If one could time-travel back to the bustling streets of the Song Dynasty, the most astonishing sight might not be the vibrant marketplaces or the lively entertainment districts, but rather the mesmerizing artistry found in everyday food. Vendors pushed wooden carts filled with lifelike fruit confections), crafting stunning edible illusions. Among these, the smiling face snacks stood out—honey-glazed plum slices carved into smiling female faces, with dried peaches as blushing cheeks and almonds as delicate teeth. These delicate creations often prompted literati to pause and compose verses, likening the treats to well-crafted smiles.
At the grand feasts of the capital's famed establishments, culinary creativity reached new heights. The spectacle of pavilion desserts amazed onlookers: dough tinted with locust flower juice formed gray-tiled roofs, malt sugar spun into intricate railings, and date paste molded into miniature rock formations. Green bean jelly shimmered like a pond's surface, while delicate layers of green bean powder mimicked mossy textures. These microcosmic landscapes were not only admired but also eaten with ceremony—at one banquet, guests were instructed to first drink three cups of wine before disassembling the meandering stream pavilion by consuming its sugar pillars.
Poetic Bites: Where Literature Meets Cuisine
The rise of symbolic food was closely intertwined with the cultural elite. The literati were not just connoisseurs but also active creators in this artistic culinary tradition.
Take Wang Anshi, the renowned reformist and poet, who adored "羊头签" (lamb-head skewers)—thin slices of lamb's face fried within paper-thin dough. One day, a cook mistakenly used shredded ginger instead of lamb, and instead of being displeased, Wang Anshi quipped, "This is jade tablet Zen (玉板禅), revealing that meat and vegetables are one and the same." With this clever twist, a mere mistake transformed into a philosophical statement, turning a humble dish into an emblem of Buddhist thought.
No one, however, embraced the art of food symbolism as passionately as Su Shi. During his exile in Huangzhou, he elevated humble pork into the now-famous Dongpo braised pork and invented "Why-So-Crispy Pastry (为甚酥)", inscribing poetry with sugar frosting onto the surface. Breaking the pastry meant literally consuming words—a delightful interplay between literature and gastronomy.
One of his wittiest moments came during a game of Go with the monk Fo Yin. Seeing a sugar lion figurine placed at the center of the board, Su Shi joked, "This lion guards the battlefield—no old monk shall steal my pieces!" His jest inspired a trend, and soon, scholars everywhere began placing sugar beasts on their game boards as board-guarding candy creatures) blending culinary creativity with intellectual play.
Even the famed poet Lu You found artistic joy in cooking. Inspired by Wang Wei's "Twenty Views of Wangchuan Villa," he used medicinal flour to carve miniature landscapes— Deer Fence and Bamboo Grove —before writing poetry to accompany each dish. He famously proclaimed, "A single spoonful captures the clouds of Wangchuan, and on my tongue lingers the soul of Wang Wei."
The People's Culinary Creativity
As the merchant class grew, symbolic food was no longer exclusive to the elite. The streets of Bianjing (today's Kaifeng) teemed with inventive delicacies. Vendors used iron sieves to drizzle buckwheat batter into boiling water, creating wriggling tadpole noodles that swam in broth like living creatures. Children delighted in lion-warrior cakes, molded from jujube paste into fierce lion-headed figures.
During festival days, such creativity reached new heights. On the eve of the imperial examination results, hopeful scholars lined up at Victory Cakes (定胜糕) stalls, purchasing red-tinted rice cakes with hidden paper fortunes that read triumphant victory (旗开得胜). It was said that before Yue Fei's army set out for battle, townspeople made these cakes into miniature spears and shields, dyeing them blood-red with fermented rice, so the soldiers could "eat victory as they drank farewell wine."
Perhaps the most whimsical creation was Dragon Candy Coils (诸色龙缠). Vendors poured multicolored sugar into dragon-shaped molds, selling the candy with exaggerated fortune-telling claims—"The green dragon grants boundless wisdom, the red dragon promises great fortune!" One day, Su Zhe (Su Shi's brother) bought a red dragon candy, joking, "I fear this is Wang Anshi's reform policies in disguise!" His words sent the crowd into laughter, cementing dragon candy's place in urban folklore.
The pinnacle of food entertainment came with the Thousand Lantern Feast at Fan Tower during the Lantern Festival. More than 360 translucent sugar lamps adorned the venue, each with a licorice wick. As the lamps burned, their melting sugar walls created edible "flowing sugar." The sight of festival-goers scrambling to lick the sugar remnants led to an unexpected stampede—an incident later known as the Licking Lantern Stampede, a chaotic yet humorous testament to the public's enthusiasm for edible artistry.
Symbolic Food: A Mirror of Cultural Epochs
Song Dynasty symbolic food was more than just an aesthetic choice—it reflected the soul of an era. As commerce flourished, food presentation became an early form of advertising. Granny Zhang's Fish Soup sold fish balls shaped like lotus pods, marketed as Quyuan Breeze over Lotus, selling hundreds of bowls daily. Plum Blossom Buns from Wang's Pavilion cleverly mirrored the Five Blessings of Plum Blossoms (梅开五福), cementing their status as a staple in the city's famed "72 Gourmet Shops."
But food also bore witness to history's darker turns. When the Jin army invaded the capital, an anonymous baker sculpted desserts into the shape of fortress towers, stuffing them with mutton and naming them "Devouring the Enemy." After the fall of the Northern Song, a displaced palace chef in Lin'an (Hangzhou) used his last bag of sugar to recreate the imperial garden's dragon pavilion, weeping as he shattered it with his first bite. Following the Southern Song's collapse, grieving citizens molded rice cakes into replicas of the lost capital's palaces for ghost offerings, swallowing fragments of a vanished dream.
