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Guizhou Cuisine
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Guizhou Cuisine
China has been known to have some of the richest cultures across the globe. Most of the cultures have been preserved in pristine condition as the Chinese have maintained them with strict commitment. There are quite a lot of regions and cultures that have cultures related to foods, mythology and agriculture, however for the purpose of this paper, it is important to concentrate on a single region, Guizhou Province. This is a region in the Southwestern parts of China and boasts with one of the hottest cuisines in China (Yingzi, 2015). The cuisine is eaten from a young age and has come to be one of the most celebrated cultures in the region, with restaurants cropping up across the region to serve the locals and even the tourists with the hot dish. Most of the locals also keep this dining habit where they boil meat or prepare rice noodles with some of the hottest chilies and make sour soups to go with the foods. With a strong mythology background that is associated with spicy foods being a source of long life, the spicy foods in the province as mentioned are started off from an early age. The Guizhou Province has slowly developed its spicy cuisine with sour soups over the years and much of this is related to the agricultural practices in the region.
βThe capital of this province, Guiyang, is a town established during the Han Dynasty (206 BCE - 220 CE). It changed names and the region became the Qianzhong Prefecture during the Tang Dynasty (618 - 907 CE). It changed names again during the Ming Dynasty (1368 - 1644 CE) and was then called the Buzheng Prefecture. The Guizhou Province was set up during the Qing Dynasty (1644 - 1911 CE), and it's capital is centrally located in the province. Other cities in this province besides Guiyang include Anshun, known for its batik and as an easy stepping off point to go twenty-seven miles southwest to see China's largest waterfalls, Huangguoshu, on the Baishu River. There are also places such as Zunyi and Kaili, and Duyun, Liupanshui, and Qingzhen. These are more town-like. Overall, the province has beautiful scenery and many minority populations. Folks from all over China come to see them and to go to Janjing Shan, also known as Mt. Fanjing. This is the province's only holy mountain. There many staircases are climbed to get to the top and a large nature preserve, a huge sub-tropical forest, home to China's endangered golden monkey.β (Newman, 2018)
While the Guizhou cuisine is not as developed as some of the neighboring cuisines from the provinces that surround Guizhou Province, it is interesting to consider how this unique cuisine has developed and the impact that agriculture has had on the same. This is a region that has a rich history and one that can be traced back to the Han Dynasty between the years 206 BCE and 220 CE. The capital at the time was referred to as Guiyang. The names would then come to change during the Tang Dynasty in the years between 618 and 907 CE, and this time it was referred to as Quinzhong (Newman, 2018). It changed names again during the Ming Dynasty between the years, 1368 and 1644 CE and this time it was referred to as Buzheng Prefecture. It was during the Qing Dynasty between the years 1644 and 1911 CE that is would become known as Guizhou Province (Newman, 2018). Guizhou is home to the largest water falls in China, the Huangguoshu that are on the Baishu River. This is attributed to the fact that, the province is one of the most mountainous in the country. It is dominated by subtropical and monsoon-like climate as it is humid. It is commonly spoken of as the land without three feet of flat ground and the land without three days of sun in a row. At the same time, this is a region that is associated with the poorest of the bunch in China (Newman, 2018). This has contributed largely to the development of the cuisines.
Mythology
Given the fact that the place is constantly dump and chilly, the people here love their chilly foods. They will in most of their foods use the hot chilies in a way to boost the warmth of their bodies. It is also established that, they tend to use the chilies in their foods relative to the myth that, the hot foods tend to increase the blood circulation in the body. This way they are able to stay warm and healthy in an environment that is very cold and in most of the cases dump from the lack of sunlight sometimes for days. There is the belief that is associated with positive and negative energy, commonly referred to as yin and yan. Where yin is the negative energy and yan is the positive energy. The foods that are cod are considered to offer the yin energy while the yan foods are considered to offer the people yan. For this reason, the yan foods are associated with spicies such as the use of chilies, garlic, curry, and onions among others. It is important for the people to be in a position to balance their positive and negative energies by taking the right foods at the right time. For this reason the people in the province will in most of the cases try to balance their energies by taking the spicy foods.
Fish and rice Faming
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