A Brief History of Taizhou Cuisine
Stage I: Pre-Qin to Sui-Tang (200s – 900s)
Taizhou’s landscape—70% mountains, 10% water, and 20% farmland—dictated its larder: the east coast supplies seafood, the western hills serve wild harvests, poultry, and vegetables. As part of the ancient Yue area, the earliest inhabitants lived on “rice and fish,” loved aquatic fare, and began salting and curing.
In the Northern and Southern Dynasties (c. 500CE), the Daoist pharmacologist Tao Hongjing wrote in Annotations to the Materia Medica: “Dried ginger now comes only from Linhai and Zhangan, and just two or three villages possess the know-how.” A thousand years before chillies reached China, Taizhou was already renowned for its ginger, and the city’s signature Ginger-Soup Noodles are a direct descendant of that heritage.
Legend has it that during the Tang dynasty, when the local prefect sent soldiers to build city walls against pirates, grateful townsfolk brought greens, winter bamboo shoots, pork, bean-thread noodles, and taro. Confronted with the jumble, the army cook tossed everything into a pot of rice gruel and created the first zaogeng, a dish that remains a signature of Taizhou Cuisine.
Stage II: Song-Yuan (960s – 1360s)
Blessed with abundant sea life, Taizhou cooks had already mastered season-driven seafood techniques. In nostalgic verse, the Southern-Song poet Dai Fugu, homesick in verse, singled out the local way with sea crabs, while the dried fish product named “Xiang” was already commonplace at that time.
A folk almanac, Fish for Every Month, listed what to eat month by month, marrying the calendar to the table. The city’s celebrated snack, Shi-bing-tong—paper-thin pancakes rolled with savoury fillings—is said to have debuted at a Southern-Song tribute banquet.
Stage III: Ming-Qing (1360s – 1910s)
The imperial “sea-ban” gutted coastal trade, yet it also spurred Taizhou to develop inland. The region’s “mountain-meets-sea” identity was no longer a geographic accident; it became deliberate cuisine. With salt-works lining the shore, cooks turned to rice-wine lees and soy sauce, forging the city’s hallmark umami-savoury balance that still defines Taizhou palates.
Ming and Qing gazetteers catalogue local produce and daily dishes in unprecedented detail, proof that the flavour system had crystallized. Recipes for maixia (literally wheat-shrimp, actually a dough-drop soup), bianshi (flat-folded dumplings), and other household staples took their modern form then, settling into the rhythms of everyday life and festival calendars that still govern Taizhou kitchens today.
Stage IV: Republican-era to Reform & Opening (1910s – 1990s)
With restaurants scarce, Taizhou cuisine lived in home kitchens. Every household still sun-dried fish “xiang,” pickled “drunken” crabs in rice-wine, and pounded glutinous rice for “ma-ci.”
Out of this domestic rhythm grew a unique “itinerant-chef” culture: for banquets, families hired cooks who arrived with woks and cleavers. Moving from village to village, these chefs stitched the local palate together, turning family recipes into a shared, subtly standardised repertory that survived the slow decades and was ready when prosperity finally returned.
Stage V: Early 21st Century to Present (2000s - now)
Fuelled by Taizhou’s private-sector boom and soaring disposable incomes, demand for high-end dining exploded. Led by Xinrongji, a wave of hometown restaurants re-engineered rustic dishes into precise, branded experiences and carried them into Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, and beyond. Year after year, Xinrongji has collected Michelin stars, earning the tag “the ceiling of Chinese cuisine.” The spotlight has given Taizhou cuisine its first truly global reputation and secured it a permanent seat on China’s fine-dining map.
Translated by Shi Jingjing