One Grand Feast Table: How Much of China’s Social Web Can It Hold?

For many, the first taste of a feast came at an age when the revolving tray was still too high to reach. The stew in the great pot bubbling and frothing, the just-fried meatballs from the kitchen still too hot to bite into, each new dish arriving at the table drawing a little gasp of wonder. Memories of feasting are also memories of homeland and childhood.

As a child I loved going to feasts. Looking back now, it’s all the just-fried fish, the buns still steaming off the griddle, the stew bubbling merrily in its pot. The roast chicken came from a nearby shop, the peanuts and sunflower seeds were just out of the oven – a little charred, a little scorching hot – but that was exactly the taste.

My hometown is Lantian. We’re famous for our shaoshouke – itinerant village cooks – and the food is genuinely superb; you can watch, clear as day, how a dish transforms from raw ingredients into a masterpiece. When there’s a feast in the village, everyone pitches in together, and the host family prepares towels and soap as gifts for all the helpers. In the kitchen it’s all familiar faces from the extended family, and whenever they’re frying meatballs, they’ll let me sneak a taste. As a child, I thought the bride was the most beautiful woman in the world – lovelier than any star in a picture – and I’d squeeze and push my way to the front row just to see. That feeling has gone for good now.

Sichuan’s most iconic feast is the baba feast – “baba” means an open-air clearing. On the third day of the Lunar New Year, we’d go to my eldest aunt’s house for a feast. Her feasts were always wonderful: every ingredient fresh, and the hand of my aunt and the relatives who helped in the kitchen was impeccable. Free-range chickens freshly slaughtered, cured pork, sausages and pig’s trotters all made from that year’s stock, the great wok set up beside them steaming and stir-frying right on the spot – no risk of “ready-made meals”. Since only close relatives came to the feast, my aunt always put her heart into this particular banquet. Feasts were wonderfully lively when I was small – we’d run about and play with the other children, though we had to fight the urge to tear the plastic tablecloths. My aunt used to have plenty of fields; after the meal, we’d play among the field ridges, chasing ducks and tending little fires, losing whole afternoons to it.

In the old days, before a single dish was served, the anticipation was already electric the moment the chopsticks were handed out, and every new course was met with exclamations of delight. The food at a grand feast always tasted better than at a restaurant. The guobaorou and sauced pork at a northeast restaurant were of course delicious in their own right, yet they never quite matched what the feast produced. I can’t say exactly why – is it the chef, the ingredients, or the wok?

Going to a classmate’s graduation banquet was always the best. The kids were seated at a special table, and the courses weren’t just the standard banquet fare – braised pork belly, pork knuckle, prawns, scallops – but also the things children crave: fried chicken, burgers, grilled cold noodles. And then a giant cake in real cream arrived at the end. Can you imagine what that meant for a child with a sweet tooth? The whole class loved him to bits! You’d hear his parents sharing funny stories from his childhood, discovering a side you’d never have guessed at school: someone so reserved and gentle, it turns out, used to climb trees and scale walls as a boy.

In Wenzhou, they call it attending banquets; in Chaoshan, the lively-table feast; in Shaanxi, a feast begins at dawn with a bowl of saozi noodles. In Ganzhou, chestnuts and wild pears arrive with the autumn harvest; in the water towns, fish is never absent; in the stuffed buns of the Bingtuan settlers, there is a filling of bittersweet remembrance. China is vast – lay out the banquet dishes from north to south, coast to interior, and you have a map of flavours.

🍝 A Shaanxi person is never far from a bowl of noodles. Here, for any wedding or funeral, the first meal of the day must begin with a steaming bowl of saozi noodles, dressed with a colourful medley of diced chives, day lilies, wood ear fungus, tomato and egg, minced meat and radish. The noodles are usually hand-rolled, cut thin and the width of a chive leaf, then dressed with vinegar-chilli – simply glorious! The last dish at the feast is always meatball soup; once you’ve had your meatball soup, the meal is done – a wish for completeness. Shaanxi also has a tradition of eight cold and eight hot dishes; no matter how cold the weather, the eight cold dishes must come first!

The most unforgettable was a “su huier” – a mixed vegetarian stew, made mainly with brine-set tofu, sweet-potato vermicelli, tofu skin, coriander and minced ginger, but above all seasoned with fermented tofu. Each county has its own slight variation, and you’d essentially only find it at this kind of flowing-table banquet.

Shihezi is a Bingtuan city, home to migrants from every corner of the country, so the local cuisine is a blend of north and south. In my memory, the feasts centred on stir-fries, interspersed with a few Xinjiang local specialities. The most distinctive dish was called junken jiamo (army-farming stuffed bun – or close to it) – essentially a large round steamed bun stuffed with chilli-spiced stir-fried meat. Legend has it that it was the most delicious thing the Bingtuan settlers could imagine in a time of scarcity, and so it carries a flavour of bittersweet remembrance.

Before I left home, I might attend three to five feasts a year. The post-harvest feast in autumn was always the best, because of the new produce: wild chestnuts, steamed wild pears, sand-fried rice-skin noodles, chestnuts in the burr – ingredients so fresh they needed little more than a direct trip from field to table. The weather was mild, just right for appetite. The dishes changed with each season: in winter, braised bamboo rat; in summer, fried purple sweet potato balls, fried fish fillets, fried baby crucian carp.

In Wenzhou, we call it “chi baijiu” (attending a banquet). When I was little, feasts were mostly held in the family house and courtyard, and everything served was a Wenzhou speciality. For instance, Wenzhou-style pickled radish – we call it cai tou – sweet and sour, utterly delicious. Then there’s sesame-oil duck, tied lamb, and a type of fried fish you dip in a sweet sauce like condensed milk.

One dish stands out in memory: braised pork intestines with peas, simply exquisite. Both the peas and the intestines were cooked until beautifully tender and deeply infused with flavour (pá is Sichuan dialect for soft, yielding), and you could tell it was the handiwork of a truly skilled veteran cook. You simply cannot find this dish anywhere else.

We have a dish called “rou geng” (meat thick soup) – the dialect name. The method is really quite simple: bamboo shoots (or water bamboo) and chicken gizzards are essential. The rest is flexible – shiitake mushrooms, dried tofu and the like. All ingredients are diced extremely fine, roughly half the size of a grain of rice. Then it’s simmered into a soup, thickened with a generous starch slurry, and seasoned to taste. The flavour is a straightforward savoury saltiness, but the gizzards and water bamboo have a satisfying chew – the texture is wonderful.

I was born and raised in Chaozhou. Attending a feast here is called “shi zhuo” (eating at a table), and organising one is called “zuo zhuo” (setting a table). The Chaoshan region has a particularly distinctive feast called the “nao re zhuo” – the lively-table feast. Every year during the nao re festival, the village organises a procession to carry the local deities out in a parade. Drum-and-gong teams, folk orchestras, and flag-bearers escort the images through the streets – it is the great, bustling shen procession. On the day itself, most households in the village set up their own lively-table feasts, inviting friends and relatives; the more guests, the more auspicious for the year ahead. The nao re procession is also intertwined with the local landscape and its agricultural wealth. For instance, Xikou Village in Linyue Township was historically renowned for its sugar cane, and on the sixteenth day of the first lunar month, the cane stalks become the procession’s principal prop: villagers cut them down, hang lanterns from the cane tops, and carry the lit stalks through the lanes – a tradition called “chuan zhe xiang” (walking the sugar cane lanes).

Hand-crafted, outsourced, or ready-made? A feast lasts only a few hours, but the preparation begins far earlier. From neighbours lending a hand, to hiring paid crews, to the flood of ready-made dishes – the labour behind a single table of feast food has shifted again and again.

When I was small, food was scarce, and a feast was the one chance to eat more and better dishes. In the countryside, a village feast was always a communal effort – your family brought the bowls and chopsticks, mine brought the stools; everyone washed, chopped, and cooked together, and the atmosphere was wonderful.

Last year my father held a birthday banquet, and I helped organise a little of it. These days back home, people generally hire a village cook’s team – a regular crew of three: one chef (almost always a man) and two female helpers. It’s certainly convenient, but something always feels missing.

I’ve chatted with a few village cooks. In the old days, back in Chaozhou, the dishes at a zuo zhuo were far less extravagant than today but made by hand in abundance. Fish balls, for instance, had to be made from local fish – bones painstakingly picked out, flesh pounded into paste – requiring enormous labour. These handmade dishes still appear on the table today, but almost all are now mass-produced in factories.

Village feasts were once cooked together by relatives and neighbours; now a master chef brings a crew of four to six and everything runs on an assembly line. In recent years, even hotel feasts are full of ready-made dishes – some served with the ice not even fully thawed.

Hotel feasts these days feel rather lifeless. Saying they taste like chewing wax is an exaggeration, but saying they’re all the same is no injustice. The simple, made-from-scratch dishes – fried fish, fried prawns, prawns stir-fried with cabbage – have vanished from the menu. Yes, there are grander dishes now than in childhood – steamed crabs, blanched prawns – yet they still don’t taste as good as those old favourites. Beyond the undisputed king of ready-made dishes, garlic-and-vermicelli steamed scallops, even the staples feel factory-made: all manner of steamed buns, dim sum, brightly coloured geometric cakes, sticky corn, dates, and chestnuts.

I still remember being a child: apart from the chef, almost everyone bustling about in the kitchen and among the tables was a woman – Grandmother, Mother, Little Aunt, plus the aunties, older sisters, and sisters-in-law of the village. They’d prep the ingredients, assist with the cooking, and once the feast was over, wash the dishes and scrub the pots. Chatting as they worked, they seemed perfectly happy, but even then I felt an inexplicable weariness, as though I’d glimpsed my own future.

A few years ago, when I got married, I originally just wanted a hotel in town – convenient, no trouble for the family. But Father insisted on holding another feast back in the village, saying the relatives and neighbours had all watched me grow up, and the meal wasn’t truly proper unless everyone shared it together. I hired a crew – one chef with five service staff handling everything from start to finish. The relatives and neighbours gathered, ate, chatted, and swapped gossip just the same, and Father’s wish to “have everyone bear witness” came true. Only that day did I realise: without this so-called “collective labour”, people can still gather together – and this is the feast I wanted.

A feast has its own code. How much to tuck into the red envelope, how many from each family to send, who sits at which table, when to raise a toast – every region keeps its own unwritten rules.

Here, village feasts work like this: each household contributes a red envelope of twenty yuan; one representative is sent from households of a different surname in the same village, one or two from those sharing a surname, while close kin all attend. Villagers observe these customs and village rules out of genuine feeling woven into local tradition, not from any external obligation; most never grumble about it, and warmth pervades every corner of the affair.

At a wedding where the groom’s family is taking a bride, there’s a custom of “tea money” – a sum not recorded on the gift list, paid by every guest. Close paternal relatives give generously; those related by marriage or on the maternal side typically give fifty or a hundred yuan. Occasionally there’s a moment of laughter when tea money is asked for a second time – from someone who has already paid. If it’s the bride’s family hosting the sending-off feast, no tea money is collected, though this custom is slowly loosening.

I feel that feasts hosted by different community groups carry distinct characters, shaped largely by whoever organises them and whoever keeps the table lively. Some people are keen drinkers and smokers, so they’ll press the drinks on you; others are easygoing, and Wanglaoji herbal tea will do just fine. There are also unspoken seating rules – elders and people of standing at one table, mothers and small children at another, the young ones at their own.

At a funeral, those keeping the overnight vigil eat only vegetable dishes cooked with plant oil; meat is served only on the final day.

These days, to stop everyone grabbing food and packing it away the moment it appears, the chopsticks are usually handed out at the very end – at least that’s how it’s done back home in Harbin.

Feasts have never been free of social obligation, and beneath the tablecloth flows an unspoken code. Once the wine has done its work, jobs and salaries, marriages and prospects all become fodder for conversation, and deeply entrenched expectations change the very flavour of the food. Faced with remarks like “don’t blame me for speaking my mind” and “it’s all for your own good” from those who’ve been-there-before, young people find their boundaries tested, again and again.

A feast is all about face – the bigger the spread, the more guests, the greater the family’s reputation. Wealthier households prefer a hotel: even if the food is nowhere near as good as what the village chef produces, and far pricier, it’s precisely that price that proclaims the family’s prosperity.

My own graduation banquet was a rather flat affair. In name it was a celebration of my admission to university; in reality, it was a show of clan connections and internal status back home. Each family centred on its senior male patriarch, and the feast ran for three full days. Past midnight the men were still roaring with drink, playing finger-guessing games, and talking the night away, paying no heed to whether the women and children at home needed sleep. I was paraded from table to table, posing for photographs with total strangers like an NPC, then lectured on gratitude because the neighbours who’d come to help were so exhausted.

At the graduation banquet before I left for university, there was a man I had to call “Uncle” despite no blood connection to him. Perhaps it was also because his daughter had built a stable life in Beijing. That evening he gestured for me to stand, then called over a few other young people and dwelt especially on his daughter’s achievements. He went on to “map out our futures” for each of us, as though, in his telling, our lives already had a fixed destination laid out before us.

Once my family forced me to go and toast the elders. I didn’t want to do it, so I stood frozen in place for over ten seconds while the whole room watched the spectacle. My older cousin poured me a glass and egged me on to go; yet my younger cousin, after I’d finished the toasting, looked down on me and demanded, why do you go whenever they tell you to? That incident left a real mark. Other people’s gazes and words come so cheaply. One person thinks it’s about your dignity; another thinks it’s nothing at all. And the ones who urge you on, and the ones who look down on you, won’t bear any of the cost for you. In that moment I felt a ferocious loneliness.

As living standards rose and holding a feast grew easier, why has it become harder and harder to find the satisfaction we once drew from a banquet? From simply showing up to eat, to now pulling out our own money for the gift collection – the very generation adults used to drag along to feasts has grown up. Gradually they’ve started reading between the lines of the laughter and banter at the table.

As a child, once my parents seated me at the table, I’d mostly stare at the dishes on the round table and look for whoever was spinning it. Slowly, through a child’s eyes, I built a habit of observation – I noticed that people spoke differently depending on where they sat. Now I sense more of an exchange of information, a thread binding some kind of feeling together. Whether it’s a family gathering, a get-together among friends, or attending someone’s milestone, the real weight of it all comes down to the talk of money and face.

When a feast is held in the village, neighbours from all around pitch in – laughing, chatting, bickering, making a racket; children and dogs alike run loose, free to be themselves, and it lets people shed their inhibitions. A hotel feast shuts everyone into a banquet hall: you take your seat, whisper to the person beside you or scroll on your phone. There’s no open space, no room to let go. As if an invisible urban system of living clamps down on the human spirit – an experience that feels unbearably stifling.

These days, since I work away from home, I go to feasts so rarely that an occasional one is still quite enjoyable. But if you live in your hometown, it becomes a burden: the ever-rising gift money and the constant round of feasts bring a real financial squeeze.

The deeper reason I don’t enjoy feasts is that I’m a committed single. I felt a sudden pang of envy reading about Taylor Swift’s wedding, where the host laid down the rules: no photographs, no plus-ones. That matters a great deal for privacy and for breaking the web of social obligation. For a feast elsewhere I still go, drawn by the food. But the hometown flavours have grown a bit “set in stone” – as though, psychologically speaking, they’ve already been pre-made.

As a child my mum would tuck me under her arm like a handbag and off we’d go to a feast. After dutifully saying hello to every auntie and uncle, I became the talking point – “Your child is so well-behaved – what extracurricular classes has she signed up for?” “Did you hear, so-and-so just had a second baby – aren’t you thinking of another?” I tuned out the politics at the table and busied myself sneaking extra helpings of garlic vermicelli steamed scallops. I never touched the prawns – too much faff peeling them.

Older now, what I get is very different: “Are you busy at work? Don’t let it put off finding a partner!” “A girl really should settle down early – marry young, have children early, then she can give her career her full attention!” Mayday, Mayday! Intrusion detected in personal space! I haven’t managed two mouthfuls of food and already the gossip has run its course. Could these questions, please, wait until everyone’s had their fill… I’ve already paid into the gift pot… I’m too full of indignation to eat.

Perhaps the feast has always been this way – I’ve simply grown up and can now read the unspoken meanings behind the looks and the words. I’ve acquired a set of “counterweights” of my own, ready to be weighed, compared, and laid out for inspection – I’ve inherited the same old system of prying into each other’s lives and trading information, passed down from the generation before.

What sustained the traditional village feast was not just the stove and the cook, but a relatively settled village and neighbours who saw each other often. As elders pass on and urbanisation scatters people across the country, fewer of these village feasts remain. Will the grand feast still exist in twenty years?

Every year around Qingming, in the rural districts around Tianjin, a rotating banquet is laid out – you pay per head, so all the relatives have lunch after visiting the graves. Now many families have moved from the village into resettlement housing, so if around Qingming you see marquee tents going up in the estates on the city’s edge, chances are that estate was a whole village relocated en bloc, still keeping the old customs.

I get to fewer feasts now. Most of my relatives in the city centre hold theirs at restaurants. And the relatives in the suburbs – they’ve grown ever older, while the younger generation hardly hosts feasts anymore.

Communal feasts are infrequent in the urban area, mainly because hosting one requires space, and the city offers few public grounds or ancestral-hall courtyards. In the villages there are far more: some are held in the ancestral hall, others in the yard of a family factory or beneath a self-built rural house. I probably attend one or two a year now – I went much more as a child; once I grew up and left, they became rare.

Beyond the feast’s setting migrating from village to city with the people, the very format of hosting has shifted dramatically. I recently attended a university friend’s wedding. She’d discarded nearly all the traditional “feast proceedings”: the couple hosted the entire ceremony themselves, and the venue was the restaurant where they’d had their first meal together. Only close friends were invited; the menu was decided in advance by an online poll of the guests, and every table even got a different set of dishes, so everyone chose their seat by the food they wanted to eat.

I truly do go back to the village for feasts far less now. Most of the friends I played with as a child have moved to town for school and work, and the village elders are leaving one by one. Occasionally someone still holds a feast and the notice goes up in the group chat, but when I see a name I sometimes have to pause – whose family is this? My own life has entered a stage where there’s little call for a grand feast; fewer and fewer things can draw people back to the village.

The village feast may indeed be fading away – after all, if the bonds themselves dissolve, the rituals that once confirmed and maintained them no longer need to exist. I don’t know whether, in twenty years, a feast will still be called a “grand feast”, but I think it will endure in some form. Perhaps smaller, freer, more chosen, more inclusive. Perhaps just friends, partners, or like-minded souls sitting down to a meal together.

The population flows brought by urbanisation and the market, and the slow unraveling of rural communities, are eroding the social foundation on which the grand feast once rested. People leave the villages, families scatter across the country, and the ties woven from blood, proximity, and the old acquaintance society loosen with each passing year; meanwhile a new generation of hosts is translating the old rituals into new forms that speak to present-day values. The society rooted in the land is receding into the distance, yet perhaps, at certain moments, we still need to become “us” once more.

🗣️ 

Do you think the grand feast will disappear?

If You Were the Host

What Kind of Feast Would You Host?

We welcome your comments – share your good ideas!

Unless otherwise noted, all images are reader submissions.

Editor: Li Ye, Lele

Layout: Ming Lin

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