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 beginnings lie in northern China under the Yuan dynasty, in the fourteenth century. Shaomai (shumai), born in the region around Hohhot in Inner Mongolia, spread with the traffic of Shanxi merchants to Beijing and Tianjin, then 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 Chinese-language conversation primer compiled in Korea in the mid-fourteenth century, records "su suan xian shaomai" sold in Dadu (present-day Beijing), and a note of the same period even sets down the handwork: a thin wheat skin wrapped around meat, steamed, with pleats made at the crown like flower stamens. Kim Moon-kyung's study (Geibun Kenkyu, 2013) placed the compilation of the Piao Tongshi in the late Yuan, the second half of the fourteenth century, dating it from internal evidence such as the sixth year of Zhizheng (1346) in the text. That is roughly three hundred years before the tale of the Hohhot brothers.

Since both the name and the method were already present in fourteenth-century Dadu, the seventeenth-century Hohhot legend cannot be the origin of the dish or its name. 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 first time the name is written down lies not in Guangzhou to the south but in Dadu to the north.