Char siu Period COrigin theory CVerified

Char siu is a Cantonese roast pork: strips of meat are marinated, hung on a fork-shaped skewer, and roasted over charcoal. The name says as much—char (叉) is the skewer, siu (燒) is the roasting. Red yeast rice gives the surface its glossy red-brown color, malt sugar the sweet lacquer of the glaze, and soy sauce the savory base. All three had long been standard in Chinese kitchens.

Char siu took shape as a single, named dish within Guangdong's siu mei, the trade of the roast-meat shops. Roasting on a fork was itself on record by the late eighteenth century, when Yuan Mei's cookbook Suiyuan Shidan described young ducks and mutton cooked that way. Ducks and pigs hung roasting in shopfronts, carved and sold by the piece; within that business the marinades and the heat of the hanging roast were refined. The shop culture matured in Guangzhou from the late Qing into the modern era, and char siu settled in alongside it, gradually, as an everyday dish.

In the 1950s, roast-meat cooks who had moved to Hong Kong are said to have refined the craft further, and the honey-glazed mat jap char siu spread. Char siu was not invented in a single year by a single hand—it grew, little by little, under the eaves of the roast-meat shops.

Char siu is often given a grand pedigree: that it already appeared in a Zhou-dynasty court cookbook three thousand years ago. The claim turns up in food writing and in the press, yet no version of it that names the specific Zhou text can be found. The best-known record of Zhou court cooking is the list of the Eight Delicacies in the Neize chapter of the Book of Rites (Liji), one of the Confucian classics. Its pork dish, pao, is an elaborate affair: a suckling pig stuffed with jujubes, wrapped in reeds, coated in clay and roasted, then dipped in rice-flour batter, fried in oil, and simmered in a cauldron for three days and three nights. It is a different way of cooking altogether from meat hung on a fork to roast.

The pedigree quietly folds two different things into one—the antiquity of roasting meat over fire in China, and the emergence of char siu as a distinct Cantonese dish. Roasting meat is indeed old. That does not make a dish bearing the name char siu old.

The name itself appears in Suhua Qingtan, a book of moral stories written in Cantonese and said to date from the Qing dynasty. In one scene a woman sends her husband hurrying off to have char siu cut and braised meats sliced, all wrapped together in a lotus leaf: char siu here is ready-cooked meat, carved and sold in a shop. Among books with a firm date, Wu Jianren's Facai Mijue (1908) sets sausages and char siu out with the wine, and Xu Ke's compendium Qing Bai Lei Chao, published in 1917, lists char siu with sausage, white-cut chicken, and roast duck among the cold plates of the late-night meal served in Guangzhou's restaurants.

The tale of a Zhou court origin has been told without naming the book it rests on. It dresses the dish in a pedigree far older than the evidence allows; char siu's true face is a dish of Guangdong's roast-meat shops. Even so, the years in which the name turns up in print cannot simply be read as its birth. No known record ties char siu's beginning to a single year. Within the span from the Qing dynasty into the modern era, as the roast-meat shop culture ripened in Guangzhou, char siu slowly took form—and that, for now, is the soundest line to draw.