Hohhot shaomai Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Northern shaomai took shape in the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) across north China and into Inner Mongolia, around present-day Hohhot (then Guihua). The filling is led by lamb and the white of the scallion; it does not include the glutinous rice familiar from the southern shaomai. This is what makes it a northern shaomai—a land where mutton is the everyday meat is written straight onto the plate.

Both wheat and lamb were long available in the markets of north China. The kitchen already had mutton, scallions, and wheat flour. To this was added a craft: rolling the wrapper thin enough for the filling to show through, gathering the top into pleats called 'flower stamens,' and steaming it with the mouth left open. Only with this method did shaomai take on a form of its own, neither a baozi nor a jiaozi.

The place it was made also tells the dish's history. Sold in the markets of Dadu and north China under the Yuan, shaomai was later carried to Beijing and Tianjin by Shanxi merchants. In Hohhot, which flourished as a hub of trade, shaomai became a local specialty from the Qing dynasty into the 1930s, and the Shaomei-guan restaurant at Beijing's Qianmen hung out a sign reading 'Guihua-cheng shaomei,' pointing its own source to the north. This northern dumpling then went south, and the refined version served as a dim sum in the teahouses of Guangzhou and Hong Kong is the shaomai now widely known. A northern dish of lamb turned into a southern dim sum of pork and shrimp.

There is a story about the origin of the name shaomai still told in Hohhot today. In the late Ming or early Qing (seventeenth century), brothers selling baozi near the Dazhao temple in Guihua split their household; the younger, to keep his takings separate, steamed a thin-wrapped item apart and sold it 'shao-dai-zhe-mai'—'on the side'—and so it came to be called shaomai. Along with variants crediting the Qianlong emperor or Kublai Khan, these are all tales about how the name began.

But the story carries a decisive gap in time. Some three centuries before that seventeenth-century episode, in the mid-fourteenth century, the Korean colloquial-Chinese textbook Bak Tongsa already set down the 'su-suan-xian shaomai' sold in the Yuan capital of Dadu (present-day Beijing). A note of the same period even describes the technique in detail: 'roll the wheat flour into thin sheets, wrap the meat, steam it through... and form flower stamens at the top'—thin wheat wrappers around meat, gathered into pleats. The name shaomai and the way it was made were already written down long before the brothers ever split their household.

On the date of the Bak Tongsa, Kim Moon-kyung argues from internal evidence such as the year 1346 that it belongs to the late Yuan, the later fourteenth century (Geibun Kenkyu no. 105, 2013). This scholarly grounding carries the name and technique of shaomai as far back as the fourteenth century. The Suiyuan Tongzhi Gao (1937) that explains the 'shaomai' name is a twentieth-century local gazetteer, and no evidence of origin.

So the tale of the brothers is not an account of the moment shaomai the dish, or the name, came into being; it stays a local story about where people thought the word came from, rooted in the soil of Hohhot. The first time a dish appears in the sources is not the moment it was born: the Yuan-era Dadu of the earliest record should not be mistaken for the land where the dish took shape, the north around Hohhot. Drawing that distinction brings into view the true history of northern shaomai, hidden behind the lively story of its naming.