreigners. The threshold is high: we must have invested at least $500,000 USD in a Chinese business for three consecutive years; be married to a Chinese citizen; make a “significant contribution” to the country; or possess skills that are especially needed.

Charles has permanent residence. He is one of the few to possess it. By 2020, less than 17,000 of the green cards, recently re-branded “five-star cards” for a new design, had been issued. (In contrast, the US issued more than two million employment-based green cards in the same time frame.) The card gives him all kinds of benefits — no visa or work permit required being the biggest one — in line with what the government provides for its other citizens. But it puts him in a gray area when it comes to work.

When China began ushering in a wave of expats in the 1990s and 2000s, it didn’t expect us to stay. Our visas were always conditional and short-term, and when we got old, we just left. It made sense. China does not need more people, and especially people with escalating health problems. We didn’t ask to retire here, which if you are not married to a Chinese citizen, isn’t possible anyway; unlike many southeast Asian countries, there is no retirement visa in China. 

But the longer we live here, the more that’s going to change. Some of us have begun taking to the courts when labor laws say we should retire, according to law firm King & Wood Mallesons (金杜律师事务所). On the internet, others talk about how to recoup the 8% pension tax we pay from our salaries every month — a pension it’s possible to draw, after 15 years in China, but highly unlikely we will use, given the visa and health care realities.

The root of the inconsistency, according to the law firm, is that “The Regulations on the Management of the Employment of Foreigners in China provides that in China, the minimum employment age for a foreigner is 18, but there is no explicit provision to specify whether they shall be bound by requirements of the Chinese statutory retirement age.”

That question is left to the provinces or municipalities, and it's the gray area, along with his green card, that allows Charles to stay in China and continue working many years past the official retirement age. No one, not his human resources department, not the entry-exit bureau, has told him he can’t.

“Each year I get a one-year contract — and that’s because I want to — and it expires in summer,” he tells me. “Generally, in spring, they ask ‘Would you like to extend it?’. We just go through the process. So I’m assuming it will be the same process. I don’t see why not.”

Charles is old enough to be my father, the oldest friend in my social circle. He represents a possible path for my own future in China, and those of us who might stay longer than anyone expected — though none of my friends plan to retire in China. Talking about it with them feels ridiculous; leaving is assumed.

But then, we didn’t really plan to be here this long in the first place. Most of my friends came in their 20s, like me, and are now in their 40s, also like me. They came for adventure or work, and for myriad reasons, have made a life here. Many left in 2022, to Singapore, to North America, to Europe, but several have stayed.

They have been through the birth stage of life and now raise their children here, as second-generation expats. For the most part, they have settled down and moved into middle-age.

I met many of them through the music and nightlife scenes, and when we once cared about what DJ’s were playing in what club, now they talk about school fees and babysitting schedules.

But for many, their time is short. Wary of the public school system, they send their kids to international or bilingual schools, where school fees can run more than 300,000 RMB per year — for kindergarten. Without the support of an executive-level salary package, the school fees are what eventually drive them to leave China. The minute a foreigner has a child in China, the hourglass turns over and the sand starts falling. By the time their oldest child is ready for proper school, it’s time to leave. 

I don’t have kids, or any plan to make any, and so I remain here in Shanghai, watching my friends and their children slowly age out of China. 

*

Charles’ children, born in Africa during his time there, are both expats in their forties, one in Asia and one in Europe, with their own families. His marriage has run its course; now separated, his wife lives back in the UK.

Alone and with few bills, Charles doesn’t need a pension. We don’t talk about it, but at the time his green card was issued, the minimum salary requirement for an eligible employee was 720,000 RMB per year. He does just fine. Not that he wants to retire anyway. “I will keep on working. Not because I have to, but because I just enjoy what I’m doing.”

We tally up the years he’s spent working in China, starting in the late 1980s: more than two decades. He was in Hong Kong for the handover, in Shanghai for the Expo. “There’s so much positive happening in China now,” he says. “Those are moments in history.”

If he has any regrets about his forty-plus years abroad, or growing older in a foreign country, he does not let on. “It was a great way to see the world but at the same time to experience people,” he reflects. “I’ve always enjoyed history and geography, from an early age. Those two coupled together — what better job to have than working in this business.”

Mentally, he feels ten, fifteen years younger than he is. He does annual health checks in Thailand but goes to Chinese public hospitals for the type of routine medical care that his age demands: colonoscopies, prostate checks. He has lived away from his home country since the late 1970s. For him, home is wherever he is at the moment, and he doesn’t feel a need to go back or slow down, no matter the age.

“I live alone,” he says. “One day I’m going to wake up dead. I put it to the back of my mind, as I think all of us do. That’s why I’d rather be doing the things I’m doing, whether it be traveling, going on trips, seeing parts of China, parts of the world.”

He has considered the end as far as drafting a will and making a list of his computer passwords. “You can’t do anything about it,” he tells me. “Do you want to? If I look at my age and I look at other people of my age, am I envious or jealous of what they have?”

“No,” he says firmly. “I’ve done all the things I want to do.”

Charles has no concerns about the possibility of dying in a foreign country. “In 12 days’ time, I will be 69,” he tells me. “I have been blessed with my life experiences so far. Long may they continue.”

Death

Wu Qiong was conflicted. She had just picked up the American man’s ashes from the crematorium and was at the airport in Wuhan, the remains stashed in her carry-on suitcase. But she desperately had to use the bathroom. She debated what would be worse: leaving the suitcase outside the toilet and it being stolen; or potentially disrespecting the man’s memory by bringing him into the restroom with her.

“This is probably the first time you’ve been in a women’s toilet,” she remembers telling the suitcase as she wheeled it into the bathroom stall. The man, who had terminal cancer,  had died on Wudangshan while making a final, international pilgrimage. “Turn your head,” she said. “No peeking!”

That was her first case, in 2012, but not the last time she spoke to ashes. In her early years working for Roseates, a small agency that specializes in the repatriation of human remains from China, she used to ask the ashes if ghosts were real or not. She figured they would know. Wu has collected so many bodies of foreigners from across China that she has lost track of many of the specific details. Often, she would have to spend a night in a hotel room with the remains while waiting for a morning flight.

She wasn’t scared, she told me — death is not taboo for her — but she did want to settle the question. “If you are there, show me,” she would challenge the ghosts. She never saw one.

*

Wu, now 39, has helped repatriate the remains of foreigners who died mountain climbing in Tibet, been there to assist after a woman fell from the 22nd floor of a high-rise in Suzhou while trying to climb in through an outside window, and seen the results of a young Russian man whose body decomposed on a couch after an alcohol-related death. It happens more often than we imagine, up to five times a day, estimates the founder of Roseates, and the logistics are complex.

Since 1995, foreigners who die in China cannot be buried or have their ashes scattered on public land, except in extremely rare circumstances for people who have made a “special contribution” to the country. Instead, our embassies are tasked to contact the next of kin, who often then hire a company like Roseates.

Founded about 15 years ago by Belgian Wilfried Verbruggen, who Wu calls a father figure, Roseates’s services involve handling “the hospital, the Emergency Intervention Team, the hospital morgue, the Forensic Medical center, the funeral home, the crematory, the Public Security Bureau at local-, district- and city level, Civil Affairs, the Notary Public, the China Foreign Affairs, the Funeral Association, the local hearse company, the Quarantine inspection, the airport Customs, the cargo agent, the airline handling agent, and the consignee,” according to its website.

Verbruggen had been in the “import/export business”, as he called the international funeral director industry, back in Belgium, before a second career selling earth-moving equipment in Europe and Africa. But after moving to China in the 1990s, he reluctantly went back to repatriation of human remains after an embassy asked him for a favor. He has been handling death in China for a long time.

Verbruggen and Wu work in the Death Bubble.

*

Death in China is a highly regulated business, with fixed prices for services — but not always for us. According to China Daily, the official price for embalming in China was 300 RMB in 2015 for Chinese citizens, but, Wu tells me, foreigners may pay inflated rates, particularly in rural areas where officials are not familiar with the process or regulations.

A typical repatriation, including embalming and airfare, can total six figures. I asked Wu to estimate what it would cost to get my body home to the U.S. if something happened to me — 120,000 RMB to the Atlanta airport, she told me. My family, in Miami, would have to figure out what to do with my body from there.

Not everyone can afford the steep bill, even when Roseates’s handling fee is just a tiny fraction of that high cost. Wu tells me about a case in which a young man from an African country was stored in the morgue for more than two years while his family back home raised money for the repatriation and the funeral. In another case, a deceased photographer’s embassy, unable to locate any of the man’s family, sold his expensive camera and used the proceeds to send his body back to his home country.

In an average year, Verbruggen, Wu and two other Chinese employees handle between 120 and 140 cases, less than one in ten of the foreign deaths in China, according to Roseates’s own estimate. Germany, the United States and the UK are the top destinations, though the company has sent bodies to more than 80 different countries.

Handling so much death, across all of China, Verbruggen recognizes quality and value, and Shanghai is the only city to have both, particularly in the professionalism of the embalming and the workmanship of the coffin, which in other cities or provinces might be nothing more than an unlined shipping crate designed to look like, but not function like, a real metal-lined coffin. “Shanghai is the best place in China to die,” Verbruggen says.

*

Verbruggen, in his mid-70s, passed the company to Wu in 2023 and retired to Chengdu with his family. His own health issues, and the 24-hour/7-days-a-week demands of the job, gave him too much pressure, Wu told me. 

Wu considers her job a mission, a service to the families of the deceased, who have lost their loved ones in a far-off, foreign country. She hopes to continue in this work for the rest of her life. That could set up the potential situation of Wu or her colleagues having to carry her former boss’s ashes back to Belgium, should he pass away in China. (Verbruggen told me that if he dies in Belgium, he’d like to be buried, but if it happens in China, he wants to be cremated.)

It’s an awkward question to ask, but Wu puts me at ease. “We hope Wilfried lives another ten or 20 years, but we have to be realistic,” she says. “I could still be working then.”

For his part, Verbruggen is not too concerned. “Where I die, China or Belgium, is not important,” he says. “Just hope not to die in a hospital!”

*

(A version of this article originally appeared in Chinese on 正面链接. It was edited by 于蒙, with illustrations by 陈禹, and visual design by pandanap.)

Qinghai’s Noodle Industry is Massive. This Man Started It.

Han Lu steps out of the Buick and into his past. The village of Upper Woliga is silent and empty but for a red construction crane and a cow grazing an overgrown patch of land. We have driven to this remote corner of Qinghai province, two hours south of Xining, to see the tiny settlement that Han left more than five decades ago, pioneering a path out of poverty that tens of thousands of residents would later follow. Han was migrant zero, the trailblazer of the Noodle Trail, and it would take him not just out of the high brown hills and deep ravines of Hualong County, but propel him out of China and turn him into a local noodle celebrity.

Today, more than 1/3 of the county's 300,000 residents work in the hand-pulled beef noodle industry. If you've eaten la mian in China, the odds are high you've had a brush with Hualong's noodle workers, spread out over nearly 350 cities across the country. The sign might say "Lanzhou" but the staff is often from villages like Upper Woliga in Hualong, where little but buckwheat and potatoes grow in the thin air of the Tibetan plateau. The county alone — to say nothing of Lanzhou and Gansu — is responsible for 32,000 shops across China, and its la mian industry worth approximately 20 billion RMB.

Han, 68, is dressed in a dark blue tracksuit, with a white hat matching his clean white trainers and white chin beard. He has an athletic bounce to his step and an easy smile as he walks us down the road to see the site of his childhood home. The village is dotted with crumbling mud-walled homes, like the one he grew up in, among the newer courtyards, built with noodle money and topped with glassed-in terraces.

Life was grueling, he'd told us the night before; of the 12 children his mother gave birth to, only six survived, and the remaining six didn't have it easy. By five years old, they were in charge of taking the family's cows, sheep and horses out to the grassland to graze. He left school at age seven, when the classes, following the political trend of the time, became study sessions of Mao quotes. By the time he was ten, he had already been drafted into a village production team, doing the work of an adult. Electricity wouldn't come until the end of the 1970s.

Han's father was a cultured man, having graduated from the Whampoa Military Academy started by the region's Muslim warlord, Ma Bufang, and though life made him a farmer, he still listened closely to the politics of the day, picked up on a tiny radio. A young Han Lu followed along, and picked up the habit with his own small radio. He was a teenager, sent 800 kilometers away to Yushu to work on a road construction crew, when the radio brought news that would change his life: the Gang of Four, a political clique that followed Mao's death, had been smashed. His construction crewmates didn't understand the bigger meaning but to Han the signal was clear. The market economy would come back; he could do business. After a year and a half on the road crew, he quit. There was no explicit permission to travel and sell but, then again, no one stopped him. After the political turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s, Han felt that for the first time in his life, there was hope.

In those early years, he tried it all. He sold cordyceps picked in Qinghai to traders in Guangzhou. When he was robbed in the Guangzhou market, he began shuttling military uniforms between Lanzhou and Yushu. He sold "foreign socks", an 80s trend. Finally, he realized there was a strong market for ration stamps, which were being phased out in Qinghai but commanded a premium in Tibet. He went to Lhasa.

Han, like many people from Hualong, is a Hui Muslim and during those trips to Tibet, he couldn't find anywhere to eat halal food. Always on the lookout for new business opportunities, he decided he'd solve the problem himself. He would open a restaurant, which back then meant buying a large tent to set up on the side of road. Beef noodles from Lanzhou had become popular in Xining, so Han hired a noodle cook from the Qinghai capital, packed up his young family (now married with two children) and opened Lhasa's first la mian shop. It was 1983.

Yingke Halal Noodles didn't last long. By 1985, Han was back in Xining, searching for a new way to make money. He drove a Soviet Lada taxi. He mined for gold in today's Kekexili Nature Reserve.

Always fashionable, he got into the clothing trade, which took him to Fujian province. Again, he couldn't find halal food. Returning to Xining, he decided to try noodles again. He sold the furniture, the family's winter clothes, everything they had. He pocketed 7,000 RMB and the family left, this time for Xiamen, where no one from back home would know if he failed.

They arrived late and spend the first night at the train station, waiting for morning. When daylight came, Han didn't waste any time. That day, he scouted and rented a location for 3,000 RMB. He spent another 3,000 RMB on three tables, stools and kitchen equipment. Xibei Halal Noodles opened the next day. Han had picked up the noodle-making process from the cook in Tibet. His wife made the soup. Two relatives who came with them washed dishes and handled money.

Their first day of business brought in 70 RMB. Han did a quick calculation. They had been open for 12 hours but the revenue wouldn't be enough to cover their costs. The next day, and every day after that, business improved. Allah had given Han the ability to pull noodles, he told me, and now it was paying off. They began making 200, 300 RMB a day as customers in the southern city returned over and over for this novel type of northwestern noodle. This time it would work. He brought his father to Xiamen. He called cousins, and cousins of cousins, and friends of cousins, and before long, the beginnings of the modern Hualong noodle network were starting to form.

Han may not have been the first person to open a beef noodle shop outside of northwest China, a government official in Hualong County would later tell me (apparently others had gone to Shanghai), but he was the first one from Hualong to be successful on the East Coast. From Xiamen, overseas Chinese investors brought him, his family and his noodle shop to Indonesia and later the Philippines. By the time he returned to Qinghai in 2001, settling in Xining and opening yet another beef noodle shop just steps away from the city's revered Dongguan Mosque, he was a local hero. (Han's shop, Zhenya Beef Noodles (震亚牛肉面), is still open in Xining on Dongguan Avenue.)

Today, there is a mock shop modeled on that first Xiamen store in the city's Hand-Pulled Noodle Industry Service Center, part of a massive government building in Hualong, and Han Lu is first among the profiles of successful noodle businessman displayed on the walls. He is, according to the government, the first to "go out" of Hualong and his Xiamen noodle store created the blueprint for all others to follow.

The noodle industry is so crucial to Hualong that, apart from the extensive official exhibition and a dedicated service call center, the county's website gives the hand-pulled noodle industry its own prominent position on its homepage.

Once known as among the poorest areas of China, with few opportunities to leave, Hualong is now synonymous with hand-pulled noodles, and the county government has established "embassies" in more than 40 cities across China to help their noodle-makers deal with the practicalities of doing business and living far from home. In noodles, at least, Hualong is everywhere.

Unspoken in all of this is the fact that, as Han told me, there were no beef noodles in Hualong when he was growing up. They came from Lanzhou to Xining in the late 1970s, and spread from there (with his help). While Han was scrupulous about naming his restaurants in Lhasa (Yingke Halal Noodles; 迎客清真面馆) and Xiamen (Northwestern Halal La Mian Restaurant; 西北清真拉面餐厅), later generations found it a lot easier to borrow the established reputation of Lanzhou, and just call their shops (something something) Lanzhou La Mian, a practice that's both common and heavily looked down upon by people from Lanzhou (and Gansu in general) and the older generation of Hualong businessmen. While Lanzhou invented la mian, most people in the industry agree that Hualong entrepreneurs were responsible for first spreading and popularizing it across China.

We stopped for homemade yogurt at a roadside stall on our way back to Xining. Two women in black head coverings tended the stall, in what felt like a remote corner of China. Surely they would be surprised to see two big white guys (me and Graeme, the photographer) pop out of this van on a Saturday afternoon in Hualong. But no. As if to demonstrate the reach of the noodle industry, they both turned out to be noodle wives, having returned to their home county so their children could attend school, after years of living across China: Tianjin, Guangzhou, Nanjing, nine years in Shanghai.

Their husbands were away, still working and sending money home, and, perhaps charmed by Han's personality and status, one of them invited us into her home for tea, and, it turned out, an impromptu meal. That week had been Eid al-Adha (古尔邦节), and some believers still followed the tradition of slaughtering a sheep for the holiday. Sure enough, a plate of sacrificial lamb came to the table, with several other dishes and purple-skinned cloves of raw garlic.

For a county with a reputation as religious, conservative and not particularly friendly to outsiders, it was a generous display of hospitality, made possible by a simple dish that Han had pioneered, that these women's families had prospered from and that we all had in common: la mian.

***

Photos: Graeme Kennedy

I Went Bowling to Honor My Chinese Food Hero

It's Qingming but I don't have a tomb to sweep. So this year, I decided to honor Yuan Mei, an 18th century poet and gourmet, by visiting the old site of his pleasure gardens and tomb in Nanjing. Yuan wrote about food (once), in his classic Sui Yuan Shi Dan (随园食单); I write about food. Yuan was rigid in his beliefs about cooking; I am a stubborn, demanding bastard. Yuan was a hedonist; I am a hedonist. It seemed obvious. Except for the fact that he is a Chinese poet from Qing-era China who has been dead for more than two centuries and I am an American ex-chef in modern China, and so far, still alive, we are almost twins.

In order to beat the crowds, I dropped into Nanjing last month for a day, chasing his legacy around the city: a rundown office tower and neighborhood, a restaurant inspired by his writing, a bowling alley. I bowed to his statue and lit incense and candles at his tomb. I hoped he was listening.

*

Yuan Mei was born in Hangzhou in the early 1700s and was a smart kid. In his 20s, he passed the national imperial examination and earned the jinshi (进士) rank. Instead of staying in the capital and having to study Manchu, he took posts as a county-level government official around Jiangnan, and wrote poetry on the side. By his late 30s, he'd had enough of government. With the money he earned from his poetry, he bought a dilapidated garden outside the Nanjing city walls, and named it Sui Yuan (随园), the Garden of Contentment. The only thing left on the huge property was a former tavern.

Yuan devoted the rest of his life to fixing the place up, building more than 20 pavilions over the next four decades. He spent his time teaching, writing poetry, entertaining and being entertained in the houses of the region's elite. He caused scandal when he dared to invite young, single women into his home to teach them, instead of going to their homes, where things could be more "supervised". He was a champion of women (and also, perhaps, a collector, with five wives and a number of concubines) and an unabashed pleasure-seeker. His poetry made him famous (it's in today's Nanjing Museum) and wealthy, but what interests me is his food writing.

There were restaurants at the time Yuan was around but the real fine dining, the good stuff, happened in the homes of the elite, where families employed high-level private chefs. Yuan toured many of them as a guest. When he found dishes he liked, he'd send his own private chef to his host's house, to study and record the details. After obsessing like this for most of his adult life, he finally compiled and published Suiyuan Shidan in 1792.

Food was still a "low" topic to write about in Yuan's world, and in discussions of his legacy, it always comes second to his verse. But as a record of what the region's most talented chefs made, and the food wisdom of the day, the Suiyuan Shidan is unparalleled. Much of it still holds true more than two centuries later. His poetry may be brilliant but I'd rather read his observations on bamboo shoots. That's just me.

For one, Yuan's book is a very detailed snapshot of how a certain class of people in Jiangnan ate hundreds of years ago. He captures a moment in China's food history when food was seasonal and regional, and expressed more about its nearby geography and habits than modern menus do. We may not eat this way completely, hundreds of years later, when our supply networks span the entire country, or even the world, and greenhouses grow fruits and vegetables in previously off-limits seasons. To have a record of who produced what, where and when, is invaluable. His admiration for mother nature is still instructive today, like his 60/40 rule: 60% of a great meal comes from chef; 40% belongs to the ingredients.

Here was a man of impeccable social standing, championing the lowest class of workers, and holding them up for praise and respect. The Suiyuan Shidan was like a pat on the back to chefs everywhere

Yuan was not the first person in China to write about food. But he was perhaps the most respected, through his poetry, and that reputation made Suiyuan Shidan into what many consider the first great book pulling together Chinese cooking knowledge.

On a deeper level, "the veneration of earthly pleasures is the closest thing Yuan Mei had to a religion," author Nicole Mones wrote in her forward to a 2019 English translation of the Suiyuan Shidan. "Without doubt, he had little time for Buddhism, which taught that sensual joys were dissolute; neither did he respond to Confucianism, which dictated that poetry should be for moral instruction, not personal expression — the opposite of his own ideas."

Three hundred years later, this rings true to me.

*

I can't say Yuan would be happy at the current site of his beloved garden, but he would at least recognize its dilapidated state. What once was a 120 hectare estate beyond the city walls is now an address in downtown Nanjing: 140 Guangzhou Lu.

Or at least that's where I started on my Yuan Mei journey, at a grim office tower named Suiyan Dasha (随园大厦). Gold lions sit out front of the entrance but there is little worth guarding. A restaurant, motel and bar all sit abandoned on the lower floors, the shuttered Suiyuan Bar at least sort of in line with Yuan's abandoned tavern building. (Though, like me, Yuan was a sober hedonist, and did not drink alcohol.)

In the lobby, the management waved off my questions about the site's glorious past. "This place doesn't have any history," they said. Outside, car horns blared from a traffic jam. Temporary walls and worker dormitories lined the intersection, the site of a metro station under construction. The past might have been illustrious, and the future will definitely be more convenient, but the present is far from peaceful.

Buying into the Suiyuan these days costs about 40,000 rmb a square meter, according to a resident who has lived in the neighborhood next to the big tower for more than 50 years. The address is envious — 9 Suiyuan, for example — but the reality is rundown. Low-rise, walk-up apartment buildings are woven together with thick electrical cables, and the working-class neighborhood has seen better days. I search Dianping for nearby restaurants. The grandly named "随园食府" restaurant turns out to be a ghost kitchen doing cheap delivery. The KFC on the corner is busy. Fried chicken sandwiches at Yuan Mei's house — is there no God?

*
A short drive away and an unmarked gate leads into the landscaped grounds of a Republican-era house. Signs with Yuan Mei's poetry line the walkway into Wu Ji Suiyuan (五季随园). Many restaurants in Nanjing borrow the Suiyuan name, some even cooking dishes inspired by his book, but only one has intangible cultural heritage status, and that's what's for lunch.

Ni Zhaoli (倪兆利) started the restaurant on Yuan Mei's 300th birthday, and now, several years later, she is touring us around the rooms. Yuan's poetry is all over the place, blown up into huge characters on the walls of private rooms, decorating fans, and on fabric couplets at the door of the kitchen. A painting of the original layout of Suiyuan sits at the entrance; framed pages from the first edition of Suiyuan Shidan hang on the walls. Everything seems to have a connection to Yuan or be part of Nanjing's intangible cultural heritage. It is elegant, historical, thoughtful, a fitting tribute to the old man.

Over lunch, Boss Ni tells us how a charter from the adjoining university to promote traditional Chinese medicine turned into a restaurant themed on health. Ni, a Beijinger, was tasked with the job, and remembering her university reading of the Suiyuan Shidan, decided to incorporate the longtime Nanjing resident's food philosophy into a health framework. After all, Yuan lived until he was 82 — he must have been on to something, right?

The restaurant is based on an ancient text's (the 黄帝内经) idea of five seasons in a year — an extra one squeezed between summer and autumn — and themes its set menus around seasonality and the number five: five menus per year, five types of fruit on a fruit plate, five colors of noodles, five small bites as appetizers.

Ni, like Yuan, is not a chef herself but has had a hand in developing the restaurant's signature dishes, like a finely diced eight-treasure tofu or young jiucai shoots stir-fried with snails and crunchy luhao.

But Ni is not a traditionalist, pulling recipes straight from Yuan's book and serving them as-is. She believes that without innovation, cultural heritage loses its relevance and dies — it needs to stay modern to be alive. That explains why, on set menus that start at 500rmb per person and go up from there, there is a cold bite of foie gras on toast, or braised beef served kind of a like a steak, with jus and a single marinated tomato. It's why one course was a kung pao prawn, why a separate poached abalone was dressed with Sichuan chili oil, and why she has a Cantonese soup chef from Jiangmen in the kitchen.

After lunch, Ni sends us off to a large statue of Yuan Mei not far away, facing Guangzhou Lu.

As we walk from the restaurant to the statue, I wonder what Yuan would make of this mixing of regions and cuisines. Ni is careful not to say that what she serves is Suiyuan cuisine, a category she thinks is too broad to have much meaning. Instead, it's Wu Ji's take on Suiyuan cuisine, their interpretation, their attempt to balance Yuan's philosophies with their own health mandate, and then balance that with what they think customers in Nanjing will accept. Updating Yuan Mei for the 21st century, while still trying to honor his memory, is hard.

*

Before he died in 1798, Yuan asked his family (including his first son, born when Yuan was 62, and named 阿迟）to keep the garden intact for thirty years, with the huge inheritance of silver he left. They succeeded, well beyond the thirty years, but in the 1850s the Taiping Rebellion came to Nanjing. Yuan described the garden as being next to a small mountain, and the Taiping were so thorough in destroying Yuan's legacy that not only did they tear down his house and pavilions, but they flattened the mountain and turned it into fields, according to historical sources.

They didn't get his tomb.

The tomb survived for the next 100 years but the turbulence in the 1960s was not friendly to the memory of a historical, imperial hedonist. Yuan's tomb was pulled down, and, eventually, built over. Today it is the Wutaishan Bowling Alley, 9 Lasa Lu, home to the Jiangsu Province Bowling Association, and my final stop on my tour de Yuan.

It's a Saturday afternoon and the lanes are busy. Couples on dates, old dudes practicing their roll, and families are all throwing balls down the lanes when I arrive. I squeeze into my bowling shoes, grab a 10-pound ball and do a little stretch. This game is for Yuan.

My muscles are tight and the first balls pull left, into the gutter. This is not how I wanted it to go. I need to make Yuan proud. I take a few deep breaths and find a rhythm, leaning deep into the release. The ball travels down the center of the lane. Nine pins fall. I clean up the last one, recording a spare. I do it once, twice, three times. My score climbs higher but there's not enough time in the game. I finish with an 87. Yuan will have to understand. I was rushed, I was nervous, it's been a while since I bowled. Please, dear Yuan, accept my excuse.

I give the shoes back and head outside. Two chairs and an ashtray mark the smoking area. An old bald man is pulling on his cigarette. I've brought something for Yuan and I reach into my backpack to retrieve it. The two candles are small and red. I put them in the ashtray and light them first. The bald guy looks over. I pull out a bundle of incense and light it with the flame from the candles. The bald guy looks away.

"Yuan Mei. Do you know him?"

The old man glances at me but doesn't speak.

"This used to be his tomb, right here, the bowling alley," I say.

The incense is starting to smoke.

"En," he says. He puts out his cigarette and walks away.

The woman who rented me the bowling shoes comes out next and asks what I'm doing.

"This used to be Yuan Mei's tomb! Suiyan, Yuan Mei, the Suiyuan Shidan!" I say.

"Right... Who?", she asks.

The photographer is taking pictures. I'm worried we are going to be kicked out.

"Just don't include the bowling association's sign in the pictures," she says, and goes back inside.

A minute later she comes out with her phone in her hand. She has found Yuan Mei on the internet.

"This guy?", she asks. "You are commemorating him?"

She is friendly, more curious than annoyed.

"Yes," I say. "We're almost done and then we'll go."

Satisfied, she leaves us alone on the steps. I came to honor Yuan Mei, and if I can't find a grave to sweep, or a garden to sit in, then this square ashtray outside the bowling alley on the site of his tomb will have to do. But the smell of incense is getting stronger and the smoke thicker.

I don't want to cause an international incident.

I blow out the candles and smush out the incense. I hope it's reached Yuan, wherever he is, this little tribute from one hedonist to another. His garden might exist in name only, but, for me, at least, for a few smoky moments, Yuan Mei is not gone.

***

Photos: Graeme Kennedy

How Many Famous Chefs Have Failed in Shanghai? Let's Count.

Shanghai is open for business again, and the chef world knows it. At least three high-profile international restaurants are planning to open this year in our city, from chefs Bjorn Frantzen, Yoshihiro Narisawa, and Esben Holmboe Bang.

How will they do? Judging by the last 20 big-name international chefs who have tried to cash in on their name / fame / stars in China (listed below), they have about a 50% chance of success.

I've listed as many international chefs as I can remember, in alphabetical order, and my assessment of their business skills. Let's walk through the graveyard!

*

Alan Wong
Wong gambled that what was missing in Shanghai was upscale Hawaiian food. True, we did not have that before Wong opened at Shanghai Centre in 2015, spending two million US dollars on the fit-out. If nothing else, it was a unique and bold bet. But it was wrong.

Success? For the construction contractors, perhaps.

Alvin Leung
Hong Kong's "Demon Chef" demonized the Bund for a short while with neo-Chinese cooking. His bad boy shtick fell flat in Shanghai and he ended up in a rent dispute with his landlord. Despite being a short flight away from Shanghai, he hasn't tried again since.

Success? Demonically no.

The Cerea Family
The Italians who brought Shanghai Da Vittorio, robbery disguised as a restaurant. Impeccable service, elegant dining room, model chef and a 988rmb Egg "a la Egg". Insanity, alive and well.

Success? Insanely.

Christian Le Squer
For a time this Michelin guy was the face of a cake delivery company in China. He never opened a restaurant here — and probably earned much more in the process.

Success? Good for his bank account, good for his reputation. A licensing victory.

Daniel Boulud
Boulud opened in Beijing's Legation Quarter just ahead of the 2008 Olympics but was too light and fluffy for the down-to-earth residents of the capital. Six years later, it was gone.

Success? Should have come to Shanghai.

Eric Pras
Pras took over the three-star Maison Lameloise in France from the Lameloise family in the late 2000s and then opened a spinoff in an office building: the 68th floor of Shanghai Tower.

Success? A one-star in the clouds of Lujiazui, still in business today.

Gray Kunz
The Middle House installed Kunz's Cafe Gray Deluxe as its "western" restaurant when it opened in 2018. Kunz himself passed away in 2020 but the restaurant bearing his name continues on.

Success? Judging by the high scores on Dianping, yes.

Jason Atherton
Atherton was supposed to be the next generation of star chefs to run things in Shanghai. He started off strong at Table No. 1 (closed) and The Commune Social (open) but then ran into a mess at The Shanghai Edition hotel, where he may or may not be involved anymore (it's complicated).

Success? Yes and then no.

Jean Georges Vongeritchen
JG was a pioneer, bringing his molten lava cake to Shanghai about 20 years ago, and then expanding into Italian food with Mercato (still open) in 2012 (and failing with a Korean grill) — all in Three on the Bund. Incredibly, he is still going strong in a city where most restaurants live as long as a fruit fly.

Success? Indisputable.

Joel Robuchon
Robuchon is the KFC of the fine dining world, a chain restaurant cashing in on Asia. Robuchon himself passed away in 2018 but his business interests live on in every intricately dotted plate, four-figure bill and palmier from the bakery.

Success? Profitable, even in the afterlife.

Marc Meneau
Like Mattagne, Meneau's name was affixed to a restaurant on the Bund no one ever heard of (in the Wanda Reign hotel) that customers never flocked to. He slipped in and out of Shanghai like a rumor.

Success? That's between him and his accountant.

Martin Berasategui
Mr. B took over the heritage house in Xujiahui park in 2009. He showed up for the opening party and never came back. His lack of commitment was obvious; he sold his name for cash. There was no closing party.

Success? More like a one-night stand.

Mauro Colagreco
Colagreco scooped up Michelin stars for his European garden restaurant, where he grew most of what he cooked. How was that ever supposed to transplant to Unico at Three on the Bund? Oh. It didn't.

Success? Unico worked as a club for a time. The restaurant never grew roots in Shanghai but that didn't stop him from expanding to Nanjing (Le Siecle, also closed) and Beijing (Azur, still open).

Nicolas Le Bec
Lyon's loss became Shanghai's gain when Nicolas Le Bec took over a garden villa on Xinhua Lu in 2014. He still cooks there night after night.

Success? Michelin snubs him but Shanghai loves him. Success.

Niko Romito
Modern cooking from this Italian star, famous for his bread as much as a 450rmb neo-lasagna. He's linked up with the Bvlgari hotel group to become a small chain of his own (Dubai, Beijing, Paris, etc).

Success? Shanghai loves a painful check and Romito is a financial sadist — the perfect match.

Paco Roncero
Roncero was involved in Xintiandi's Estado Puro early on. Is he still? I don't eat in Xintiandi enough to know.

Success? I haven't heard the Spanish chef mentioned in years, but the restaurant is open and busy, so if he's still getting royalties — yes.

Pierre Gagnaire
Gagnaire, like Meneau, went into a luxury hotel but with much better results. His restaurant at The Capella is still going, with the son of the great French chef Alain Chapel in the kitchen.

Success? If you count Michelin stars, yes. It has one.

The Pourcel Brothers
French twins who opened Sens & Bund in Bund 18 in 2004. Their Michelin stars were a draw for a few years, and they cashed in at the 2010 World Expo's French pavilion. But they were too early, and too absent, and now they are gone.

Success? For a short while.

Wolfgang Puck
A 1980s phenom in California, Puck showed up in Shanghai with the opening of Disney. He tried to leverage Disneytown's success into a followup location in Puxi. But without Disneytown's captive audience, or anything special from the kitchen, he drowned in Xintiandi's constant churn.

Success? Limited to Pudong (still running).

Yannick Alleno
After opening in Beijing, Alleno tried fine dining, and then a bistro, in a Changning mall. Shanghai shrugged.

Success? Closed in 2019.

Yves Mattagne
Another Michelin star who took the China cash in exchange for slapping his name on a failed seafood restaurant (2008), at a private club on the Bund.

Success? His restaurant was gone within a year.

***

Illustrations: Cheesecake

The Diplomatic Bastard: Why This Tiny Restaurant Matters

Halfway through dinner at Bastard, a Shanghainese friend began laughing at the dishes and their prices. He has plenty of money. He had just signed a restaurant consulting contract worth 50k a month — a side business to his real job, good for a little pocket money — but paying 38rmb for two pieces of fried tofu made him laugh in disbelief.

Another friend, not from China, told me he's only gotten angrier since eating at Bastard, calling it just a "mish-mash of different Chinese flavors."

A third, this time not a friend, said directly they would never eat Chinese food from a Western chef.

Bastard has, among the people I know, been controversial. The name hints at it, a low-key middle finger to people looking for a more traditional type of restaurant. Some people don't like it.

I love it.

When I came to China, a while ago now, I was a young line cook stuck in the fine dining world. I figured I'd stay for a year or two, maybe jump to Jean Georges for a while, and continue my slow climb to chef elsewhere.

China shook me out of that. It made me want to learn again, but not about spherification and sous vide techniques. It made me want to learn about Chinese food. I quit the (western) kitchen so I could do that, and, in my way, I've been doing it ever since. There was no textbook or professional school back then that could help. There still isn't. I gleaned what I could from restaurant meals, chef chats, and, as my Chinese improved, from a few Chinese-language books. But back then, and even today, there's a real lack of professional-level resources.

I pulled restaurant criticism from my left pocket while trying to stuff as much Chinese food knowledge as I could into the right pocket. I developed an idea that when evaluating food, the only thing that mattered was on the plate. It served me well, guiding me around traps like the decor (whether terrible or luxe) or reputation (whether terrible or legendary).

But it's not always true.

Michael J. and Jiro H. came into the restaurant industry later than I did, when they were already into their 20s. They had both been to college for other things before going into a kitchen and restaurant operations, respectively.

After Hong Kong, they moved to Shanghai, where Michael was the chef of Canton Disco at The Edition Hotel, at the time part of HK's Black Sheep Group. He had learned at the side of chefs in Black Sheep's Ho Lee Fook kitchen.

He tried — and failed — to break into traditional Cantonese kitchens, which weren't so enthusiastic about teaching their techniques to a white guy from Poland who didn't speak Cantonese.

After some moving around, leaving Shanghai and coming back, they decided to put their own money into realizing an idea they had been talking about for six years.

Bastard is their first restaurant, a mish-mash of Chinese flavors and regions, mostly Cantonese and Sichuanese. (When I put the "mish-mash" insult to Michael, he laughed and said, "I agree.") It's dark inside, far down a lane in Jing'an, kinda hard to find the first time.

If the soul of Canton Disco was about luxury and glamour, inspired by the wealth of 1980s Hong Kong, Bastard's soul is cyberpunk, DIY, the Kowloon Walled City. The music — Talking Heads, Can — is a little loud. The seats are crowded. The menu is not long and the dishes are mostly on the small side. It's easy to order the whole thing. They describe it as modern Chinese food.

I'm not even going to talk about what's on the plate. The dishes on their first menu are not nearly the most important thing about the restaurant. So this is not a dish-by-dish "review".

It's beside the point.

Michael Janczewski has gone farther than any of the other chefs, not just adding Chinese ingredients to a western cooking philosophy, but opening with a fully Chinese menu. At this point in his kitchen career, he's been cooking Chinese food longer than he cooked western food. But he's not Chinese and it's inevitable that he's going to be questioned about that.

I didn't have to look far for criticism, which they are not above, but I couldn't find much about their idea of the place, and how they see it. They don't spend much time on marketing.

So I sat down with Michael and Jiro and asked.

"There's an idea of what a Chinese restaurant must look like," they told me. "But we wanted to change this idea or perception of Chinese food and how it looks, and do something you don't expect."

"It's dark in Bastard, it's more colorful, more vibrant, hipster-ish. It's not the same stuff," they said. "There's different ways of having fun with Chinese food. We are here to say you don't have to do it the traditional way. You can do it your own way. Express yourself."

"Sometimes guests will ask me if the chef is from Sichuan," Jiro told me. "When people ask what food we serve, I say mod-Chinese food, but I think they're quite confused. This genre and the idea challenge the public — not just that it's a foreign chef doing Chinese food."

When I talked with Michael about the food philosophy, and what difference and similarities there are between global cuisines and global chefs, he kept it simple. "Taste never lies," he told me. It is, for him, another low-key middle finger to the approach of weighing down food with techniques and sometimes forgetting that "food is just food — don't overthink it."

I also wanted to hear their perspective on the criticism I've heard myself or read on Dianping, and give them a chance to respond.

Dianping: Shanghai has plenty of fake western restaurants, but now it finally has a fake Chinese restaurant.

"Well, I guess we are a pioneer of the genre! They say it's good, it's not the easiest, to be a pioneer, but at least we are first!"

Some people: It's not original.

"If it's not, let me know another restaurant that serves this kind of food, point it out, I'm happy to go there... Getting char siu, listening to Psycho Killer, having a highball — that doesn't happen in every other place."

My friend: It's way too expensive for what it is.

"I can say that about many other restaurants that serve western food. But people seem to look down on Chinese food unless it's fine dining. We care about the ingredients that we are using, and sorry, those are not the cheapest. That's the only way to justify it. I agree, you can get a char siu on rice anywhere for 58rmb but where is this pork coming from? You don't know. Here, we are using Iberico pork and it comes with a higher price tag. So for people who care about the ingredients, just even the produce, they know that."

A prominent food world person: I'm not eating Chinese food from a Western chef.

"But he's eating French food from Chinese chefs? It's not even a criticism for me. I had plenty of these comments when I was running Canton Disco. It was expected. This is just being racist — it's not even a criticism. Very backwards. You don't necessarily have to be Chinese to cook Chinese food. Food doesn't always have to stick to tradition. There's as many ways to do something as there are people."

***

I support Bastard because I support western chefs learning about and experimenting with Chinese food. I see myself in Michael and Jiro, back when I bailed on the Western fine dining world and started to look at China as the teacher.

It's not just them.

I support the guys at Yaya's and now Paulo de Souza at The Merchants and Blake when he was cooking at Oha Cafe and Yann Klein at Maison Lameloise and anyone else who is trying to learn from China.

(It matters equally that there are younger Chinese chefs who are experimenting with Chinese cuisines, and here I'm thinking of Zou Mingyang at the Oha Group and even Zhang Yi (both women! yeah!), who recently won the San Pellegrino China Best Young Chef Award.)

Do I like all their food, every time? Do I like all the business models? No, I don't.

Bastard really speaks to me because it's most my style. I like the Talking Heads and dark alleys more than white tablecloths and tedious garnishes.

But this is bigger than that.

These chefs matter even more in the global climate we are living in, as other countries and people turn away from China.

It matters that there is a dialogue between western chefs and China, that they are investing their time and their money into trying to understand the country and its cuisines, and, in an era of de-coupling, that they are engaging.

It just happens to be through a restaurant.

***

Photos: Elsa Bouillot

Should You Open A Restaurant? Yes! No! Here's Why!

You love food. You go to restaurants all the time. You worked in one during summer vacation once or maybe for a year or two.

Your friends come to you to ask where they should go for dinner, and ask your opinion on whether a place is worth trying. They ask you to order when you go out together. And now you've got a little extra money in your savings account, one or two hundred thousand rmb. It's not enough to buy a house and it's not collecting much interest. Maybe you should take the plunge and invest in a restaurant?

Maybe you've got even more than that, a few million, still not enough to buy a house in downtown, but enough to try out the food and beverage industry on your own.

So many restaurants are busy, aren't they? How much does the food on the plate cost, after all, compared to what they are charging for it?

Plus, it seems like everyone else has opened a restaurant. Why shouldn't you?

Well, don't let me stand in the way! I think it's a great idea, a grand idea, maybe the best one you've ever had!

I just have a few small questions first! I'm sure they won't stop you. Don't think twice!

*

Do you have a background in restaurant management? Years of experience? If not, how are you going to know when things are going well or going bad, and how to fix them?

Do you have a connection to a landlord who will give you a great price on a great property? If not, are you prepared to compete for the opportunity to pay high rent?

To get an idea of current prices, I spoke with Federico Rossi of Reco Real Estate, who handles a lot of properties in Xuhui and Jing'an. He told me that for streets in the central areas of the former French Concession (Anfu Lu, Wukang Lu), you can expect to pay 25-28rmb per day per square meter.

That's about 150,000rmb a month in rent for a 200 square meter restaurant.

For "secondary" streets or projects from big state-owned developers, you might be lucky and pay 16-18rmb per square meter per day. Oh, and you'll need to pay a three-month deposit up front, even on a three-year lease.

Do you think you will open in a nice mall? This is a dream. Nice malls don't gamble on first-time restaurant owners, and malls that do accept people with no track record are usually not nice.

How big of a space can you afford? Have you done the math to determine how many seats you can fit in there at one time, and how much each person needs to spend to make you profitable?

What price level will your restaurant be at? If it's not expensive, then you need volume. Do you have the space for that? Do you have the operations for that?

If it's expensive, then you need a very good chef. Do you have one? If not, how will you get one? Why will they work for you and not someone else?

Do you even have the ability to recognize a great chef? "They worked in a five-star hotel" is not an answer.

Do you have the budget for a good designer? I got a quote from one many restaurants use (and I like): about 250,000rmb for a 200 square meter restaurant. And that doesn't include the acoustic, kitchen or engineering consultants, much less the project management and construction costs. (The design fee can be significantly less or more depending on the designer.)

How long of a lease are you going to be able to get? Can you make your investment back in that time -- and profit? It's not uncommon for an untested brand to get no more than a three-year lease.

Why does Shanghai need your restaurant? There are already more than 100,000 restaurants in Shanghai, and endless variations in every category.

Where are you going to open? If you're downtown and want a streetside location, you are going to pay alot.

If you're not downtown, is your business model adapted to the neighborhood? Is your restaurant going to be so outstanding that people will cross the river or go to a district they don't usually go to? How are you going to achieve that?

If you want to be downtown but can't afford a prime location, how are you going to attract customers to a second floor, or a fringe area?

What's your actual profit going to be? Look at your investment, and then do the math from your percentage of profit, from the profit margin, from the actual revenue. How much do you think you will actually make?

Do you know that net profit, even for successful restaurants, is usually around 3-5%? (EBITDA will be higher but that's a little complicated for this stage.) Sure, some restaurants are making hundreds of thousands of RMB per month, but for every restaurant that is reliably profitable, many restaurants are just getting by — even ones who look or are full all the time.

What's the end goal of your investment? Do you want to be involved in day-to-day operations? If not, do you have a strong general manager who you trust? Won't steal from you? Will handle the restaurant as if he or she owns it, but will work for a reasonable salary?

If not, how are you going to find that person? Are you prepared or do you have the time to step in and try to do it yourself? Would you even know how?

Maybe a delivery-focused business would solve some of the problems. Location, size, service. Good idea! But do you want to give away 25% of your gross revenue to the delivery platforms? Can you still profit, or even make money, after losing a quarter of your sales?

Are you going to invest alone? Do you have millions of rmb to potentially lose? If not, how many other investors will there be? One of the top reasons restaurants fail is that the investors don't get along at some point. Of course, everyone was friendly and positive at the beginning, easy to get along with.

But opening a restaurant involves hundreds — thousands — of small decisions. Will we have tablecloths? What's the budget for plateware? Can we afford a dishwashing machine? Should we buy it or rent it? Which POS system will we use? Do we expand to a second restaurant?

It's inevitable that as the investors go through these questions, there will be disagreement. Someone will want to do it cheaply. Someone will want to spend. Conflict is guaranteed.

Will all of the investors be reasonable, rational and have high EQs? Will they be able to navigate the conflicts without making it personal? Can they all compromise? What if they are not equal partners? Who will lead? These are not questions you can prepare for. You only get the answers once the issues arise and you learn that other people are hell.

How are you going to attract staff? Providing housing and meals is a good way to attract people, but are you ready to become the manager of a dormitory, and all the problems that brings, as well? What will you do when your employees, who live together, get in a fight? Don't show up for work? Damage the apartment you've rented for them or disturbed the neighbors?

Are you good at: human resources, accounting, China marketing, interpersonal communication, explaining the minute details of how food tastes and why, keeping a positive attitude in the face of daily problems, leading a team, knowing when chefs are taking kickbacks from suppliers, Dianping promotions, taking criticism whether it's right or wrong, drinking with customers, working with people who might not have a high degree of education, listening to a thousand different opinions and picking out which ones are valid, compromise, not sleeping much, navigating bureaucracy and being comfortable with the unknown?

Can you afford to lose all the money you will be putting in? Wouldn't you rather give it to me?

Read all the questions and think you have all the answers? Then you're either crazy, brave, foolish or brilliant (maybe all four), which means...

Congrats!!! You're ready to open a restaurant!

(This article is intended to dissuade everyday people from investing in something they don't fully understand, and losing their time, money and energy to a notoriously difficult business. Of course, there are many other restaurant professionals who are able to juggle all of these problems and still come out profitable, and they are only a little crazy because of it. They deserve respect. The moral of this story? Leave the restaurant investing to the professionals. And give your money to me, instead.)

***

Illustrations: Cheesecake

I Scientifically Measured KFC's New Soup Dumplings

KFC has launched a limited run of soup dumplings in China. They are now available everywhere except Hainan (Covid, probably) and... Shanghai.

So this holiday weekend, I did what any regular person who is just a little bit into soup dumpling math would do — I went to Suzhou to measure them with a scale and calipers.

If you're not following along, I started a project nearly ten years ago called The Shanghai Soup Dumpling Index, where I applied precise measurements to various soup dumplings from 52 different shops. In 2015, I published the results and got on TV because of it. I've been trying to live it down ever since.

But KFC pulled me out of retirement. It was never a question. As soon as I saw the ad, I knew it was happening.

The night before my Suzhou trip, I started packing. Scissors? Yes. Digital scale that measures to the hundreth of a gram? Yes. Notepad and pen to record the weight of the meatball and soup to the gram? Yes. Calipers? Wait, where were my calipers?

I dug around in my kitchen equipment. I found my portable refractometer for measuring sugar density, I pulled out my digital pH gauge for measuring acidity, and my instant read Thermopen for highly accurate temperature readings. But the calipers, the ones I had used for years to accurately assess the thickness of soup dumpling skin? They had gone for a walk.

I say this only because it led me to a discovery that, no doubt, will be useful to you at some point in your Shanghai life. Along with sushi, green groceries, and vibrators, you can also buy highly precise scientific calipers on Eleme and have them delivered to your house within an hour.

With my kit prepared, I took an early morning train to our sister city (soup dumplings only available from 6-10am) and stopped at the first KFC I saw. It was at the train station. Soup dumplings weren't on the printed menu but they were in stock.

I conducted a bit of due diligence on the cashier.

Were the dumplings frozen?

Yes, they were.

Were they steamed or microwaved to heat them up?

They were heated in an oven.

This was not looking good. I ordered three sets of six (15.5rmb each). Twenty seconds later, they were ready, on the counter, in the disposable aluminum trays that airline food usually comes in. This was looking worse.

KFC has said they have produced 12 million soup dumplings, or two million sets, and when they sell out, they are gone. I was under no illusion that they suddenly hired thousands of Shanghainese ayis and assigned them a spot in their countless locations across China (except Hainan and Shanghai), to wrap and steam soup dumplings to order.

Twelve million dumplings. That is something like the Gross Annual Soup Dumpling Industrial Output of Shanghai. It's a hell of a lot of dumplings. These would be factory made.

Still, when I opened the lid of the first tray of dumplings, I gasped a little. I have no animosity towards KFC in China. It has gotten me through many Chinese countryside meals and train journeys. It cracked the code of delicious fast-food congee and bought and perfected the recipe for Portugese egg tarts. If there is a way to industrialize a soup dumpling and maintain its integrity, KFC will be the one to figure it out.

The smell came first, a clear whiff of "generic" with wheaty undertones. But what happened to the tops? Instead of pleats, the most elegant feature of a soup dumpling, there were stamped grooves in a loose imitation of pleats. The dumpling wrappers were thick and soggy from sitting around in the heater, and despite the formidable width of the skin, one had managed to break.

As I began to measure, dissecting dumplings in a corner of the second floor, I understood that breaking hardly mattered; even when intact, these soup dumplings contained almost no soup (1.33g on average).

I moved on to taking the weight of the meat, a foamy ball that smelled like wet cat food. Finally, I took out my new set of Delixi calipers and it all fell apart. In 2015 Shanghai, a good dumpling wrapper would have been about 1.25mm thick, and a great one under 1.0mm. This was KFC's biggest failure: wrappers that averaged 2.49mm.

As my Shanghainese dining companion remarked, "That's not a soup dumpling. It's a mantou."

In KFC's defense, they are not the only dumpling shop to offer such a thick skin.

Before Nanxiang Mantou Dian in the Yuyuan Garden complex renovated, the soup dumplings on the ground floor take-away had mantou-like wrappers and only a trace of soup. They also sucked.

In Nanxiang itself, today part of Jiading district, the ayis still err on the side of pudge.

But as many Shanghainese have told me, it's no longer 1975. We have options now, and Shanghai wants soup dumplings that stick to the Shanghainese mantra: thin skin, a lot of meat, a lot of soup, and a savory taste.

As a soup dumpling, prized for draping a savory meatball filling in only the barest of wrapper, KFC's fortified skin is an architectural failure. Yes, we might understand it as technically necessary to serving 12 million dumplings across China and having them stay intact. This might be the best that the current world of food engineering can do, might even be the pinnacle of 2022 industrial soup dumpling technology. As an eating experience, however, it's disappointing.

There's a reason KFC won't bring these to market in Shanghai, the soup dumpling city, and here is the mathematical proof.

***

A Loving Tribute to Chinese Food, From a Hundred Years Ago

This past week, I was reading old guidebooks to life in China from the early 1900s, and in one of them, a 1914 book by Peking University professor Isaac Taylor Headland, I found a fantastic chapter on appreciating Chinese food. Obviously a kindred soul, writing on a topic close to my heart, I felt the need to share these hundred-year-old words that still ring so true to me. I've picked out the best parts (including the picture above) and reproduce them below. —saintcavish

"When foreigners speak of Chinese food, they bunch it all in together, as though it were the same all over the country. It is decidedly not the same. 

***

"When we who have been in China come home, folks talk to us as though we had nothing but rice to live on, and as though the Chinese existed on this one kind of food alone, and as though it was very poor living.  

***

"In a city like Peking one can always buy beef, mutton — the best mutton I have ever eaten — pork, fish, and chicken, and in the winter time the Mongol market furnishes all kinds of game. 

"When the cold months come, great camel trains of Mongol men and women bring loads of frozen game, deer, wild boar, pheasants, partridges, Mongol chicken, rabbits, and everything that grows on the mountains and the plains. 

"Among the best of all this game is the wild boar, the pheasant, and the bustard — the former fed on only the cleanest food, and the latter equal if not superior to our best American turkey. 

"They have a red haw, about the size of a crabapple — an inch in dia- meter — which makes a sauce for bustard equal if not superior to our cranberries. These Mongols also bring large quantities of butter, sealed up in the stomachs of sheep, as we put up our bologna sausage, though foreigners, so far as I have known, have not been very good customers, perhaps because of the greasy and unbathed appearance of the merchants. 

***

"The Chinese themselves use but little, if indeed they use any, butter, and they say of us that we carry about with us a butter odour. 

***

"There are three kinds of food common to us that the Chinese, when they first come in contact with the foreigner, do not like. These are butter, coffee, and cheese. 

"I have had guests who would force themselves to eat these things when I knew that the very odour of them was offensive. I remember one evening I invited Professor Lu — a very large, corpulent professor — of the Peking University to dine with us. It was the first time he had dined in a foreign home. 

"My table boy had been with us for years, and I had never known him to be guilty of a smile while waiting at the table. During the dinner, when he passed the butter to Professor Lu, he was about to take half that was on the dish. The boy gulped, and suggested in a half-under- tone that we never used so much. Professor Lu, perhaps to justify his mistake, or perhaps to approve himself to his hostess, explained, also in a half-undertone: "I am very fond of butter." 

***

"I have had Chinese friends say to me, "I can drink your coffee, and eat your butter, but I draw the line at your cheese." 

***

"Many foreigners go to China and never learn to like their food. All I have to say is that, from the deepest depths of my heart, I pity them. They do not know what they are missing in life. 

"Let me confess here that you have to learn to eat Chinese food. I did not like it the first time — nor the first few times I tried it. But it is an undertaking that richly rewards the one who learns to do it well. 

***

"They have a way of baking — or cooking — large pieces of fat pork, covered with rice flour, which makes it one of the most delicious mouthfuls I have ever tasted. 

***

"It would be impossible in a short chapter like this to try to indulge in any eulogy of sharks' fins, birds' nest soup, chicken soup, egg soup, or the delicious lotus seed broth that one gets at certain seasons of the year. 

"Those who do not know what birds' nest soup is will be interested to learn that there is a bird in the south that expectorates a kind of a gelatinous substance of which it builds its nest on the sides of inaccessible cliffs, where they are very difficult to secure. It is this that makes it so expensive. 

"Some of my friends to whom I have given this explanation, have expressed their sentiments by a peculiar curl of the lip and a twitching of the nose, and said they would not eat it if it were saliva. And then I called their attention to the fact that the bee —  but you may look up the composition of honey yourself — this chapter is about Chinese foods. 

***

"My favourite Chinese food? Oh, I just take any kind and am grateful and happy."

    — Isaac Taylor Headland, 1914

The Fascinating Story of Shanghai's Bloodiest Building

The killing building grabbed me. I've been intrigued with the old Shanghai Municipal Abattoir since I went to its "re-opening" as a creative industry hub in 2008, when it was renamed 1933 or Lao Chang Fang (老场坊). Sitting on the former killing floor as its new management company spun fantasies about the building's glorious future as retail and office space, I wondered:

Why did Shanghai did need such a big cattle slaughterhouse? How much beef could the expat population possibly eat? Enough to justify this four-story, hyper-modern (for its time) architectural killing machine? And why did they put an Art Deco facade on the front? Has Shanghai always been so obsessed with its looks that even a century ago, it decorated the municipal slaughterhouse?

I never went deeper. Almost fifteen years later, now in lockdown, I fell into an online rabbit hole and came out on the other side at... the 1933 abattoir. My questions came back.

So I tested those questions against the internet. And behold! I found a very detailed study by a professor from a university in Suzhou that satisfied much of my curiosity, but didn't answer who was eating all that beef. For that, I turned to an American historian in Beijing who, also intrigued by 1933 during his time in Shanghai, began studying the historical cattle trade in China. Power of the internet...

So, there is no "news" hook to this article. It is just a nerdy, long and deeeeeep dive into the history of a gory but crucial topic: slaughterhouse architecture.

THE LOCATION

It started with the slaughter grounds. In old Shanghai, the gray areas between the various "municipalities" — the French Concession, the International Settlement (run by British and Americans), and the Chinese city — were often where animals destined for the meat market were killed. It was not pleasant, hygienic or systematic. So in the 1890s, the International Settlement built a city-run slaughterhouse in Hongkou. In the 1920s, it was damaged by fire. At the same time, city planners predicted that Shanghai's population was growing too fast for meat processing to keep up. And they were right. By 1932, Shanghai's foreign population had boomed to nearly 70,000 people. They needed a new abattoir.

After surveying six sites, the Shanghai Municipal Council settled on Shajing Lu (then Sawgin Road) in Hongkou. It was close to the railway station, where the cows came in, and the cattle yards, built in the 1890s, where the cows were parked between arrival and, uh, disposal. It was next to a creek, for getting rid of "waste", and wharves, for shipping. So, in 1926, the Council bought the land and its British architects began drafting plans for what some would eventually call the largest slaughterhouse in East Asia.

THE PROCESS

The Council did their research before launching into the design we see today. It had been 40 years since the last Shanghai slaughterhouse was built, and slaughterhouse architecture had, like many things in the 1920s and 30s, been modernized in line with the "scientific principles" of the day. The architects of the Council wrote to other cities around the world to get advice and tips from their experience in designing modern abattoirs. One important lesson: let gravity do the hard work.

From a 1930 letter by the Toronto Municipal Abattoir Manager:

"the Toronto Municipal Abattoir and Cold Storage has been operating as a Public Abattoir for the past sixteen years ... my recommendation to you is that your killing take place on the top floor so that your offal will gravitate to the floor below... in the operation of killing the livestock on the top floor, it would be much better to have your beef conveyed over to a separate building which could be utilized as a public wholesale market and would also separate your by-product department from your fresh meat entirely."

From Johannesburg that same year:

"The abattoirs as originally built had slaughtering on the ground floor and the Hanging Hall opposite. Some nine years ago additions were made on the first floor of which the slaughtering of cattle is easily done. The arrangement is not an uncommon one and the writer has personally visited the abattoirs over in Sydney and Adelaide and in Melbourne where slaughtering was done on the first floor and even on second floors. The advantage of this is very considerable in as much as the animals can all walk up an inclined way, and gravitation can therefore be employed for delivering the various products of the dressing of the beast to lower levels for treatment."

It works like this.

The animals walk up the anti-slip concrete ramps and into their "lairages" on the third and fourth floor. (The ramp on the southeast corner was for cattle; the northeastern corner ramp was for calves and sheep — the abattoir was built for cattle but handled more than just that.)

These lairages were the holding pens where animals were housed for 24-48 hours before they were killed, to allow them to relax a bit from the stress of being moved from the stockyards. (It is true that stress hormones can adversely affect the quality of meat — there is a deep body of literature on the subject.) This is also when inspectors would check the animals for any outward signs of disease or illness.

From there, they went across the bridge — the M.C. Escher-looking constructions that people now pose for selfies on — to the killing floor, moving from the "square building" into the central "circle".(See the second article for floor plans.)

The bridges themselves were designed to be just wide enough for one animal to pass through without being able to turn around. Once they were on the bridge, the only way was forward. It was a literal bridge between life and death.

At the other end of the bridge, they would enter a kind of chamber, where they would be shot with a .22 pistol. Smaller animals were stunned with an electric shock. The box would be lowered by gravity, the carcass pulled on to the floor, bled and stripped of its hide, and moved to the butchering table.

Each table had two chutes nearby for the workers: one to send the hides down for processing on the ground floor of the circular building; the other for shooting the organs down to the organ room on the mezzanine level.

Their carcasses were strung up by the hind legs and moved around on a track running along the ceiling, winding up in the chilling rooms on the west wing of the building. From there they might have gone into the cold storage or meat market that stood where the Kowloon Hotel (九龙宾馆) now stands, south of the abattoir, and/or onto the central Hongkou market a few blocks away.

The killing chamber automatically returned to its position, a new animal would step into the box, and the process would start again.

A 1936 newspaper account from the Evening Post described it this way (lightly edited):

"He is a full-grown beast with big horns and big eyes and a small hump behind his head. He is brought in from the country and is put into a cement stall in the lairage section... well-ventilated and clean; the animals are not crowded. They have food and water. The inspectors look the ox over and after a day or so he is ready. The ox is then led to slaughter.

He is led into a narrow cement runway and quartered temporarily in a waiting pen. He is surrounded by white cement, galvanized steel and mechanical efficiency. He cannot see what is happening to those that went ahead of him because the building is constructed to prevent that.

When they are ready for him, he is led on over a bridge into the slaughtering block. He walks into a “box” somewhat like a piano box without a top. He still can’t see anything ahead. His nose is tied down to steady him if he is restless.

We stood and looked at this ox. He breathed a little hard but didn’t tug or kick or roll his eyes. He stood quietly. A man stepped up to him with a pistol in his hand and put the muzzle to the middle of this beast’s forehead and fired. The ox instantly fell down in a heap in the box, quite dead.

The box tipped mechanically and the body rolled out onto a cement floor, slanted for drainage. The butchers were here. The work was done, by local custom, on the third floor. A knife goes into the throat and out comes the blood into a bucket. The efficient butchers took off the hide, cut off the feet, head, tail and tongue. Out comes the organs, stomach and intestines, down a chute to a disposal plant.

A hook came down, caught a leg tendon and up went the carcass in the air, hind legs speared on the hook attached to an overhead trolley. The meat was stamped and the carcass rolled off to the cooling halls to join rows of similar carcasses."

THE MARKET

How much meat came out of the abattoir, and who was eating it? Surely, it couldn't all have just been the beef-crazy British, could it?

By the time the slaughterhouse opened in November 1933, Chinese citizens had been allowed to live in the French Concession and International Settlement for decades. Though they also ate beef — historian and professor Thomas DuBois shared a 1925 Chinese cookbook with me named The Secrets of Western Cuisine (西餐烹饪秘诀) that included about a dozen beef recipes — Chinese residents ate more pork, and so the slaughterhouse included a lairage and butchery for pigs on the ground floor.

According to documents from the Shanghai Municipal Archives, the abattoir had a planned capacity for slaughtering 500-600 cattle per day, 500-700 sheep, and 150 pigs. In reality, it seemed to have processed less than that, at least in its early days. This is where the statistics compiled by Professor DuBois come in. Be prepared, this gets a little data-ish.

(The conclusion: Shanghai produced a humongous amount of meat — way more than even the British could eat.)

Professor DuBois compiled data on the 1933 cattle trade in 15 Chinese cities, showing that Shanghai processed the most cows of any city that year, at more than 51,000 — roughly 10 million kg of beef, just ahead of Guangzhou (49,000) and Qingdao (38,000), which both exported their meat. (It's unlikely Shanghai exported much beef.)

To get an idea just how much meat the average foreign resident of Shanghai might eat, I turned to a paper named The British Market for Meat 1850-1914, which shows that in 1914, the average Brit (in Britain) consumed about 58kg of beef per year.

So, let's play a little math game. This is totally for fun, not rigorous or academic or probably even correct, but let's try.

The Shanghai Municipal Council's 1915 census shows that the British were 26% of the International Settlement population. Assuming that percentage stayed about the same for the next 20 years, and using archived Bureau of Public Safety documents that show 44,240 foreign residents in the International Settlement in 1932, we can estimate a population of about 11,520 Brits.

If each person consumed beef at the rate of 1914 Britain (58kg per year on average), the Brits of Shanghai alone would eat 670,000 kilograms of beef annually — 3,700 cows per year, or about 10 cows (plus a small steak) per day.

That's to say nothing of the demand from the Japanese, Portuguese, French, American or the many other nationalities — much less the Chinese population of the International Settlement and the million-plus residents of the French Concession. The demand from the Jewish population alone was enough to convince the city to install a special slaughter pen — the Weinberg pen — for ritual slaughter in order to produce kosher beef for that community.

Total it all up and the city was processing an average of 140 cows per day.

Clearly, Shanghai needed a lot of meat.

THE DESIGN

Debate over the categorization of its facade as Art Deco notwithstanding (there is, I understand, some contention), it seems rational to wonder why the Council architects dressed the building up. To me, a slaughterhouse design epitomizes the rule of function over form; indeed, the Shanghai Municipal Abattoir's internal design was as meticulous and process-driven as any modern, assembly-line factory at the time. As Professor Wang Yi-Wen writes in The Modern Abattoir as a Machine for Killing: The Municipal Abattoir of the International Shanghai Settlement, it just specialized in disassembly. Why did it need a cherry on top?

Many sources note that the latticed facade faces west and would have covered the chilling rooms; ventilation was a key concern. Surely, this could have been achieved without the Deco design. But it wasn't. We will never know why.

Even the identity of the chief architect of the Shanghai Municipal Abattoir is obscured by history. In the 2016 paper she co-authored, Professor Wang speculates that the primary architect was not, as many sources state, a British architect named "Balfours" but instead a British civil servant named A.C. Wheeler. Wheeler was an assistant architect in the city's Architecture Office, which handled the abattoir project, and he oversaw new builds during the 13 years he worked there.

Alas, Wheeler moved to Canada in 1939 and if he left any papers explaining why his slaughterhouse has an Art Deco facade, they have been lost to history. Anti-climax!

***

THE LATER YEARS

All of that leads us only to the very start of the abattoir's life. What happened after 1933? The general timeline goes something like this.

After the civil war, the new government took over the slaughterhouse, re-named it the Shanghai Number One Slaughterhouse and continued to run it. Slowly, its use morphed from killing machine to pharmaceutical factory, as its R&D department began exploring insulin extraction from the organs of pigs, cattle, sheep and even rabbits. (It started slaughtering rabbits in 1957.)

By the mid 1970s, the shift into biomedicine was complete and the pork slaughtering moved to a different Shanghai abattoir.

By 2002, the pharma company had moved out and the building was left for dead.

The city government picked it up again in 2005, named it Heritage Architecture and made it the flagship project of its plan for urban regeneration and heritage protection through the creative park industry.

In 2007, the management contract was awarded to a company who had previously worked on Three on the Bund. They stripped away the architectural additions that had piled up over the decades as the building's use evolved, took it back down to its almost-sculptural shape and left the concrete bare — originally, the building would have been whitewashed and its rooms done in white tile.

1933 debuted in 2008 and has been a combination of office, shopping and event space since then — oddly, at one point, it hosted a lot of weddings.

Unfortunately, there's little there about the building's history or place in Shanghai; if anything, it seems the current managers are not keen to embrace the building's gory reason for being, preferring to emphasize its aesthetics.

Instead, the building was marketed as "the original option for company annual conferences", according to its old website. The former killing floor is now the "dazzling" 1,500 square meter "Sky Theatre", and the old chilling room has become the "Basilica Suite", where the lattice windows "create superior light and shade effect".

To me, it seems like a missed opportunity for education but it's not hard to understand the motivations of the management company, who spent a reported 80 million rmb on restorations: talking about death doesn't help sell events or office space. In a country where death is taboo, saving the old abattoir is an especially awkward task.

***

THE PRESENT

Today, the scale of Shanghai's meat consumption is staggering, and it seems almost quaint that the city once envisioned a single building as a solution. I found at least 75 slaughterhouses in Shanghai's city limits with a quick Baidu search, and that says nothing of the slaughterhouses in other provinces that supply Shanghai.

And how much we eat!

Let's play the data guessing game again.

Statistics from 2020 show that Shanghai alone ate more than four kilograms of beef per person that year. If we do the simple math, that's 4.18kg times 24.9 million, the official population of Shanghai in 2020, or 104 million kg. Divide by about 200kg, the average amount of meat from one cow in modern times, and we see that, as a city, we consumed more than half a million cows that year — at least 1,500 cattle per day.

Pigs? 9.5 million animals — 26,000 per day.

We're going to need another slaughterhouse...

***

THE END

This account owes a deep debt to the academics: Wang Yi-Wen, a professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Design at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (which is actually in Suzhou); and Thomas DuBois, a professor and historian at Beijing Normal University. Thank you both for your papers, your research in the Archives and for our conversations in which you helpfully walked me through the history and answered my questions.

***

Illustrations: Cheesecake

The Camel Milk King of China

I originally wrote this story in 2017 after a trip to Xinjiang the previous year. It appeared on the Roads and Kingdoms website, and was part of their “Dispatched” column of “original longform reporting, curated by Anthony Bourdain.” I’ve edited the original down from more than 4,000 words to this 2021 version, and appended an update at the bottom about what’s happened in the company since I first visited.

***

“Drink one more shot and I’ll give you the antidote,” Chen Gangliang, the founder of China’s only camel milk company, slurs at me. We are in a Xinjiang desert but eating fish, harvested from the area’s two freshwater lakes. The plates of freshwater pike, tiny fried silver fish, and fish dumplings have been cleared, and now we are deep into the baijiu. It’s still light outside in this dusty town; in summer, the sun sets around 11pm.  The restaurant is a concrete box on the outside but fancy inside, a hidden entertaining spot in Fuhai, a small city that is ethnically Kazakh and primarily based around the mumin culture of the nomadic Kazakh herders.

The baijiu stinks of regret but we are a long ways past the first shot of the night, and the entire evening —goaded on by the camel milk princess, toasted by senior managers in short sleeve dress shirts with shoe-polish black comb-overs, in a fog of cigarettes and new friendship — is starting to seem like a set up for this exact moment. Properly shit-faced, improperly enthusiastic, Chen and I finish the shot.

Silver cans of Wang Yuan camel milk appear on the table. They are supposed to erase the effects of half a bottle of moonshine with their super-nutrition. The cure is so effective, Chen says, that it turns his salesmen into superhuman drinkers. He doesn’t allow his staff to bring camel milk to restaurants, he says, because they would outdrink everyone else. There was no such ban on our dinner. Two cases of milk sat against a wall.

I pull the tab on top of the silver can and chug. It tastes mostly of dairy, with a slightly animal whiff. It is not unpleasant. It is not alcoholic. And it doesn’t work.

***

Twenty-four hours earlier we had landed in Altay, a tiny triangle of extreme northwestern China, where the borders of Kazakhstan, Russia, and Mongolia meet. Everyone is here for the zhuanchang, a massive migration of tens of thousands of animals, when herders move their camels, cows, sheep, and horses from the lower, spring pastures to the alpine grasses higher up the mountains.

These days, the zhuanchang has been at least partially co-opted as a tourist attraction, and the hotel was buzzing with middle-aged photographers in vests who had paid dearly for the opportunity. The “official” start date on our trip was set for the day after our arrival, and many farmers were forced to haul their animals to the starting point by truck to make it in time for the spectacle, cheapening, if not completely defeating, the original spirit of the tradition.

The next day we made the two-hour drive from Altay to Fuhai, out of the pine forests and green fields and into the desert scrubland that stretches for hundreds of miles to the south, broken only by Ulungur Lake and the Black Mountain range. Thousands of animals trotted along the roads as we passed.

***

For most of its recent history, fish have been the most valuable resource in this arid county, with winter ice-fishing the main excitement. Camels were simply a transportation tool for carrying goods, Chen tells me.

A decade ago, he estimates, there were 3,000 camels in the whole of Fuhai county. Their milk was drunk as a medicine, given to the elderly, children, sick people, and important guests, according to according to Hayrat Haleymolla, the chief of the Kazakh Pharmaceutical Research Institute, and an important part of traditional Kazakh medicine.

(Kazakh medicine is split into two branches: doctors who deal with bone fractures, and the “wood-and-leaf” doctors who deal with every other type of disease, all of which they believe to be contagious, and treatable by herbs and barks, as well as camel milk.)

Today, there are at least 20,000 milking camels in Fuhai and the camel milk industry is booming. Xinjiang Wang Yuan Camel Milk Co Ltd is the main reason.

We head out early in the morning to see the process. After miles of scrubby desert, a pair of yurts and a small dust cloud appear as the camels kick up dirt while waiting for us.

It’s the beginning of summer and the camels are ugly. They are shedding their thick winter coats in ragged patches and their humps flop over to one side, a sign that their reserves of fat are depleted. They buck and bay, and groan a deep and sad sound, like Chewbacca; they want to be milked.

The camels cluster together like sheep, and the husband pulls one of the females out by the rope threaded through her nose. He leads her into a set of parallel metal bars stuck into the brown earth, an informal milking stall that looks more like playground equipment than an industrial dairy operation, and wipes her udders with warm water.

His wife, in a purple velvet dress and white scarf, wheels over the milking machine—a camel-specific model designed by Wang Yuan in collaboration with a local university—attaches the suction cups, and flicks a switch.

Thick, white milk streams into a stainless-steel container, but not for long. Where a cow might produce 15 liters, a camel will only give one.

The herders catch, milk, and repeat, eventually straining the fresh milk into a second container, one that will go to Wang Yuan and be weighed, inspected and credited to their boss’s account.

Satisfied to see that it is indeed possible to milk a camel, we head over to the yurts with camel milk princess. Bahar Guli, or Spring Flower, is a fine-boned and light-skinned beauty in land of strong, tan women who has become a celebrity spokeswoman after a pure camel-milk diet saved her from a wasting sickness.

She is dainty in her mustard-colored pants and delicate top, and plays the part of urbanite host well, fussing over the tea and snacks laid out for us. She looks exactly as she did in the advertisement in the magazine on the plane.

The yurts are dusty and white on the outside, held in place with taut ropes anchored into the ground. Inside, they are resplendent, a million shades of crimson, carpeted from the walls down. Wooden ribs used to make the skeleton bend from the curved roof down to the ground in a symmetrical dome shape. A generator cranks out electricity.

Nuts, dried fruit, and camel milk in every possible preparation sit on the table: fresh salted camel curd, hard and dry nuggets of that same curd, yogurt, fresh, fermented and dried into sheets. Until Wang Yuan was founded, this was the only way camel milk lasted past the first few days of freshness. A vacuum flask of warm camel milk sits at the end of the table. It is a proper Kazakh feast, passed off as just a few snacks among friends.

A man in nice slacks, a polo shirt, and an embroidered velvet prayer hat joins us in the yurt. He had been standing outside during the milking, supervising, but he wasn’t with our party from Wang Yuan. He was too clean to be a herder but too interested in the details to be a stranger.

Over a bowl of zhuancha, a rough and salty milk tea made with butter and camel milk, we learn that this is Jengis Tohan, no longer a herder or sheep farmer, but a camel-milk entrepreneur. In 2011, when Wang Yuan was founded, he used his savings and sold his flock of sheep to buy 75 camels, back when the females were cheap. Things have gone well. He’s now up to 90 camels and planning a jump to 200. The female camels are now valued at about 20,000 RMB, a sevenfold increase from when he bought them. In a county where the per capita income is less than 10,000 RMB per year, camel milk has been good to him.

From here, the milk we’ve seen will be collected by one of the roving Wang Yuan tanker trucks, which roam up to 500 miles away from the Fuhai factory, collecting milk from all sizes of milking operations. The collected milk is then put through the proprietary Wang Yuan process. This is crucial. The rarity of camel milk in the past and the abundance of preserved products that we were offered go hand in hand. Without refrigeration, the traditional herders had to drink the milk fresh, or preserve it.

Wang Yuan’s breakthrough, as Chen tells us later, is an enzymatic process that disables the unnamed molecules or proteins that cause camel milk to spoil. It’s only here in China, of all the camel milk-producing countries across the Middle East and Africa, that anyone has been able to break this code. “The cans say ‘Best within six months’,” Chen tells us, “but that’s just to play it safe. This milk will last up to two years.”

And with that, what once was a highly regional and limited product has suddenly become available across China, sold in specialty Wang Yuan shops in packs of six. Sales are fastest in Guangdong.

From 2011, when the company opened, to 2016, Wang Yuan’s revenues have grown to RMB 230 million. They have more than 500 outlets, with locations in every province in China except Tibet. They recently added a RMB 90 million research and development extension to their factory in Fuhai, and a new factory in Inner Mongolia is in trial operations.

Wang Yuan is the biggest employer in Fuhai county, and to hear the CEO and local camel farmers tell it, the best thing to happen to the county in decades. Ten years ago, herders were living below the poverty line, making 3,000 RMB a year, and there was a serious social problem with alcohol and drunks freezing to death during the brutal winters. The company had done more for the growth of per capita income than any government project, and some 340 families were now raising camels, some bought with subsidies from the government, making ten times their previous annual income.

“It’s not like cows,” Chen told us. “One squeeze, one fen.” He mimicked milking a cow. “With camels, it’s one squeeze, one kuai. Another squeeze, two kuai.”

We go out to lunch at a bare-bones pilaf restaurant, where the options are rice, rice with Altay lamb, and extra lamb. When it comes time to pay, the waitress says two words — Wang Yuan — and refuses our money.

We sit with Chen as he outlines his first encounter with camels in Dubai in the early 2000s through years of visits to India, Mongolia, the Middle East and Africa, to see camels and the culture that surrounds them. To his surprise, there was barely a market for anything but meat, and even then it was small. Finally, after years of research, he commissioned a study to analyze the various proteins in the milk, looking for one that would be particularly well-suited to the cosmetics industry. It didn’t work.

Chen is a slight man with hawkish features, and he comes up to the chest of most of the herders. But decades in manufacturing near Shanghai, where he is originally from, have made him business savvy, and eventually he found his way to Fuhai and the Kazakhs, who already had a small population of camels.

After the cosmetics failure, he took his cue from the Kazakhs and Mongolians around him, who prized the milk’s medicinal properties, and decided to pursue milk. But with villages up to 200 miles apart in some cases, collection and transportation was a problem. Keeping the milk fresh would be nearly impossible.

That pushed him to develop a processing system that he says disables the molecules in the milk that trigger spoilage, allowing the milk to stay shelf-stable for 24 months, without destroying the bacteria that make the milk so beneficial in the first place. He is up-to-date on the science surrounding the microbiome and recent research suggesting it might be a factor in Alzheimer’s — another disease he claims his camel milk will help treat. He was part of a team in 2013 that sequenced the Bactrian camel genome and published its findings in the British journal Nature.

Some publications report that the milk increases the body’s productions of antioxidant enzymes and may have a positive effect for people with food allergies, Type 1 diabetes, hepatitis B and other autoimmune diseases. The largest market in the U.S. are the parents of autistic children, who believe it has a calming effect on their kids.

At 62, Chen might reasonably be retired, but instead, he’s here, in Fuhai, 2,000 miles from home, checking in on our stomachs after our first can of the milk (the first two hours often make people’s bellies rumble) and explaining the cultural, economic, and medical background of camel milk. He tells us he’s removed 70 percent of the “camel flavor”: enough to make it palatable, in his calculation, but not enough to confuse it with cow’s milk. Indeed, the taste, on the milder side of goat milk, is the least interesting aspect of Wang Yuan’s entire operation.

On our second night, the banquet was held in a herder’s modest home, outside of town. The same embarrassment of dried fruits and dairy products were laid out for our arrival, and off to the side, on the couch, I could see Wang Yuan’s senior management starting to remove the packaging from the baijiu bottles. By this point, the CEO had given up his conceit about camel milk inhibiting the effect of alcohol, and he leaned over and whispered to me, “We need a strategy.”

He came up with an elaborate toasting ritual, using his god-like status among these herders to force toast after toast on them, until their eyes turned red and the room got loud. My assistant, seated to the CEO’s left, survived by pretending to take a sip of tea after each toast, and then coyly spitting the baijiu back into the tea. I drank it straight and tried to eat as much as possible.

The better part of a roast sheep arrived on the table and the snacks were cleared away. A round and jolly camel herder named Jiger Hurmet did the honors. He pulled out a long pocket knife and divided up the meat of the sheep’s head with the practiced script of a salesman.

“To the beautiful woman over here, an ear, so that she may better hear and understand her husband,” he started. “To our new singing friends over here, the meat from the upper palate, so that you may use it to speak the truth about us.”

Until it’s divided up like this, you don’t realize how many different types of meat there are on a sheep’s head. I think I was given part of a cheek. I’m not clear how it was supposed to benefit me.

By this point, it didn’t matter. The night was getting sloppy and camel milk was not going to stop it. Music helped. The Kazakhs are famous for their singing, and out of nowhere, a dombra, a Kazakh lute, appeared.

Resting it against his ample belly, the intoxication fell away and the table fell under the trance of Hurmet’s booming voice and folk songs, which carried through the house and out into the courtyard.

Halfway through, he made a solemn speech about a song that was dedicated to CEO Chen, the man whose company had single-handedly raised his standard of living and brought him to the feast that night. He broke into a mournful verse and began strumming both strings in rapid succession. It was a sad story, a fable of a young camel that was separated from its family, lost in the desert, a parable about never being able to go home again.

When he finished, the living room erupted in applause, and Hurmet immediately stood up to offer Chen another shot of baijiu. The night continued on like this, getting hazier and hazier until finally it was time to go. Hurmet dragged me out of the house, through the courtyard and into the backyard, a pitch-black area lit from above by the thousands of stars in the sky, the type of view you only get far from a city. He pulled me into a big bear hug and slurred something into my ear about Chen’s largesse. He was deep into the baijiu. He, of all people, was going to need some camel milk.

***

Since writing this article in 2017, Wang Yuan’s sales have increased dramatically, to 800 million RMB in 2020; the company’s 2021 sales forecast anticipates a 50% increase to more than a billion RMB. They now have about 2,000 stores across China and the price of a female camel has continued to appreciate. It currently stands at around 25,000 RMB. Bahar Guli has married and moved out of Fuhai. She is no longer the camel milk princess.

Photos: Jia Li

Everything I Learned About Truffles in a Week

It’s truffle season in China right now. Who cares? Don’t Chinese truffles suck? Aren’t they just flavorless little fungus nuggets masquerading as real (French!) truffles, colluding with synthetic truffle oil and immoral chefs to ruin our dinner? I don’t know! Or, I do know. I spent a week talking to chefs and truffle scientists, and reading dozens of scholarly papers, to achieve a veneer of knowledge. Now that I have finished and crawled out of my mycelial dirt hole, I present it here, to you, you filthy mushroom sniffer.

The first Chinese black truffle wasn’t from China. Instead, a dried sample of the underground mushroom was sent from what is now the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh to England, where botanist and mushroom enthusiast Mordecai Curbitt Cooke described it in an 1891 scientific journal as a Himalayan truffle. In honor of its provenance, he named it after the subcontinent: tuber indicum.

It was a minor discovery, another member of the global truffle family, which we now know lives on every continent except Antarctica and whose classified species number in the hundreds. But it wouldn’t be known in China for another hundred years, when the black, bulbous tuber was dug out of a Sichuan pine forest in 1989. Named tuber sinense by the Chinese scientists tasked with its description, today we know that it was, in fact, part of the broader tuber indicum family: the Chinese black truffle.

Derided as a fraud, a fake and a rip-off of its European counterpart, the expensive Perigord black truffle (tuber melanosporum), the poor Chinese black truffle has only been known for three decades and has spent much of that time maligned as a flavorless, unscented imposter. The truth, as usual, is more complicated.

Truffles go back in history to about 156 million years ago, the era of pterodactyls and stegosaurus dinosaurs, when the earth’s single land mass, Pangaea, was splitting into two. Initially an aboveground mushroom, they went into hiding underground, becoming, as they are called in the mycology world, hypogeous.

Some speculate it was to escape the weather (they are better insulated in the dirt), others that going belowground actually helped them to be eaten by animals like squirrels and wild boar,who would then spread their spores through their feces.

Whatever their reasons, they continued having mysterious truffle sex — I will explain; it doesn’t have anything to do with that Nicki Minaj song — and reproducing, breaking off into different families, and spreading around the world. They lived a quiet existence in the soil and roots of pine and oak forests for millions of years until humans came along and started digging them up.

Everyone from the ancient Babylonians to the Romans ate truffles and theorized on their origins. A disciple of Aristotle guessed they came from flashes of lightning. A Greek poet theorized they were born from silt and transformed through internal heat. For more than two millenia, they remained a mystery to the humans who dug them out of the forest and ate them.

And then, in 1808, French farmer Josef Talon figured out how to farm them. The golden age of the European truffle began.

(Truffle sex: Truffles are either male or female and in order to procreate and produce more truffles, they have to have sex somehow. That’s difficult, because like middle school cafeterias, they separate into same-sex cliques. So, all the truffles around one tree might be male, but then all the females are over there around another tree might be female. They cluster. The problem is: truffles don’t have feet. So how do they meet and make baby truffles? It’s an ongoing question in science, according to the research I read. Scientists still don’t really know. Mysterious truffle sex!)

Today, the Chinese truffle business is far larger than the more well-known European black truffle business, whose harvests are in decline as climate change warms the planet and rainfall decreases. Some estimates put modern tuber melanosporum harvests in Europe as low as 20 tons per year, while tuber indicum harvests are more like 1,000 tons per year, according to one scientist I talked to.

(Though there are truffle farms in China, they are still experimental. That means all commercial truffles in China are wild. It also means that no one is consistently or accurately tracking the actual output or value of the truffle industry, as truffles are sold informally at local and regional mushroom markets.)

This shift in global truffle production is only likely to speed up. In another study from 2019 in Science of the Total Environment, scientists modeled shifts in temperature related to global climate change and predicted that the southern European truffle — tuber melanosporum, the expensive Perigord truffle — may become extinct as soon as 2100.

But does anyone want a Chinese truffle in the first place?

The Chinese black truffle, tuber indicum, and the southern European tuber melanosporum are cousins. They look alike. They grow similarly. But telling them apart is difficult, even for scientists with microscopes and too much time.

I have spent days reading through journal articles with titles like Food Authentication: Species and Origin Determination of Truffles (Tuber spp.) by Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry and Chemometrics.

Other methods I’ve come across, all in studies trying to tell the two cousins apart: matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionisation time of flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF-MS); Fourier transform near-infrared (FT-NIR) spectroscopy; stable isotope ratio analysis (to determine their stable carbon, nitrogen and hydrogen isotope ratios); sterol fingerprint identification; and capillary gel electrophoresis.

Companies specialize in DNA testing truffles to tell which variety you may have.

Why?

Money, of course. Tuber indicum is significantly cheaper and way more abundant. According to Truffle.farm, a website that tracks average truffle price, the retail price for tuber melanosporum was nearly 20 times the price of tuber indicum (21,300 rmb per kg vs 1,100 rmb per kg) in 2019. It’s easy to see the attraction for unscrupulous vendors to try to substitute tuber indicum for tuber melanosporum.

In one strange twist in my research, I found a truffle hunter in southwest China who claims to have found tuber melanosporum growing in Sichuan in 2018. A contentious WeChat conversation followed, in which I asked him for some type of proof that he had made such a historic and scientifically implausible discovery.

He insulted the scientists I consulted, who called it “impossible”; insinuated that I was working on behalf of the Italian Urbani family, which controls 70% of the world’s black truffle trade and is not friendly to Chinese truffles; brushed off any concern that he was the only one to ever find this truffle and it just happens to benefit him financially; produced a single China Customs certificate that identified his product as tuber melanosporum (China Customs are neither botanists nor mycologists and do not perform DNA tests on truffles to determine the species — it was likely a taxonomic mistake);  claimed his financial or logistical limitations were too high to send his newly discovered “Chinese melanosporum” for any actual test that might confirm his discovery; failed to produce any theory for how tuber melanosporum, which has only ever been found in France, northwestern Italy and northwestern Spain, and is known to be a species European in origin, appeared, wild, in his backyard but nowhere else in the world; and just generally went off the rails with distractions, obfuscations and personal accusations against me.

In his defense, a chef friend of mine who has seen samples of the truffle in question confirmed it was more aromatic and more similar-looking to a European truffle than previous Chinese truffles he had seen. It is always possible that a truffle hunter discovers a new species, when there are so many types in China, and that this species might even bear a stronger resemblance to tuber melanosporum.

That still wouldn’t make it a tuber melanosporum, and the circumstances surrounding this particular instance, and the way the truffle hunter reacted to my questions, coupled with the obvious potential for financial benefit and the history of fraud associated with Chinese truffles, just smell off.

If the truffle hunter is correct, he will have proven the Chinese and European mycology fields wrong and upended what we know about the geographic distribution of species between Europe and Asia. He will also have made a tidy little profit. Seems to me the burden of proof for such a claim rests on him.

In my conversation with him, all he had was vitriol.

In researching this article, I found all kinds of references to China being the capital of “cheap knock offs” and Chinese truffles being a “cheap knock off” of French truffles, as if anyone could suddenly engineer an organism that dates back to the late Jurassic period. In academic papers, tuber indicum was sometimes described as “valueless”.

Six years after the discovery of tuber indicum in Sichuan’s Huidong County, The New York Times published a 900-word story headlined The Invasion of the Chinese Truffle describing chefs who had been “ambushed by Chinese truffles”.

Interestingly, I suppose, no such cultural stigma was attached to truffles from Africa — the desert truffles of Morocco and Tunisia, the Kalahari truffles of Namibia and Botswana, the farmed melanosporum of South Africa — or the Middle East, where they have been used in medicine for centuries. (Truffles have high anti-oxidant, anti-tumor and anti-inflammation levels.)  

Racist posturing aside, there are differences between tuber indicum, the Chinese truffle, and tuber melanosporum, the Perigord truffle. The most important is aroma. And here is where things get quite complicated.

Chinese truffles do have an aroma, depending on a wide range of biological and environmental factors, such as soil composition and pH, nutrient sources, residual farming chemicals, genetics, humidity, storage conditions, their microbiome and the geographic location where they are found.

(Though tuber indicum are most closely associated with Yunnan, Sichuan and Tibet, they — or a close cousin, tuber formosanum — have also been found in Heilongjiang, Jilin and Hebei recently. Even then, some will tell you that those from Yunnan’s Gongshan county, on the border with Tibet, are the most fragrant.)

Again, back to the scientists and the literature.

In Mushrooms, Humans and Nature in a Changing World, a book published in 2020, science found that quantities of volatile organic compounds, and especially sulfur compounds and ketones, increase while aldehydes decrease as truffles mature. Only mature tuber indicum contain 2-methyl-1-propanol (up to 19%), a very important component of truffle flavor.

And here’s the catch: maturity.

This is where the biological limitations of tuber indicum are compounded by human behaviour, to everyone’s long-term detriment.

How?

Truffles are part of a symbiotic ecosystem that grows among the roots of their host trees, typically pine and oak. They are a network, a web, and the truffle that we eat is just the most visible manifestation of that web (in mycology speak, the truffle is the “fruiting body”).

To the people harvesting truffles in China, that delicate symbiotic relationship often doesn’t matter. Unlike Europe, where truffles are hunted with dogs who are trained to find ripe truffles, in China, truffle hunters use hoes to scrape the forest floor as early as August (truffles mature in fall and winter). When tubers are found, the entire area is scoured and all the truffles are harvested, regardless of maturity.  

Blame the lack of training or regulation, the relatively short history and unfamiliarity with the truffle, or the potentially high financial rewards (even if they pale in comparison to tuber melanosporum); it all results in unsustainable harvertising and significant damage to the ecosystem.

So much so that in the thirty-odd years that have passed between that first Sichuan truffle discovery and today, wild Chinese truffles have gone from unknown to villains to now being rated as “vulnerable”, one step below “endangered” on the government’s Red List of Biodiversity, along with several other threatened truffle species.
 
So the answer is, yes, Chinese black truffles do have an aroma. Yes, it’s closely tied to maturity, as a 2013 study in the journal Mycosystema noted: unripe tuber indicum emit just four aroma compounds while fully mature tuber indicum emit thirteen (dimethyl sulfide, 2,3-butanedione, 3-methylbutanal, 2-methylbutanal, hexanal, and 1-octen-3-ol are the main ones, in case you want to make one at home).

No, it doesn’t rival the Perigord truffle in the minds of many chefs I spoke to. But the degree of that aroma is tied to so many factors, big and small, that the quality of any given truffle can vary wildly. So both the naysayers who call them “aroma-less” and the supporters who use them in some manner (and I spoke to several well-respected French and Italian chefs in Shanghai that do) may be right. They just had different truffles.

These days, Chinese black truffles have gone completely mass market. Shake Shack launched a black truffle menu in November 2020 with truffled burgers and fries. Bi Feng Tang uses them in multiple ways. You can buy them on major online sites including JD.com and Taobao. I can get dried Chinese black truffles delivered to my door in an hour through the Hema app on my phone.

And yet we still hardly know them. China has so many types of truffles it’s still discovering new ones at major commercial markets in capital cities (and even white truffles in Sichuan — a topic for another time).

In 2020, two scientists in Yunnan found purple-black truffles mixed into a batch of tuber indicum at a Kunming mushroom market, and took them back to the lab. After a quick analysis, they discovered the tubers were previously undescribed: two new species.

Illustrations: Cheesecake

***

A Few of the Resources I Used in Researching This Piece

The Invasion of the Chinese Truffle, by Florence Fabricant. 1995. The New York Times.

Chinese Black Truffle-Associated Bacterial Communities of Tuber indicum From Different Geographical Regions With Nitrogen Fixing Bioactivity by multiple authors. 2019. Frontiers in Microbiology.

The Black Truffles Tuber melanosporum and Tuber indicum by multiple authors. 2016. True Truffle (Tuber spp.) in the World.

Nutritional value and antioxidant activity of Chinese black truffle (Tuber indicum) grown in different geographical regions in China by Xu Baojun, Wu Ziyuan and Mandiner Meenu. 2021. LWT – Food Science and Technology.

Potential aromatic compounds as markers to differentiate between Tuber melanosporum and Tuber indicum truffles by multiple authors. 2013. Food Chemistry.

Food Authentication: Species and Origin Determination of Truffles (Tuber spp.) by Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry and Chemometrics by multiple authors. 2020. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Mushrooms, Humans and Nature in a Changing World (book) by multiple authors. 2020. Springer.

Distribution of Tuber indicum in Northeastern China and Its Ecological Significance by multiple authors. 2019. Acta Edulis Fungi.

Species Recognition and Cryptic Species in the Tuber indicum Complex by multiple authors. 2011. PLOS ONE 6.

A new species of the genus Tuber from China by Tao K, Liu B, Zhang DC. 1989. Journal of Shanxi University (Natural Science Edition).

Himalayan Truffles by M.C. Cooke. 1891. Grevillea, A Quarterly Record of Cryptogamic Botany and Its Literature.

Two of the People I Spoke To and a Website I Reference

Yu Fuqiang, Vice Director, Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Wang Yun, retired professor, Member Royal Scientific Society of New Zealand, Botanical Society of China (member councils), North America Truffling Society (honorary life)

Truffle.farm, a website which hosts a truffle price tracker