How the chilli pepper has set fire to the internet in China
Summary
- Thanks to Mao, the once-derided pepper quietly revolutionised Chinese palates
Tianshui, a city tucked away in China’s north-western hills, does not normally make headline news. But a fiery soup that owes its unique flavour to locally grown Gangu chillies has lit up the internet. Since March, the hashtag #TianshuiMalatang, referring to a popular type of street food, has racked up more than 140m views on Weibo, a social-media platform. Millions have flocked to the city to try it themselves. A local chef was caught on tape looking so miserable at work that local authorities had to give him a talking-to so that he remembered to smile.
Increasingly the Chinese palate is craving spice. Last year Meituan, China’s biggest food-delivery app, reported that nearly 80% of restaurants now offer spicy fare, a taste known as la in Chinese. Look back a few hundred years, though, and chillies were nowhere to be found.
Unlike ginger and Sichuan peppers, which are native to the region and widely used, chilli peppers were brought to China from the Americas by Portuguese and Dutch explorers only in the 16th century. At first, nobody ate them. For at least 50 years, they were grown as decorative plants, prized for their cheerfully bright colour and tiny white flowers, and occasionally used as medicinal herbs.
During China’s last imperial period, a stringent system that taxed salt forced peasants in Guizhou province to look for an alternative to the condiment. They chose chillies, which produce several crops a year and take up little land. From there, a new flavour was unlocked. The pepper steadily spread to other rural regions of China, but its pungent, overpowering flavour barred it from getting near the tables of imperial or upper-class families. For a long time, la was used to describe vicious-natured people, and the few urbanites who enjoyed chillies did not trumpet their taste.
But the Communist revolution revolutionised the kitchen. The chefs of nobles were out of favour, and their traditions discontinued. The new leader, Mao Zedong, was the son of a peasant and a fan of chillies. Mao made Russian envoys eat sweat-inducing dishes and laughed when they could not handle the heat. “You can’t be a revolutionary if you don’t eat chillies," he said. What was once a poor man’s food became a symbol of China’s working class.
Industrialisation after Mao created the largest migration in human history. Hundreds of millions of migrants poured into big cities, bringing with them the spicy flavours of home. Chillies are now incorporated into street food, fine dining and snacks in regions with little tradition of heat.
Cao Yu, a food writer and author of “The History of Eating La", argues that part of the chilli’s charm also comes from its social function. “If we’ve had spicy food together, we’ve endured pain together," he says. “It’s just like drinking, it brings us closer to one another."
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