The Braised Goose in the Qiaopi: 100,000 Yuan a Bird

The Braised Goose at 100,000 Yuan

This is a qiaopi (an overseas Chinese remittance letter) written on 12 July 1946, sent from Seremban in Malaysia to Huamei Township in Chao’an, Guangdong Province, over 4,000 kilometres away. It is now housed in the Qinghui Building of the Caitang Qiaopi Museum in Chao’an County, Chaozhou City.

The sender was Shen Dongyan, and the recipient was his mother. Like the vast majority of qiaopi in real life, this letter dealt with concrete everyday matters: it asked how the early-season rice harvest had been that year, inquired how much grain rent a certain brother had collected, and raised the question of schooling at home—transfers, tuition, and boarding fees. It mentioned that once “shipping routes are open and running smoothly”, he would send back “clothing for everyday wear”. Finally, he touched on one further matter:

“Counting the days, I see that the feast day of Ancestor Yong is drawing near. Over the past few years, we must not yet have had the chance to buy a large goose for worship, and I think this year we ought to manage one. I do not know what each one costs at present, so I am enclosing 100,000 yuan in national currency to meet household needs; the remainder will follow in later letters as required. I write this with the utmost respect and wish you good health.”

One need not be fluent in classical Chinese to follow this letter; even from the keywords alone, every Chaoshan person should grasp its meaning: a certain ancestor’s feast day is approaching, and over the past few years the family may not have had the means to buy a braised goose for the rites. The sender wonders whether the money enclosed is enough for one.

In the Chaoshan region, whether one is paying respects to the gods at Spring Festival or performing ancestral rites at any other time, braised goose is the offering of the highest grade. This qiaopi shows that so firmly rooted a folk tradition was already deeply held by the 1940s. The 100,000 yuan in national currency that Shen Dongyan—then far away in Malaysia—so earnestly enclosed with his qiaopi to his mother was most likely his estimate of the going price for a single braised goose at the time.

Yet that very year fell in the most violent episode of hyperinflation in modern Chinese history. At the start of 1946, 100,000 yuan could still buy two cows; by the end of the year, its purchasing power had shrunk rapidly. By early 1947, the same sum could buy no more than a single chicken. This qiaopi was sent in July 1946, when 100,000 yuan was roughly the purchasing power of one braised goose. Saying this, I cannot help feeling sorry for Xu Dongyan—with the rapid devaluation of the national currency, had the money been delayed a little longer in transit, who knows what it would have been worth by the time it reached home, or whether a braised goose would still have been within reach.

If the 100,000 yuan had not been delayed in transit, then in that year its purchasing power could have bought several dozen jin of cooking oil or slab sugar, or one to two hundred jin of rice, or a length of ordinary cloth for a shirt. This confirms that braised goose was indeed a luxury in those days, not something ordinary households could casually buy for the ancestral rites. For the Chaoshan people who had migrated south to the Nanyang, the surest mark of having earned enough to lift one’s family to a better standard of living was being able to place a braised goose on the offering table.

Food Homesickness in the Nanyang

But could the emigrants who had gone south to the Nanyang, Shen Dongyan and his fellow travellers, eat braised goose from back home while they were there? On this point, Director Xu of the Qinghui Building of the Qiaopi Museum is quite certain. He says that the Chinese community in the Nanyang was so vast that someone would certainly have been making braised goose—though not from the authentic Lion-head goose breed, and the flavour would have taken on something of the local cuisine. Director Xu also remembers that in the 1980s and 1990s, when Chinese emigrants from his own clan came back to Chaoshan to visit family, they would deliberately take braised goose with them on the return to Southeast Asia, which speaks to the fact that the goose at home still tasted distinct from the version made in the Nanyang.

In the era when Shen Dongyan wrote his qiaopi, did anyone carry braised goose from home south to the Nanyang? Qin Mu, a writer from Chenghai in Guangdong, composed an essay called The Goose. In it he wrote: “In the old days, if a traveller in the countryside wanted to take a large goose along, he would usually tie its legs with a rope, hang it from the handle of a large oilcloth umbrella, and then rest it on his shoulder and stroll off at an unhurried pace. The goose, for its part, was perfectly serene—never once struggling along the way, just craning its neck from time to time, peering about here and there, as though it had long been accustomed to such a manner of travelling.” The sight was undeniably delightful. One wonders whether, among those who set out for the Nanyang during the Republic era, there might have been a braised goose that, in this very way, left the Chaoshan land, boarded a red-head boat, and was carried south to the Nanyang.

On the podcast Yijian Fangjian (The Dissenting Room), a recent episode titled “Grandmothers and Qiaopi in the Hidden Rivers of History” featured Li Jielin, a female writer from Chaoshan, who mentioned that she had once come across this particular qiaopi: in 1936, a husband and wife in Raoping sent three baskets of lychees to their son in Siam (present-day Thailand). I put this to Director Xu of the Qinghui Building for his view. He believed that the lychees might well have arrived within about a week—no longer fresh, but not yet spoiled—whereas a braised goose would certainly have gone off after two or three days on the road.

No Braised Goose, No Grand Feast

Back to the braised goose at Shen Dongyan’s home. Of all the foods of the Chaoshan region, braised goose is perhaps the most powerfully symbolic. Its presence signals that a meal is grand, bountiful, and steeped in ritual, and people use it to express the deepest reverence for ancestors and gods alike. The Chaoshan people have a familiar saying: “No braised goose, no grand feast.” “Grand feast” here means an affair of abundance and ceremony.

Everyone knows that in the Chaoshan region, families “make offerings” whenever a festival or holiday arrives. The ritual offerings come in sets of three or five—the three-offering set in turn split into a small and a large version—but however many offerings are assembled, there must, must, absolutely must be a braised goose. Nowhere is this more magnificently on display than at the “shrine tents” (also called “god pavilions”) set up during the village deity processions. Every household carries its offerings to the god pavilion on a shoulder pole; the “blind boxes” of offerings may differ from one family to the next, but every single one will include a braised goose. Walk past the shrine tents in the Chaoshan countryside during the first lunar month, and you will see offering tables lined with goose after goose, forming a silent army of geese.

Take Xikou Village in Linxi Town, Chaozhou—hailed as the “Home of Braised Goose”—as an example. Over Spring Festival alone, deity worship requires four braised geese: one for Sending the Gods to Heaven on the twenty-fourth of the twelfth lunar month, one on New Year’s Eve, one for the sugarcane-alley procession on the sixteenth, and one for the Lord’s Birthday on the twenty-third. Widen the view to the whole year, and there is another for the Birthday of Mazu (the twenty-third day of the third lunar month), and yet another for the ancestral hall rites at Mid-Autumn in the eighth month. Sometimes the Winter Solstice demands one too. Ancestral rites, coming-of-age ceremonies, weddings, funerals—all require one. You could count on all ten fingers and still not finish.

Nearly a century on, braised goose has become everyday fare for the modern Chaoshan person, too. Braised goose shops line every alley and lane; if guests drop by unannounced, it is an entirely routine move to dash to the mouth of the lane and “chop up” a couple of plates to enliven the table. But a few decades ago, aside from ancestral and deity rites, a Chaoshan family simply would not have eaten so grand a dish as braised goose at any ordinary meal—households of modest means would even substitute duck for goose.

If that year Shen Dongyan’s mother got her wish and used the remittance from his qiaopi to place a braised goose on the offering table, the family would still have had to wait until the gods and the ancestors had taken their share before they themselves could eat. Fortunately, braised goose eaten cold is rich and mellow on the tongue all the same; there is no need to reheat it for gods and humans to share the meal.

Today’s Braised Goose

Today in Chaozhou city, braised goose shops line every street and lane; sometimes two or three can be found on a single short street. Prices and flavours vary from shop to shop, and they also shift at different points in the year. Even the price of each cut differs. On current market terms, the going price for ordinary braised goose in Guangdong is roughly this: head-on neck at 45 yuan a jin, kidneys are the priciest at 80 yuan a jin, the mid-section has the thickest meat and can reach as high as 50 yuan a jin, hind legs at 42 yuan a jin, goose feet and wings at 60 yuan a jin, and goose intestines at 20 yuan each. However, the stretch from shoulder to wing root—lots of bone, very little meat—is sold very cheaply; the shopkeepers call it “half sold, half given away.”

All these “ordinary” braised geese are typically made from Lion-head geese raised for about 140 days, a market age at which the birds are still reasonably priced. But if a goose is kept growing for three, five years or more, there emerges the extremely expensive aged goose head, with prices climbing to a thousand yuan apiece.

As for flavour, the Chaoshan region—billed by the high-speed rail station as the “capital of world cuisine” (see image above)—naturally strives for ever greater refinement with so important a food as braised goose, and every township and every village has its own distinctive taste. In the Chenghai area, for instance, Lion-head goose farming is highly developed and the local braised goose is well known; there is even a master stock hotpot, and the braised goose there tends towards the savoury. In Linxi Xikou—the “hometown of braised goose”—the braised goose leans sweet, likely connected to the area’s historically thriving sugarcane cultivation and sugar-making industries.

In Xikou, I got to know Brother Liu, who is skilled at braising goose. This is how he does it: he first melts sugar in a wok, coats the whole goose in this caramel glaze, and only then braises it. The result looks superb, gleaming with a caramel colour. Most braised geese, however, go straight into a pre-mixed master stock, coloured with dark soy sauce; the finished product is comparatively dull—not caramel but a yellowish brown.

As noted earlier, during Spring Festival ancestral rites, every Chaoshan household must have a braised goose. After the rites, the whole goose is either hung under the eaves or somehow squeezed into the fridge. For the days that follow, every single meal will include a plate of braised goose; exactly how long it lasts depends on how many mouths there are at the table.

It is very tasty, of course, but eating it every day through the whole of the first lunar month inevitably takes the gloss off. Quite a few people come to regard this once-revered delicacy as something of a burden by the end of the holiday. So people have devised all sorts of ways to “clear the stock” of their braised goose.

Because a Lion-head goose is far too large to fit in a fridge whole, the meticulous Chaoshan family will portion it out: bones and meat are picked apart—one bag of bones, several bags of meat, and the neck, wings, and offal are packed separately. Then a bag is taken out each meal: the neck and wings first, then the bones paired with plain congee for breakfast, and the picked meat saved until last. The leftover meat can also be stir-fried with preserved radish or ginger to make a new dish, taking a little of the “leftovers feel” away.

In any case, the Chaoshan people’s reverence for food, and their ingenuity with it, have not changed from 1946 to the present day.

– This is Foodthink’s 809th  original piece –

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs are by the author.

Editor: Tianle