Shaoxing

Shaoxing was the capital of the state of Yue, whose king Goujian, defeated by the neighbouring state of Wu in the fifth century BC, is remembered for sleeping on brushwood and tasting gall to keep his humiliation fresh until he conquered Wu. Earlier still, local tradition places the burial of Yu the Great, the legendary tamer of floods and founder of the Xia dynasty, on Kuaiji Hill just south-east of the city, and the Qin emperor is recorded as climbing the hill in 210 BC. Under the Han the area was the commandery of Kuaiji.

The city's waterways were engineered early. In the second century AD the Jian Lake reservoir was built to irrigate the plain, and the network of canals, bridges and stone-lined channels that defines the old town grew up over the following centuries. In 353 the calligrapher Wang Xizhi hosted a spring purification party at the Orchid Pavilion outside the city and wrote the preface that became the model for Chinese calligraphy. The Southern Song court gave the city its present name in 1131, and the Bazi Bridge dates from the early 13th century.

In the Ming and Qing Shaoxing was famous for two exports: its rice wine and its clerks. Shaoxing natives served as private secretaries and legal advisers to magistrates across the empire, and the term Shaoxing shiye became a byword for the profession. The 20th century gave the city a remarkable set of figures — the writer Lu Xun, born here in 1881; the revolutionary Qiu Jin, executed in the city in 1907; the educator Cai Yuanpei; and Zhou Enlai, whose ancestral home is here. The textile industry centred on Keqiao has since made Shaoxing a prosperous city.

Shaoxing wine, the amber huangjiu brewed from glutinous rice and the water of Jian Lake, is the city's symbol. It is drunk warm and used in cooking, and the tradition of burying a jar at a daughter's birth to open at her wedding gave the name to the nü'erhong, or daughter's red, variety. The Shaoxing Yellow Wine Museum in the city explains the craft.

The city's literary identity is unusually strong. Lu Xun's stories, set in a thinly disguised Shaoxing, are widely read across China, and places he wrote about — the Xianheng Tavern, the Sanwei Study, the Baicao Garden — draw visitors. Calligraphy pilgrims come to the Orchid Pavilion, and the ceremonies at the Mausoleum of Yu link the city to the oldest layer of Chinese tradition. The wider prefecture is the birthplace of Yue opera, the sung, mostly female form that grew up in Shengzhou in the early 20th century and became the second most popular opera style in China; the older, louder local form, Shaoju, is also still staged.

Everyday culture is that of the Jiangnan water towns: black-awning boats, whitewashed walls, stone steps to the water and old stone bridges. The Shaoxing dialect of Wu is still spoken at home. Crowds at the Lu Xun quarter can be heavy, but a few streets away the old city is quiet and lived-in.

The prefecture has about 5.3 million people, with about 3 million in the three urban districts. Shaoxing ranks among China's wealthier cities by income per head: Keqiao's textile market is one of the largest in the world, Keqiao is one of China's largest textile dyeing and printing bases, and Zhuji in the south of the prefecture is famous for pearls. Rice wine, though famous, is a small part of the economy next to cloth.

Most residents live in apartment estates in the new districts and in Keqiao, driving or taking the metro into the centre; the old city's canal houses are home mainly to older families, with a growing number converted to guesthouses and shops. The day starts early with a bowl of noodles or rice porridge with fermented vegetables, offices and factories run on standard hours, and evenings are spent in the malls along Jiefang Road, in the parks, dancing in squares or walking the canals, which are lit at night.

The issues people talk about are the cost of flats, the environmental cost of the dyeing industry, the balance between tourism and a living old city, and the pull of Hangzhou, now a metro ride away, for jobs and shopping. Rail and metro links have tied Shaoxing closer to its larger neighbour and brought more weekend visitors.

Shaoxing cooking is Zhejiang food with a strong fermented note. The best-known dish is chou doufu, stinky tofu, fried until crisp and eaten with chilli sauce from stalls across the old city; its smell carries down the street. Fermented vegetables are everywhere: meigan cai, dried pickled mustard greens, is steamed with pork belly, and many dishes are steamed. Drunken chicken is cooked with the local wine.

The rice wine itself appears at every meal, warmed in winter and poured into small cups, and it goes into the kitchen as a cooking wine across China. Aniseed beans, huixiang dou, are the classic snack beside a cup of wine, made famous by Lu Xun's story about the impoverished scholar Kong Yiji.

Pickled goods, above all meigan cai, are a popular gift to take home. Breakfast is a bowl of rice porridge with pickles or a plate of fried dough sticks. The restaurants of the Lu Xun quarter and Cangqiao Straight Street serve the traditional dishes to visitors; locals eat the same food more cheaply in the side streets of the modern centre.