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1、GRADUALLY ENTERING THE REALM OF DELIGHT: FOOD AND DRINK IN EARLY MEDIEVAL CHINA DAVID R. KNECHTGES UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON The presidential address of 1995, constituting an examination of the favorite or distinctive food- stuffs and beverages of early medieval China as revealed in texts practical a
2、nd literary from that period. DURING THE PAST THREE YEARS viewers of Chinese cinema have been treated to two delightful films by the Taiwan director Lee Ang. The first, The Wedding Ban- quet, nominated in 1994 for an Academy Award as Best Foreign Language Feature, is a comedy about a homo- sexual Ta
3、iwanese man living in New York. He undergoes a sham marriage to a woman from mainland China to hide his lifestyle from his elderly parents who are con- stantly arranging matches for him. The second film, which was shown two years ago, is Eat Drink Man Woman. This is a comedy about a widower who is t
4、he greatest living chef in Taipei. The film recounts the complicated rela- tionships the chef has with women, principally his three daughters, but also a scheming widow, who has her sights on the chef. Even for those who have not seen them, one can easily determine from their titles that food is a d
5、ominant mo- tif in these films. In The Wedding Banquet food figures not only in the grand wedding feast that is held in a New York Chinatown restaurant, but also in the hilarious epi- sode at the sons apartment where his fiancee, who cannot cook, serves to the parents a sumptuous Chinese meal that h
6、as actually been cooked by the sons American male lover. Cooking occurs constantly throughout Eat Drink Man Woman. Much of the movie is devoted to showing Chef Zhu on his day off preparing elaborate Sunday feasts for his daughters. We also see him coming to the rescue in the Grand Hotel kitchen by t
7、ransforming a mass of fake shark fins into a grand dish that is served at the wedding banquet for a generals son. Then there are the delicious foods (spare ribs, crab with vegetables, shrimp and green peas, bean sprouts and sliced chicken) the chef prepares for the lunch box taken to elementary scho
8、ol by the daughter of his neighbor. * This is a revised version of the presidential address deliv- ered at the 205th meeting of the American Oriental Society, March 26-29, 1995, Salt Lake City, Utah. The delight in food that we see in these films has a long history in China. The title of Lee Angs se
9、cond film, Eat Drink Man Woman, in fact is an ancient phrase found in one of the Confucian classics, the Li ji ,- or Record of Rites, where one is told that “eat and drink, man and woman-the greatest human desires reside in them.“ The idea that food and sex are fundamental hu- man desires is of cour
10、se not unique to ancient China. As Turgenev put it so aptly in one of his Poems in Prose: “The genius of love and the genius of hunger, those twin brothers, are the two moving forces behind all living things. All living things set themselves in motion to feed and to reproduce. Love and hunger share
11、the same pur- pose. Life must never cease; life must be sustained and must create.“2 What I would like to do this evening is discuss some aspects of food culture in early medieval China. The early medieval period begins at the end of the second century A.D. and extends to the seventh century. After
12、the fall of the Han in A.D. 220, except for a few decades be- tween the late third and early fourth centuries, the great Chinese empire was no longer unified. North China was occupied by a succession of states ruled by families of central and northern Asian stock, and the area south of the Yangtze w
13、as the domain of the so-called legitimate Chinese dynasties. The culinary tradition inherited by the Chinese of the early medieval period already had a long history. Al- though significant changes took place from the early Zhou dynasty to the early Han-that is, from the elev- enth century to the fir
14、st century B.C., the Chinese of the pre-medieval period can be said to have eaten well but simply. The staple food was grain, which in early times 1 Li ji zhushu i%BJ-tiL in Shisan jing zhushu _+ iEIt (Kyoto: Chibun shuppansha, 1972), 22.4a (3077). 2 Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, A History of Food (Lo
15、ndon: Basil Blackwell, 1992, 1994), v. 229 Journal of the American Oriental Society 117.2 (1997) consisted mainly of millet, but by late Zhou times there seems to have been abundant barley, wheat, and rice. Grain food in this period was usually cooked whole, not as flour, and was boiled or steamed.
16、Glutinous forms of millet and rice were also used to make jiu fi, a word that is often translated “wine,“ but actually is better ren- dered as “ale.“ To complement the grain food the Chinese of the an- cient period served vegetables and fruits. In early times the principal vegetable was the soybean (shu 7,). As an indication of its importance, the Chinese actually class- ified it as a cereal.3 By early Han times it was deemed a food primarily for the poor.4 Boiled soybeans could not have
