by S. Jayasankaran
Everyone knows that Shih Huang Ti was the Great Emperor who first unified China.
By all accounts, he was a busy fellow. If he wasn’t involved in standardising the country’s system of weights and measures, he was busy exhorting his countrymen to build a Great Wall to keep China’s borders safe.
Donald Trump wants to do the same with his Mexican border: going forward, it could make him renowned as America’s Shih.
The mighty Emperor was also obsessed with immortality which might help explain the 8,000-odd collection of life-sized terra cotta soldiers that present-day tourists to China come to gawk at.
In his relentless pursuit of immortality, the busy wall-builder was often prone to travelling across his vast empire often seeking new spices, herbs, poultices, foods, and anything that might prolong life.
It was a chilly fall evening when the empire builder stumbled into a seaside village in the country’s east-central region. The terra-cotta admirer was hungry, thirsty, and disgruntled: so far, his pursuit of immortality had been fruitless.
As the Biggest Boss of the Land, he was quickly directed to the home of the hamlet’s best cook, Lee Shang Hai.
As luck would have it, Master Lee was in the throes of making a new soup.
Master Lee was also a regular Da Vinci, as he’d recently invented something that he called tofu. He was now using it to ward off the cold, and he thought he’d finally succeeded.
“Eureka,” he yelled in triumphant Mandarin. The Emperor heard the exultant shout at the same time he smelt the soup. It made him vault the low wall that surrounded Master Lee’s house.
A veritable ambrosia was simmering on Lee’s stove. A potent concoction of ginger, mushrooms, and fungi with beef strips and his remarkable tofu, all steaming in beef stock. As the emperor burst in, the culinary craftsman slowly added eggs and, in an ingenious twist, threw in a generous amount of white pepper dissolved in vinegar.
Unable to contain himself, the creator of one of the World’s Wonders – the Wall, not the Soup – helped himself.
Technically speaking, the dish should have been named Emperor Jumped Over the Wall because that was what happened and that would have certainly elevated Master Lee’s status. But it was called Hot and Sour Soup for a reason that’s since been lost in the mists of antiquity.
Even so, a grateful Shih lavished much honour on Master Lee, naming the humble village after the artist. Now you know why the city’s called Shanghai!
The emperor also insisted that Master Lee become his personal chef and follow him back to Beijing.
Even so, the story didn’t end well. Convinced that Lee’s soup was the elixir of life, the emperor consumed it so often and so frequently, that he developed gastric ulcers. He was also taking mercury on the side which Anthony Fauci will tell you is never a good idea. It was a short reign as reigns go, and as reigns go, he went.
Bereft of his patron, the great cook took to alcohol. From then on, he also added wine to his cooking.
WE