Why Can’t Guizhou Do Without Sour Soup – or Sour Soup Do Without Guizhou? | Good Book Extract & Livestream Preview

The following extract, taken from the chapter on Guizhou’s sour soup in Fermenting China: Yunnan and Guizhou, is published here with the authors’ kind permission.

In Guizhou, the most stirring nostalgia is surely that spoonful of hot, tangy sour soup. Every corner of the province has its own sour soup, but in Qiandongnan Prefecture it is truly the indispensable centrepiece of every table, “Three days without sour soup, and your walk goes unsteady.” This local proverb speaks to the people of Guizhou’s devotion to all things sour. A bowl of sour soup graces the ordinary day, and no important occasion is complete without it –the New Rice Festival, Dragon Boat Festival, Fishing Festival, Miao New Year … on every joyous occasion, sour soup dishes are the fermented flavour that binds people together.

Guizhou’s sour soup falls into different categories: white sour soup, known locally as rice sour soup, is made from rice water or noodle water, fermented by microorganisms including acetic acid bacteria, lactic acid bacteria and yeast; red sour soup is fermented mainly from tomatoes, red chillies and glutinous rice. Red sour soup made with tomatoes is called tomato red sour soup; that made with chillies is chilli red sour soup. In some areas, the two are fermented separately, blended together, and then fermented a second time. Although the ingredients differ, both red and white sour soup are produced through mixed fermentation by multiple microorganisms. The principal participants are lactic acid bacteria, yeast and acetic acid bacteria, all of which carry out their work in an anaerobic environment.

Why Did Sour Soup Emerge in Guizhou? And why does it possess such unyielding vitality there? The answer lies in the history and migrations of the Miao people. In the ancient era of Yao, Shun and Yu, the Miao lived in the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River. After successive defeats in war, they migrated ever westward and southward to the Jianghan Plain. Following a long period of rest and recuperation, the Miao who had settled in the Jingchu region gradually grew in strength. The Zhou court regarded them as a threat: King Xuan of Zhou “ordered Fang Shu to march south and subdue the frontier lands”, and during the Warring States period Wu Qi used military force to “subjugate the Man and Yue peoples to the south”. Having suffered repeated suppression, the Miao ancestors were ultimately forced into their most consequential mass migration, following the Wuling Mountains further south into regions seldom trodden by travellers – through thorn-choked mountain paths and over ridges of sheer cliff – until at last they reached the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau. In the Qiandongnan region Miao Migration the song Over Mountains and Rivers goes: “We passed through a thousand hardships, tasted ten thousand sorrows. We migrated to the west and made a good life.”

These Miao ancestors had lived first on the Central Plains and then in the Jingchu region, so their food culture was undoubtedly inherited from the Central Plains traditions of the Pre-Qin period. The Rites of Zhou – specifically the Hai Ren chapter in the Tianguan section – already records a great variety of fermented condiments and preserved foods, showing how commonplace these habits were at the time. When the Miao ancestors reached the mountains of Guizhou, the region’s particular geography and climate made fermentation all the more vital as a means of preparing and preserving food – the result of generations of Miao adapting to their natural environment in order to survive. Geographically, Guizhou’s plateau is a maze of towering peaks and deep ravines; salt resources are scarce and transport is extremely difficult, making the cost of bringing salt in prohibitively high. These geographic factors left Guizhou’s Miao communities in a state of chronic salt deprivation. Ordinary Miao households could only turn their harvested rice and wild vegetables into sour foods, seasoning their meals with tang in place of salt. Climatically, Guizhou sits on the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau and enjoys a subtropical humid monsoon climate: abundant rainfall, little sunshine, many overcast days and heavy dampness. The organic acids in sour soup help strengthen the spleen, open the appetite, enhance hunger and clear summer heat.

Today we can explain the fermentation of sour soup through the principles of science, but for the Miao ancestors who had just arrived in the mountains of Guizhou, making sour soup may well have begun as an accident. The ancient songs of the Miao are their great encyclopaedia; the origins of many Miao customs can be traced within them. One song in praise of the ancestors tells of the birth of white sour soup: In the tale of the Miao ancestor Jiang Yang creating the world amid a great deluge, Jiang Yang is bitten by his rival Lei Gong (Thunder God). Jiang Yang’s son sets out to visit his wounded father, carrying with him a bamboo tube filled with rice water. But the journey is so long that by the time he reaches his father, the rice water has fermented and turned sour. Yet Jiang Yang, moved by his son’s filial devotion, insists on drinking it – and discovers that the taste is quite pleasant. And so the Miao families began their generations-long tradition of drinking white sour soup.

Though the ancient song attributes the creation of white sour soup to Jiang Yang’s son’s serendipity, among Miao households the making of sour soup is a mark of a woman’s diligence and skill. On the stove in every Miao home, there is at least one jar of sour soup fermenting quietly, nurturing white sour soup. The family’s own glutinous rice is the very root of survival, and it can also become white sour soup. The method is in fact quite simple: bring the starchy water left from rinsing rice to the boil until it runs clear, then pour it into a jar and let it ferment for three to five days. The process itself is easy; what matters is the quality of the water and the temperature. Spring water from nearby hills or clean stream water gives Miao sour soup its first layer of quality. Setting the jar on the stove means the daily warmth of cooking fires gently encourages fermentation. The climate in the mountains is damp, and the local microorganisms that drift through the air, though invisible, are ever active, exchanging with each jar of sour soup, each feeding the other, each nurturing the next. In three days the fermentation is essentially complete. Every time the sour soup is ladled out, the utensils must be scrupulously clean and free of oil, for the key to fermentation in the soup is lactic acid bacteria; carelessness invites rancidity and can ruin the flavour entirely. When one’s own jar runs low, a neighbour’s sour soup mother (fermentation starter) is borrowed to keep the culture alive, and in the borrowing the bonds of community are quietly renewed. This humble sour soup – clear and white, tart yet fragrant, mellow and full-bodied, lingering long on the palate – transforms, day after day, into the most exquisite of flavours. Vegetables, tofu, beef, fresh fish, pig’s trotters … anything can find its way into the soup. Especially in the sweltering heat, when a bowl of sour soup touches the tongue and that familiar taste floods back, one is instantly at ease. Radiating outward from the Qiandongnan region, sour soup has become a vital key to Guizhou’s distinctive culinary culture. Each land nurtures its own sour soup, and though recipes vary slightly, on the soil of Guizhou – whether among the Miao, the Dong, the Shui, the Buyi, or even at Han Chinese tables – the rich, tangy depth that sour soup brings is the undisputed star.

Food culture is the clearest mirror of its age, and Guizhou’s sour soup, too, has quietly evolved across the long sweep of history. How Did White Sour Soup Give Rise to Its Sister Star, Red Sour Soup? This is where the tomato and the chilli take their turn centre stage. The tomato reached China during the Ming Dynasty, but for a very long time it was grown purely as an ornamental plant. The Qunfang Pu, compiled in 1621, records: “The fan shi, also called the “June persimmon”, has a stem like wormwood, grows four to five chi tall, its leaves resemble mugwort and its flowers resemble pomegranate blossoms; one branch bears five fruits or three to four, and a single plant yields twenty to thirty. Tied to a trellis, it is most beautiful to behold. It comes from the western lands, hence its name.” The late Qing and Republican periods were a crucial era in teaching the Chinese to eat tomatoes. At that time, attitudes varied from region to region – some adored the fruit, others loathed it. Yunnan was China’s vanguard in embracing the tomato: the Shiping County Gazetteer of 1937 notes that the people of Shiping had once mistakenly believed tomatoes to be poisonous, “but in recent years it has become a prized food ingredient”. For a province where everyone eats sour, the arrival of the tomato must have been the perfect match. The Majiang County Gazetteer, published in 1938, describes a method of preserving tomatoes: “pickled in a jar with salt, garlic, chillies and sweet rice wine” – this would surely be the celebrated Guizhou delicacy known today as red sour soup. The chilli pepper reached China only in the late Ming Dynasty; its earliest name was fanjiao (foreign pepper), and it first appears in the Zunsheng Bajian, written in 1591 by Gao Lian of Hangzhou, which states: “Chilli plants grow in clumps, bearing white flowers; the fruit resembles a blunt brush tip, is spicy in taste and red in colour, and is very fine to look upon.” Scholars, aesthetes and wealthy merchants of the Jiangnan region regarded it as an ornamental flower. At the same time, owing to its “hot and spicy” quality, the chilli was also employed as a medicinal herb. In the eighteenth century, chillies spread to the southwest, where they came to be called haijiao. The Sizhou Prefecture Gazetteer of 1721 records the presence of haijiao, noting first its role as a salt substitute before it became a food in its own right. Once tomatoes and chillies took their place on the dining table, the wonderful marriage of heat and tang was born, giving Guizhou its distinctive hot-and-sour flavour. And the ancient tradition of white sour soup branched and evolved: from the late Qing onwards, red sour soup began to write a whole new chapter of flavour in Guizhou’s story.

Unlike white sour soup, the making of red sour soup is closely tied to the local climate and the rhythm of the harvest. From September, red chillies and bird’s eye chillies ripen in turn, and it is the finest time to make red sour soup. The ideal version begins with the region’s mao la guo (wild tomatoes), cooked into a base; these tomatoes are thick-fleshed and firm, with a sharp, full-bodied tartness. Salt, fermented rice dregs, chillies and other ingredients join them in the jar for a natural fermentation, and after ten to fifteen days the lid can be lifted. The moment it opens, a rich, heady fruitiness of fermentation rises to greet you. Though called a “sour soup”, it is far more than simple acidity: it offers a rich, layered, complex taste experience. It lacks the sharpness of fruit acid or the thinness of vinegar; its tartness feels like a long, slow breath, deep and shallow at once, mingling with the savoury, umami-rich meat, settling warmly in the stomach. In Guizhou, whenever a dish comes with sour soup, a dipping sauce laced with Litsea cubeba oil is the perfect soulmate. Litsea cubeba oil, also called shancangzi or shanjijiao oil, is a distinctive spice. The fermented tomato and rice-water base gives the broth of sour soup fish its thick, tangy, refreshing depth, while the gently prickling note of Litsea cubeba oil rounds the soup out into something rich and whole – a seamless marriage of flavours.

by Ma Junli and Liu Xinzheng

China Light Industry Press

Published August 2025

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