Jinan’s historic celebrities

If analogies are any help, think of Jinan as China’s Albany. Both cities are capitals of large, prosperous regions. Both cities long ago lost all of their thunder to dynamic port cities. Qingdao is no Manhattan, thank goodness, but you can get Chinese food 24 hours a day there, too, with no possibility of a snooty waiter.

So while Qingdao charms with its salty freshness and Teutonic architecture, Jinan sulks in the Shandong hinterlands, and well it might. Is that to be the measure of a great city, clean air and a coastline? Why, for ages Jinan was a majestic home to kings and courtesans, while Qingdao’s finest lurked in thatched huts, grubbing for cockles at low tide. Lift the illusory veil of time from thine eyes and read of the Jinan heroes who covered their home town in glory.

Lord Huan of Qi

In 685 BC, during the Spring and Autumn period, China was more politically divided than an expat bar watching the Euro-Cup playoffs. A man born to his time, Jiang Xiaobai strode into this chaos and hacked out hegemony for his state of Qi, centered around today’s Jinan. Newly monikered as Lord Huan, he began the long tradition of uninspired Chinese marketing slogans with “Respect the king and defend against the barbarian.”

He also launched the custom of endless wall-building projects to snub undesirables. The wall eventually stretched over 600 kilometers to the sea at humble little Qingdao. The barbarians, so termed for cracking their preserved eggs at the big end, had a monolithic reminder of their crudity. Lord Huan turned his attention to cultivated pursuits such as dining on steamed infant, as recorded in the Xiaocheng chapter of the Guanzi history. Still, he was an inspiration to national patriarch Qin Shi Huangdi, who got a taste of what trouble real barbarians could make, and likewise responded with a thousand-year masonry project.

Bian Que

If Traditional Chinese Medicine gets a hard time now, imagine what it was like to introduce it as an alternative to ten thousand years or more of good old fashioned witch-doctoring. If the prospect of a senile crone inhaling bamboo smoke and menacing you with a chicken bone was disconcerting, at least there was no pain involved, and surely it was sufficient to frighten the evil spirits out of the body.

So imagine the utterly disarming bedside manner of doctor Qin Yueren, later to be called Bian Que, after the god of healing. Practicing between the fourth and fifth centuries BCE, he was the first to convince the ill to have needles stuck in them, and that nasty purple welts on the back from painful fire cupping were really a good thing.

Not content with having invented acupuncture and moxibustion, Bian Que took a multi-kingdom tour of residency, specializing in whatever branch of medicine his host city seemed most in need of. Thus, he can lay claim to being China’s first gynecologist, pediatrician, and otolaryngologist. It is also speculated that he inspired China’s first lawyers specializing in malpractice.

Liu Kuan

The story of Liu Kuan contains all the elements of celebrity scandal: noble status, sexual deviancy, and blasphemous behavior. Liu Kuan was the last king of Jinan back when it was Jibei, and brought down his mighty house by carrying on with his recently widowed stepmother. That’s right – Hamlet just thought about it out loud; Liu Kuan actually did it. With his court grumbling and enemies plotting, Liu Kuan compounded the offense. He cursed Han Emperor Wudi as he was making a sacrifice, a sacrilege akin to setting off an air horn as Guo Jingjing prepares to make her final dive.

Few objected when Liu Kuan was subsequently forced to commit suicide. China’s history abounds with scandals worthy of The Enquirer; we remember his for the fabulous wealth of his tomb, unearthed in 1995. Although denied the ostentatious jade death suit so fashionable in royal funerary at the time, Liu Kuan nonetheless loaded his tomb with jade swords and masks, ceramic finery, and enough gold ingots to warm a miser’s heart, some 2,000 artifacts in all, on display at Jinan’s Shuangru Mountain.

Xin Qiji and Li Qingzhao

While modern souls respond to political malfeasance with bigger TVs and more nachos, Chinese in the twelfth century were not so progressive. Without regularly scheduled programming to numb their sense of disillusionment, some took to the quill. By the early 1100s, the formerly fat and happy Song Dynasty had lost sizeable chunks of its territory, including Jinan, to the leaner, meaner Jurchens. What’s worse, corruption from the top of the Song court down prevented any kind of unified resistance.

Xin Qiji did his best to avenge his crumbling nation, leading a band of two thousand men against the Jurchen upstarts when only twenty-two years old. He won a high seat in the Southern Song government for his troubles, but soon learned his superiors had given up the struggle. Heartsick, he sharpened his sword-pen and fulfilled the poet-warrior paradigm. His poem Dance of the Cavalry reveals that a pre-battle drinking regimen may have factored into the Song forces’ lack of potency on the field.

Though drunk, we lit the lamp to see the glaive;
Sober, we heard the horns from tents to tents.
Under the flags, beef grilled
Was eaten by our warriors brave
And martial airs were played by fifty instruments:
Tis an autumn manoeuvre in the field.
On gallant steed,
Running full speed,
We’d shoot with twanging bows.
Recovering the lost land for the sovereign,
‘Tis everlasting fame we would win.
But alas! White hair grows!

A woman of good birth, Li Qingzhao had little chance to defend her homeland physically, instead turning her displacement into an ongoing metaphor of longing for both home and freedom. Before fleeing south to escape the Jurchen horde, Li Qingzhao’s lyrics dealt with the ephemera of comfortable women in their budoirs. After becoming a refugee, her work turned somber and reflective, and like Xin Qiji’s, revealed that alcohol has always been sovereign for dealing with distress.

Let not the deep cup be filled

with rich, amber-colored wine;

My mind was eased of sorrow

even before I became intoxicated.

Distant bells have already echoed

in the evening breeze.

My dream is broken

as the scent of incense vanishes.

Too small, the hairpin of gold

of warding-off-cold

loosens its hold on my tresses.

I awake to find myself blankly facing

the red flickering glow

of the candle

Hatsue Sato

If something doesn’t ring Chinese in the name, it’s because Chef Sato is a Japanese citizen born in China. It sounds like a recipe for patriotic schizophrenia, until one understands that she is the only non-Chinese certified master of Shandong cuisine. The fastest way to cultural communion is through the stomach, and Chef Sato deserves praise for sharing what is considered by many to be China’s original cuisine at her Jinan House restaurant in Tokyo. The fact that Shandong cuisine eschews sugar, lard, and MSG is also to her credit.

Enduring the nightmare that was China during the Second World War, Chef Sato pursued her craft. Cultural Revolution agents, who found gourmet cooking as offensive as a class system, all but wiped out knowledge of true Shandong cuisine in China. Only Sato’s dedication in Japan kept the craft alive. Some may argue if that makes her a hero, but she is certainly a celebrity. The film Dream Cuisine documents her extraordinary life, and how she travels to Jinan every year to teach young chefs.

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