Chaozhou

The Han River delta was settled long before it was Chinese-administered, and the area was governed as Chaozhou prefecture from the late 6th century, when the lowlands were still a frontier of the empire. Its defining episode came in 819, when the Tang scholar-official Han Yu was banished here after criticising the imperial reception of a Buddhist relic. He governed for only a matter of months, but promoted schooling and left such a mark that the river, the hills opposite and a temple on their slope were all renamed for him — an act of civic gratitude without much parallel in China.

Under the Song the prefecture grew rich on rice, salt and river trade, and work began in 1170 on the crossing that became the Guangji Bridge, at first a floating bridge of linked boats and rebuilt in stages over centuries into a hybrid of fixed stone piers and a floating middle section. Ming walls enclosed the city, ancestral halls multiplied, and a distinct Teochew identity — its own speech, opera, carving and cooking — hardened in the coastal plain between the mountains and the sea.

From the 18th century onward Teochew men left in great numbers for Siam, Malaya, Singapore, Indochina and the Dutch East Indies, and their remittances built mansions in villages across the plain. The opening of Shantou as a treaty port in 1860 moved the region's commerce downstream to the coast, and Chaozhou settled into the role of the cultural and ceremonial centre rather than the economic one. It became a prefecture-level city in its own right in 1991, and restoration of the bridge, the wall and the arch street since the 2000s has turned the old core into a destination for Chinese travellers.

Chaozhou is the reference point for Teochew culture, which is carried by tens of millions of people in Guangdong and across Southeast Asia. Teochew is a Southern Min language, not mutually intelligible with Cantonese or Mandarin, and it keeps features of older Chinese that make it valued by linguists and impenetrable to other Chinese speakers. Chaozhou opera, or Chaoju, is sung in it, accompanied by the gongs and drums and the string ensembles that also play at temple festivals.

The crafts are unusually concentrated. Chaozhou woodcarving, gilded and cut in multiple openwork layers, fills temple beams and ancestral halls; Chaozhou embroidery works in raised padded stitches; and the city and its surrounding district are a major centre of porcelain and ceramic production. Gongfu tea is the daily social ritual rather than a performance for visitors: a small pot, a handful of dancong oolong, and three cups refilled around a table in shops, offices and doorways all day.

Clan and ancestor worship remain strong, expressed in ancestral halls, lineage associations and the temple processions of the lunar calendar, and the diaspora is woven into this: overseas families fund temple repairs and return for New Year. Chaozhou people have a reputation across China for commercial skill and for close-knit networks — the businessman Li Ka-shing, born in the city in 1928, is the best-known example — and hospitality here is practical, generous and conducted over tea.

The prefecture-level city of Chaozhou has about 2.5 million residents, of whom only a few hundred thousand live in the old urban core on the west bank; the rest are spread through Chao'an district and the county towns of the plain. Migration has long run both ways: families with relatives in Bangkok or Singapore are commonplace, while younger residents leave for jobs in Shenzhen and Guangzhou.

The local economy rests on ceramics and sanitary ware, food processing, clothing and embroidery workshops, tea growing in the hills to the north, and, more recently, tourism to the restored old city. Much production happens in small family firms in the towns around the centre rather than in large plants.

Days start early with porridge or noodles and a first round of tea, and the old city becomes busiest in the evening, when the arch street fills and families eat out. Weekend crowds from Shantou and Guangzhou have grown quickly since the high-speed line opened, and the pressures that come with that — rising rents in the old lanes, shops turning over to souvenirs, conservation of the timber houses — are the current local arguments.

Teochew cooking is one of China's most distinctive regional kitchens, built on seafood, restraint and an obsession with texture. Beef hotpot is the modern emblem: beef is cut to order by muscle, from the fattier near the brisket to the lean, and swirled in clear broth for a few seconds, with hand-beaten beef balls that bounce, and shacha, a sand-tea sauce of peanut, garlic and dried seafood, for dipping. Braised goose, lu e, is simmered in a dark stock of soy, galangal and spices and served sliced and cool with the eggs and beancurd cooked alongside it.

Everyday eating runs on moi, loose rice porridge, taken with a counter of small salty dishes — preserved radish, salted vegetables, braised fish, pickled shellfish. The snack repertoire is long: oyster omelette fried crisp at the edges, fish balls and fish-paste dumplings, kway teow rice noodles, steamed rice cakes stuffed with chives or taro, and sweet pastes of taro and water chestnut. Street stalls sell sugar-coated taro chunks and cooling herbal drinks.

Tea sits over all of it. Phoenix dancong, a single-bush oolong grown on the mountain slopes north of the city, is brewed gongfu style — a small clay pot packed tight with leaf, poured fast and repeatedly into little cups, and drunk strong before, between and after meals rather than with them.