WE, THE PEOPLE of Chengdu, love to eat. Food is more important than life itself. Su Dongpo certainly thought so.

     A famous son of Sichuan who left his mark on the Song Dynasty as a writer, poet, artist and statesman, he made his real contribution after his political enemies turned the emperor against him and he was banished to Hubei in 1081. There poverty forced him to live close to the land and from that experience came some of his finest poems. Despite his dire circumstances he spent time perfecting his Dongpo pork shoulders recipe. Few today can recite his poetry, but no one can forget the smell and taste of that original dish. My grandpa told me how, in the 1930s, when warlords were battling for control of Chengdu, and artillery fell on the Huangchengba area, deluging streets with debris as houses collapsed, customers in a packed mapo tofu restaurant watched the bedlam creep closer as they waited for their meals, urging the chef to hurry so they might take shelter. The chef maintained his steady pace in the open kitchen, responding, “Mapo tofu cannot be rushed; that would ruin my reputation.”

     As food aficionados may know, Chengdu is China’s capital of street snacks. Sichuan’s most famous modern writer, Li Jieren, fashioned the term guiyinshi, or “ghost eating”, in his 1935 book Ripples in Stagnant Water. Li described street vendors who carried baskets of food on shoulder poles and crossed streets and lanes like ghosts, wooing night owls and offering to appease their grumbling stomachs with spicy delicacies: husband-and-wife beef lung slices, dragon wonton, sticky rice balls, steamed beef, cold spicy gelatin and dan dan noodles. Many of Chengdu’s well-known dishes had their roots in guiyinshi. Nowadays, hawkers use flatbed tricycles and carry little coal-burning stoves, setting up shop with hotpots and steamers, and dust covers and umbrellas, on popular thoroughfares.

     One night in 1994, soon after my release from prison for my involvement in the student movement of 1989, I went to Tianfu Square in the centre of the city looking for guiyinshi. The vast plaza is supposedly built around the remains of an ancient palace and in more recent history was home to Chengdu’s best-loved guiyinshi. After the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 the area became a slum, then an indoor-outdoor market for those consigned to society’s bottom rung. The market was demolished after the Communist Revolution because the Party thought it epitomised “old China”. At the height of the Cultural Revolution, what was left of the palace was blown up to make way for the Long Live Chairman Mao’s Victorious Thoughts Museum.

     Starting in the late 1970s, when Deng Xiaoping came to power and reversed many of Mao Zedong’s radical policies, Chengdu experienced a revival. Most of its old buildings were gone but the food, in all its variety, survived. Without the market as a focal point, however, guiyinshi was scattered. I found vendors on a street leading off the square and, after deciding on a bowl of minced-meat noodles, boiled peanuts and a small bottle of liquor, sat on a folding chair on the kerb and contemplated the competing smells of the food around me. A loud commotion jolted me from my reverie as chairs, tables and stoves started disappearing on the backs of scrambling flatbed tricycles. The very chair I was using was yanked from under me as my noodle man tried to escape the police cars closing in, amid deafening sirens, from all directions. But it was too late. Uniformed police were pulling riders from their bicycles, toppling chairs and smashing plates and bowls. The whole street was in chaos. Smoke rose from overturned stoves, women cried, men cursed loudly. I heard a voice declare through a megaphone, “You are operating without licence. You are ruining the city’s good looks. You are violating sanitary rules. Anyone who resists will be thrown in jail.” The farce lasted an hour or so and ended with the departure of six trucks laden with confiscated furniture and cooking utensils. I and other patrons shrugged and continued the search for the best guiyinshi in town.

 

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China had a box seat for the total solar eclipse in July 2009 and Chengdu was among the cities best placed to observe the century’s longest and most spectacular cosmic event. It was a cause for celebration. A little past midnight I joined my sister and we went hunting for guiyinshi. We passed Tonghuimen Road and the Fengqintai district and penetrated a labyrinth of lanes that took us to the back of the People’s Park. Entering a courtyard, we followed a long, tunnel-like corridor between houses that wound round and round like duck’s intestines. Then I saw Old Mama’s Pig Trotters, a well-known little eatery that seemed to be always on the move and revelled in its shabbiness and disorderly seating. Customers who couldn’t wait for one of the tables, which always spilled onto the narrow pavement, squatted on the ground with steaming pigs’ trotters in their hands and plates of dipping sauce in front of them. A middle-aged man in a white vest held a shot glass in one hand and a pair of chopsticks in the other, smacking his lips and chatting to people queueing to be served: “Even the bones melt away: heavenly!”

     Hunched over my food, I wasn’t paying attention to the crowd, but my sister spotted Zhou, a monkey-thin man with Coke-bottle spectacles who used to be well known in Chengdu as a chef. As is the custom in Sichuan, if you bump into someone at a restaurant and hit it off after the ritual exchange of pleasantries, you invite the stranger to join you at your table, which is how we came to dine with Zhou that night and learn a few of life’s secrets.

     “Tofu is a wonderful thing, truly miraculous,” he said as he sipped his liquor. “You get some high-quality yellow beans, grind them and strain the soya milk. Then you add bitter-tasting gypsum as a coagulant. The final product is bland and tasteless, almost to a fault, but you can make a couple of hundred gourmet dishes out of it,” he said. “In the book Daodejing the philosopher Laozi extols the physical properties of water. When you control water it can become anything you desire. But if it takes control it will turn into a flood, filling the Earth and sky, killing people and destroying the world. It’s the same with tofu. A chef can turn tofu into anything, from dried and seasoned tofu skins to fresh tofu jelly broth. But if he is not paying attention he can screw up and ruin his reputation.”

     I was entranced by his insights. Zhou said most people in Sichuan probably knew how to make a couple of tofu dishes, but mapo tofu was the most challenging. He explained that its name dates from the 1860s, when a restaurant called Prosperity Chen’s Food stood near Wanfu Bridge outside Chengdu’s Northern Gate. “The place was in worse shape than those roadside food stalls that serve migrant workers today,” Zhou said. “But one should never underestimate those low-class restaurants.”

     His words reminded me that the finest French cuisine is just peasant food served as expensively as possible, and it was as if Zhou had read my thoughts.

     “Most well-known Sichuan gourmet dishes originated at the lowest level of society,” he said. “The wife of Prosperity Chen had dirty, dishevelled hair, and her face was pitted from a childhood bout of chicken pox, but although she was nothing to look at she stood strong, like a tigress, a spitting image of the monstrous female innkeeper and warrior, Sun Erniang, in Outlaws of the Marsh. Her patrons were mostly traders who bought rapeseed oil from extraction workshops in the city and pushed small wooden barrels on squeaky wooden carts. They would always gather at Prosperity Chen’s restaurant for lunch.

     “Those oil traders had the most back-breaking jobs and it was worse in the summer, when Chengdu turns into a steamer. One day, a shirtless trader arrived exhausted, dehydrated, hungry and shaking. With a gourd ladle he scooped out half a litre of vegetable oil from a barrel on his cart, patted his stomach and said: ‘I’m a poor guy with a big stomach. Surprise me and give me a big plate of whatever you can make.’

     “‘No problem,’ said Mrs Chen, tossing a pile of cow’s innards onto a cutting board. She took a long knife and chopped up a storm, her arms flailing, ping, pong, ping, pong. A group of customers watched in awe, one shouting: ‘This woman is under a crazy spell!’ The restaurant shook as chunks of innards disappeared under her knife and tiny pieces flew off the board.

     “When a chef finds the right mood, it’s the same as a poet who finds his or her muse,” Zhou said.

     “Surrounded by pots, pans, ladles and basins, and amid the cheering crowd, pockmarked Mrs Chen seemed hypnotised by inspiration. With her hair hanging loose she chanted something nobody understood. ‘The sun must have come up in the west,’ some customers said to each other. Mrs Chen took the gourd of oil offered by the trader and tipped it into the wok. Then she threw in broad beans, a small pinch of Chinese prickly ash from Hanyuan county and a handful of dry peppers. You can imagine the intoxicating smell of the oil sizzling with the spices. When the oil reached its optimum temperature she removed the innards, adding water mixed with starch and a bunch of green garlic sprouts. She removed the tofu from the wok, banged her metal spatula against the stove and yelled, ‘Ready to go!’

     “The trader bent over and sniffed the food, declaring that the smell itself made him sweat. He picked up a chunk of tofu with his chopsticks, put it in his mouth and was speechless. The other customers wondered what had happened. Could he have been poisoned? Finally, the trader screamed: ‘You damned pockmarked woman! The tofu is killing me with its freshness and flavour. I love it!’ Seeing its effect, the other customers took their chopsticks to the man’s plate, had a couple of bites and mobbed Mrs Chen. ‘I want exactly what he’s having!’ they demanded.

     “Word spread quickly. Stories of pockmarked Mrs Chen’s magic tofu dish swept Chengdu like the autumn wind. The recipe for mapo tofu, or pockmarked Mrs Chen’s Tofu, passed from generation to generation for nearly a century and a half. Many high-end restaurants now serve mapo tofu as a signature dish, but its soul could be found only in that small, dirty roadside shed near Wanfu Bridge.”

     Chef Zhou’s story made me nostalgic. The government’s three-decade modernisation drive has erased the past. New buildings are taller than ever, restaurants bigger and grander. Sichuan dishes have become more elaborate, exaggerated. Watching a television chef talk about mapo tofu is like sitting in on a science lecture – esoteric. Like government officials, Sichuan food is being corrupted with each passing day.

     Advertising has embraced the new code: “Imperial Court food” and “dishes copied from ancient recipes” attract customers to extravagantly decorated, “exclusive” restaurants serving dishes with “unique” flavours. Such eateries have become venues at which officials and businessmen can eat at the public’s expense while cultivating political and business connections.

     Food has become part of the culture of corruption. If one wants to find the soul of Sichuan cuisine, it is in Chengdu’s guiyinshi, scattered down small side streets, under dripping eaves and inside crowded, smoke-filled rooms.