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Home of vinegar flavored with folk stories and modern history
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If you have lived in Shanghai for a while, you would know that hairy crabs are all the rage during autumn and winter. Hairy crabs must be thoroughly savored, with the crabs sourced from either Yangcheng Lake or Taihu Lake, both in the nearby city of Suzhou, Jiangsu Province.
The yellow wine used to wash down the crabs must come from Shaoxing in neighboring Zhejiang Province.
And the vinegar for dipping the crab? Well, it’s from Zhenjiang, a city near Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu. Zhenjiang vinegar is also used in soup dumplings.
It is easy to associate Zhenjiang with food. The city is famous for its “three strange happenings”: The vinegar never goes bad, jellied pork is not served as a course in a meal, and pot lids are cooked inside noodle pots.
Let’s do some unpacking here because the “strange happenings” are not immediately obvious to the unfamiliar, let alone foreigners. According to legend, the son of Du Kang, the creator of wine, discovered that his father’s distiller’s grain would not only not spoil but would instead turn into vinegar after 21 days.
What’s more, vinegar gets more aromatic the longer it is stored. Thus, vinegar-making in Zhenjiang is credited to Du’s son, Hei Ta, who made good use of water from the neighboring Yangtze River.
The city has a museum devoted to the production of vinegar, which is housed in the former factory of the biggest local vinegar brand, Hengshun.
When it comes to jellied pork, locals like to eat it for breakfast, naturally dipped in vinegar. They don’t typically eat it as a course during lunch or dinner. Zhenjiang jellied pork is available in Shanghai ... as a cold dish.
Pot-lid noodles (锅盖面) are yet another Zhenjiang culinary specialty. Legend has it that on one of Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) Emperor Qianlong’s trips down south, the lady chef of a noodle shop was so frightened that she covered her pot with the wrong lid. To her amazement, the considerably smaller lid floating on the soup base enhanced the flavor of the noodles significantly.
Lao Zhao noodle shop is a wonderful place to sample them, while others swear by Da Hua. The two noodle shops are a 12-minute walk from each other on Daxi Road.
Qianlong’s imprint was not limited to Zhenjiang cuisine. One of his most important achievements is the production of the exquisite “Siku Quanshu,” or the “Complete Library in Four Sections,” the largest collection of texts in pre-modern China. Only seven complete copies of the 10-billion-word opus existed. They were kept in dedicated libraries in Beijing (two copies), Shenyang, Chengde, Hangzhou, Yangzhou (across the Yangtze from Zhenjiang) and Zhenjiang.
The Zhenjiang library was destroyed during the Taiping Uprising in the mid-19th century, but was rebuilt 12 years later and is now part of the Jinshan Temple tourist area. The Buddhist temple is one of the most famous in China and serves as the setting for many Chinese folk stories.
Jinshan Temple sits by the mighty Yangtze River. The name Zhenjiang means “overlooking the river,” as the city has historically been a key domestic and international commerce port.
A tour through the surrounding ancient Xijin Ferry area is educational. You will discover not just the ruins of the ferry dock from different periods, but also what is possibly the world’s oldest river rescue association right next to the landmark Zhaoguan Stupa, dating back to 1311.
There is a lot of modern history as well. On Changjiang Road, not far from the ferry ruins, there were several Western trading companies, including the Asiatic Petroleum Co.
During the Qing Dynasty, Zhenjiang was a logistical hub, an important battleground in the First Opium War and one of the trading ports established by Britain following the Second Opium War.
The former British consulate, which is now the Zhenjiang Museum, is an imposing structure, but it has a bloody history: The original consulate building was burned down by angry locals when British patrolmen attacked local peddlers.
Zhenjiang, on the other hand, is associated with a well-known Western ambassador to China and Chinese culture. Pearl S. Buck, born into an American missionary family, spent her formative years in Zhenjiang and went on to become the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China.” Her magnum opus, “The Good Earth,” is a must-read for anybody wanting to understand China. Her childhood home is now a museum.
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