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

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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