Hohhot shaomai Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Northern shaomai is a steamed snack of north China: a filling wrapped in thinly rolled wheat dough and steamed with the top left open. In Hohhot, in today's Inner Mongolia, the filling is lamb with the white of the scallion, and it does not include the glutinous rice familiar from the southern shaomai. Wheat and sheep had long been part of life in north China. Wheat ground to flour and rolled into a thin skin, a filling wrapped inside, the mouth left open in the steamer: that handiwork gave shaomai a form of its own, neither a baozi nor a jiaozi.

The old record in which the name shaomai appears is Bak Tongsa, a textbook of spoken Chinese used in Korea. It portrays life in Dadu, the Yuan capital (present-day Beijing), through conversations, and in one scene officials debate what to eat, listing 'lamb-filled mantou, su-suan-xian shaomai, bianshi, crystal dumplings.' The lamb filling belongs to the mantou; the shaomai has a su-suan filling, a sour filling made without meat. Shaomai appears again, as 'shaomai soup,' in a passage on the daily meals of a court official. The book gives only the names; it does not say how the dumplings were wrapped or steamed.

Hohhot, once called Guihua, is spoken of as the home of shaomai from the Qing dynasty onward. In this town, which flourished as a hub of trade, shaomai was popular from the Qing into the 1930s, and it is said to have spread to Beijing and Tianjin with the comings and goings of Shanxi merchants. A shop at Beijing's Qianmen is said to have hung a sign reading 'Guihua-cheng shaomei.' This northern dumpling later went south, and the version settled as a dim sum in the teahouses of Guangzhou and Hong Kong is the shaomai now widely known.

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, open-topped 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 name shaomai appears in a book far older than the brothers. Bak Tongsa, the portrait of daily life in Yuan-era Dadu, records 'su-suan-xian shaomai' and 'shaomai soup.' The scholar Kim Moon-kyung (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, and no Goryeo-era original has been found, but its content is held to reflect conditions under the Yuan and Goryeo. It is a record more than two centuries older than the seventeenth century in which the brothers' story is set.

The Suiyuan Tongzhi Gao (1937), which explains the 'shaomai' name, is a twentieth-century local gazetteer, and no evidence of how the name began.

So the tale of the brothers does not describe the moment the name shaomai came into being; it remains a local story about the word, rooted in Hohhot, the town that later made shaomai its specialty. The record from Dadu, for its part, shows only that the name shaomai was part of life in the Yuan capital — not where the dumpling was first made.