Jiaozi (gyoza) Period BOrigin theory CVerified

The heart of a jiaozi is wheat flour. Wheat came from far to the west, in western Asia, but it took root in China in antiquity, and with it grew a culture of milling grain and rolling the dough into thin wrappers. Filling those wrappers, then boiling, steaming, or pan-frying them, is the assembly of steps that makes a jiaozi a jiaozi.

As a filled parcel, its ancestry runs surprisingly deep. At the ancient city of Xue in Tengzhou, Shandong, a late Spring and Autumn period tomb yielded triangular wrapped foods; a 1991 report in Kaogu Xuebao identified them as dumplings, and they are roughly 2,500 years old. In the written record, the third-century dictionary Guangya lists the word huntun, and Yan Zhitui of the Northern Qi wrote that the huntun of his day was 'shaped like a crescent moon, a food eaten everywhere.' Crescent-shaped parcels were clearly widespread. At this stage, though, the dumpling and the wonton had not yet fully parted ways.

Physical examples close to the modern dumpling turn up in the Tang. From the Astana tombs at Turfan, a Silk Road waystation, dumplings and wontons survived in the dry ground. Archaeobotanical study of the excavated dumplings found they were formed from wheat and millet and dated between 499 and 640 CE; these are the oldest surviving examples close to today's jiaozi. The dumpling's own distinct names, jiaozi and jiao'er, appear in writing later still, first in Dongjing Meng Hua Lu, an account of life in the Northern Song capital. It was in the Song that jiaozi spread widely, becoming a staple food in the north.

The same idea of wrapping filling in a skin is shared with the wonton, floated in broth, and with the leavened, puffed baozi. The wonton is a sister that branched from the same line of unleavened boiled parcels; the baozi grew from leavened dough on a different line, yet shares the same idea of wrapping filling in a wheat skin.

The best-known origin of the jiaozi is a legend of invention by Zhang Zhongjing, the revered physician of the late Eastern Han. For people whose ears had been damaged by frostbite, he is said to have made ear-shaped parcels filled with medicinal herbs, a soup called qu han jiao er tang, and this is held to be where the dumpling began. The story is also widely told as the reason people eat jiaozi at the winter solstice and Lunar New Year.

The trouble is that the legendary recipe contains chili pepper. Chili is a New World ingredient, and it did not reach China until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the late Ming. The Eastern Han belongs to the second and third centuries; in Zhang Zhongjing's lifetime, chili existed nowhere in China. The date of the story and its ingredients are out of step by more than a thousand years. On top of that, Zhang Zhongjing's only secure work is the Shanghan Zabing Lun; the jiao'er anecdote is absent from contemporary records and appears to have been passed down as a later oral tradition.

None of this denies the genuine age of the jiaozi as a kind of food. The finds at Xue push the prototype back some 2,500 years, and the Turfan dumplings preserve Tang-era examples. That one person invented it in one year is not history, but the dumpling as a wrapped parcel is far older, shaped gradually over a long stretch of time. Firm physical and written evidence can be traced from the Three Kingdoms onward, while voices reporting a Han origin still remain, and the earliest boundary of when it was born is still unsettled.

Stories about the dumpling's beginnings are not told in China alone. In Japan, a well-worn account has it that the first person in the country ever to eat a dumpling was Tokugawa Mitsukuni, lord of Mito, the figure popular culture knows as Mito Kōmon. Zhu Shunshui, a Ming loyalist scholar who took refuge in Japan after the dynasty fell, is said to have introduced him to fukutsutsumi, a parcel filled with duck, pine nuts and goji berries. The source named is always the same book: the Shunsui Shushi Danki.

That book, though, records no meal. Compiled at Mitsukuni's order by his retainer Asaka Tanpaku out of Zhu Shunshui's answers to questions from his Japanese students, its final volume sorts Chinese vocabulary into categories — heaven and earth, human relations, food and drink — and gives each word a reading and a brief gloss. Mooncakes and jiaozi stand in the food section as Chinese words explained to Japanese pupils. A word entered in a glossary and a dish set before someone and eaten are two different things.

The printing is far from the events as well. The book carries a preface of 1707 and was published in Kyoto in 1708: twenty-six years after Zhu Shunshui died in 1682, and seven years after Mitsukuni's own death. The details in circulation wobble, too. Some retellings put the presentation of fukutsutsumi in 1689, by which time Zhu Shunshui had been dead for seven years. The widely read Japanese Wikipedia article on gyoza in Japan hangs the whole sentence on a single footnote, a web magazine piece from 2024. Nor is this the first tale of its shape. Mitsukuni was long said to have been the first in Japan to eat ramen, in 1697, until in 2017 an entry in the Inryōken Nichiroku, the diary of a Muromachi-period monk, showed noodles called keitaimen made and served to guests in 1488, carrying the record back some two centuries.

None of this rules out that Mitsukuni tasted a Chinese filled parcel; that remains perfectly possible. What is not certain is that the Shunsui Shushi Danki writes down any such moment, or that the first person in Japan to eat a dumpling can be named at all. In any case, the jiaozi that Edo-period Japan knew was known as a foreign custom — as in the Shinzoku Kibun of 1799, the survey of Chinese daily life that the Nagasaki magistrate Nakagawa Tadateru had compiled from interviews with Qing merchants — and not as anything eaten at Japanese tables. The pan-fried gyoza eaten in Japan today comes from elsewhere: from the prewar Japanese communities of the Kwantung Leased Territory and Manchuria, and from the repatriates who brought it home after 1945.