Shumai Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Shumai is a small dim sum: a thin wheat wrapper folded around a filling of pork and shrimp, left open at the top and steamed. The wheat of the wrapper and the pork and shrimp of the filling had all long been on Chinese tables. What makes the dish itself is the handwork, rolling the skin thin enough to show the filling through it and pleating the top open like a flower before steaming.

Its forerunner, shaomai, was already a dumpling of northern China under the Yuan dynasty, and its name appears in a book portraying daily life in Dadu, the Yuan capital (present-day Beijing). Encyclopedias and magazines say it was born in the region around Hohhot in Inner Mongolia and spread with the traffic of Shanxi merchants to Beijing and Tianjin, but that route is not borne out by records of the time. The northern shaomai later traveled south to reach the teahouses of Guangzhou and Hong Kong. At the yum cha table it was polished into a star of the dim sum cart alongside har gow and the like, taking on the refined form we know today. Guangdong is the place that made shumai known to the world, but it is not the dish's cradle.

There is a familiar tale about how shumai got its name. In Guihua (present-day Hohhot) at the turn of the Ming and Qing, so the story goes, two brothers who sold baozi split the household; to divide the income, the younger brother steamed a separate batch of thin-skinned, open baozi to "carry along and sell" (shao dai zhe mai), and so they came to be called shaomai. Other tales of the name, that the Qianlong Emperor coined it, or that it honors Kublai Khan, were added in the same vein.

But the name shumai appears in writing far earlier than the seventeenth century of the legend. The Piao Tongshi, a textbook of spoken Chinese used in Korea, portrays life in Dadu (present-day Beijing), the Yuan capital, through conversations. In a scene where officials talk over what to eat it names "su suan xian shaomai" (shaomai with a meatless, sour filling), and in a scene about the daily meals of an official of the court's banqueting office it names "shaomai soup." The book gives only the name; it does not say how the dumplings were wrapped or steamed. Kim Moon-kyung's study (Geibun Kenkyu, 2013) dates the book's final compilation to 1388 or later, at the very end of Goryeo or after the founding of Joseon. The text that survives was revised in wording during the Joseon period, but its content is held to reflect conditions under the Yuan and Goryeo. It is a record more than two centuries older than the time in which the tale of the Hohhot brothers is set.

Since the name was already part of life in the Yuan capital, the seventeenth-century Hohhot legend cannot be where the name came from. At most it explains, for that one place, where people thought the word came from, and the account in the local gazetteer Suiyuan Tongzhi Gao (1937) is likewise a later reading of the name. Where a word is said to come from is not where a dish comes from. In the same way, because yum cha is so strongly tied to Guangdong, many take Guangdong to be the birthplace of shumai. But this too mistakes the place where it settled and was refined for the place where it began. The old record of the name lies not in Guangzhou to the south but in a book about Dadu to the north.