Baozi Period COrigin theory CVerified

A dim sum shaped by the cultures of milling, leavening, and steaming

Baozi is a Chinese steamed bun made by wrapping a filling in leavened wheat dough and steaming it in a bamboo basket. The filling may be pork, but also fish, vegetables, and much else. From teahouses and dim sum shops to market snacks and the family table, it has long been eaten widely as a snack that doubled as a staple food for ordinary people.

Both wheat and pork are foods long present in China. Milling wheat into flour, leavening it, wrapping a filling, and steaming it in a basket -- this way of making the dish rests on the overlapping cultures of milling, of leavening, and of steamed food. Once these were in place, it took its form as a dim sum by the Song dynasty.

The name baozi itself reached a turning point in meaning during the Song. What had been called mantou, whether filled or not, gave way to the word baozi for the filled kind. This method of steaming would later become the ancestral form of wrapped dishes across Eurasia, among them the Mongol buuz.

Baozi has a founding story everyone knows. During his southern campaign in the Three Kingdoms period, the strategist Zhuge Liang, to put an end to human sacrifice to a river god, is said to have wrapped meat in wheat dough to model a human head and called it mantou, the barbarian's head; from this, the legend goes, the mantou got its name.

Yet the earliest surviving record that ties this anecdote to Zhuge Liang is Gao Cheng's Shiwu Jiyuan of the Southern Song -- the twelfth century. That places it some nine hundred years after the events it describes, with no contemporary support to be found. Isaac Yue of the University of Hong Kong and others say only that people of the Song believed it to be Zhuge Liang's invention, and treat it as a later literary attribution, an origin tale composed after the fact. The story that binds the invention to a single man does not hold up as a specific founding account. None of this denies the antiquity of the genre itself -- the filled steamed bun.

The actual making of it was far more gradual. Shu Xi of the Western Jin wrote in his Rhapsody on Cakes of a mantou served at spring feasts, and this is its oldest surviving appearance in writing. By the Tang there were small leavened dim sum, and in Northern Song Kaifeng, steamed buns with fillings of meat, fish, and vegetables spread as a snack for students; Meng Yuanlao's Dongjing Meng Hua Lu records them among the foods of the market. In time the word baozi split off from mantou to name the filled kind. There was no single inventor. Against the background of milling, leavening, and the steaming basket, this dish drew close to its present shape over many generations.