Day 1
On Chinese soil at last, in Fujian province, in the southeast, halfway between Hong Kong and Shanghai. For the past 35 years, I’ve revered Chinese food: what will the real thing be like? I resolve, in Star Trek spirit, to boldly eat what no Jefford family member has eaten before, but am still taken aback by my first lunchtime mouthful in a busy restaurant in Xiamen: fresh corn juice from a glass. A primrose-hued emulsion, it slides down my throat like liquid linen: sweetly starchy.
As I set about the fried shrimps, razor clams with chilli and taro with pork, I realise that my unorthodox chopstick technique can provoke tittering at up to 30 paces. It does this throughout my stay, so that by the end I camp it up with gratuitous winks and baroque hand gestures. Initially, though, I am quite chastened: I try holding my chopsticks the proper way. Messy humiliation results.
Day 2
A ‘farmer’s lunch’ near Jinxi, north of Xiamen. Our hosts serve tepid beer with little formality – mine is poured into a soup bowl. The food lurches from the sublime (a dish of baby crayfish) to the challenging: tightly rolled intestines with what looks like softened toenail, but turns out to be boiled mutton skin. The intestines taste bitter; I wish my own innards luck as I swallow. Little fish float in a murky broth as if on a creek after dynamite fishing, but the poultry stew looks much more promising. Mr Wang’s palmtop dictionary tells us the bird is francolin. My fellow traveller, Ed Eisler of Jing Tea, is almost a vegetarian, but tentatively reaches for the uppermost morsel. As he turns it in his chopsticks, he is met with the glum stare of a dead, boiled francolin, complete with beak. Ed smiles, rather wanly.
Dinner in the Great World Seafood Restaurant in Fuzhou is more of a success. Our hosts are the charming Zhang Zhang and her dad, a jasmine tea producer. We tour the tanks first. It’s like a SeaWorld aquarium; the only difference is that they kill whatever you point at and it’s on your plate ten minutes later. I haven’t got the heart to order the execution of little turtles anddon’t fancy whelks the size of pig’s trotters. We settle for spiny rock fish (deliciously delicate), giant clams (served in a fragrant broth), more razor clams, cooked in salt this time, and beef rolls with white mushrooms. These are dipped in the ubiquitous little dish of black vinegar that is given to every diner as a condiment.
Day 3
Up into Fujian’s Wuyi Mountains, a chain of densely forested, mist-draped, river-cut sandstone peaks. Each has its own name: Jade Maiden, Two Breast Peak, Tiger Roaring Rock... We travel up the Floating Dragon Gorge to the village of Tongmu, where tea from wild bushes is smoked at Bohea Farm to provide the sublime progenitor of all lapsangs.
There’s a stew out of which I pick a head. It seems to have a beak, yet the body is fishlike. No one’s sure what it is
The highlight of dinner is mountain frog soup, in which chopped frogs (still attached to their black-and-white mottled skin) are served in a nutritious broth. The flesh proves succulent, but the mass of fine bones is like dried vermicelli in the mouth. (You spit them out. Hacking and spitting are still enthusiastically practised in China – and the louder, the better.)
There are also braised aubergines and close-textured potatoes. There’s omelette, greens and squelchy belly pork, dribbling fat. And there’s a chilli-strewn stew out of which I pick a head. Is it a bird? It certainly seems to have a beak. Yet the rest of the body looks rather more fishlike. No one seems to be sure just what it is.
Day 4
Still at Tongmu. Very good smoked tofu for lunch, and the forested hills have provided a wild boar stew this time, served with cinnamon and chilli. There’s another stew with heads in, but this time it is definitely a fish, dentally well-endowed, like baby pike.
Supper back at Haisheng Hotel in Wuyi City brings us our first fresh bamboo shoots, red-cooked pork with a brightly glazed skin, and a platter of reconstituted dried baby carp (better than you’d think) with fresh green soya beans (chewy). There are also two local specialities: smoked goose and a stew of ten different mushrooms.
Day 5
South to Guangzhou, 75 miles north of Hong Kong, and lovely, steamy dim sum for lunch in a hotel overlooking the Pearl River, which is in fact muddy hazel rather than nacreous. It’s back to an even bigger aquarium restaurant for dinner, where tanks full of writhing sea snakes, miserable alligators and a tray of squirming grubs do little to quicken the appetite. But we are guests of the mysterious Miss Zhiang, who looks like a Chinese Cleopatra and dominates the market in fine pu’er tea, so we shut our eyes and think of… well, bitter melon with black bean sauce, roast duck, and sweet-fleshed soft shell crab served in an orange-coloured curry. We are given whole green coconuts with their tops sliced off, and sip the milk through straws.
As is customary in a private dining room, a huge TV blares throughout dinner, with news footage of baton-wielding police breaking up a demo under a bright Middle Eastern sun. Blows rain down on hapless Muslim women. The appetite fades again.
Day 6
North to Hangzhou, 120 miles south of Shanghai, and the best meal of the trip which, incredibly, is in the staff canteen of a university science park. Highlights of the 12-dish meal are yellow eel with a dark, sweet sauce; a scallop shell of cabbage with stir-fried vegetables and gingko seeds; cotton wool-soft white dumplings with pork; and a giant fish from Thousand Island Lake. As a guest of honour, I am given the choicest part: the cheek. Everyone watches as I swallow the tepid, jellied morsel.
There’s still, of course, room for a final dinner. Mr Li takes us to a Sichuan-style restaurant run by his old college friends. The food arrives and my jaw drops. Each dish contains a good 60 or 70 bird’s eye chillies. You can hear them hum like a poked beehive. We leave China with a bang.