https://www.medievalists.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/tang-dynasty-sugar-300x164.png 300w, By Elizabeth Smithrosser
Readers are likely familiar with crystallized sugar as “rock candy” or “rock sugar.” While today crystallized sugar can be found in any Chinese kitchen cupboard, in medieval times it was a much rarer commodity. But that is perhaps strange. Why, when vast swathes of southern China lend themselves well to the farming of sugarcane, were only a handful of districts able to manufacture sugarfrost from it? This was the mystery that twelfth century writer Song dynasty writer Wang Zhuo took on in his Sugarfrost Handbook.
Wang Zhuo 王灼 was born in present day Sichuan, southwestern China. While classically literate, he never served in an official capacity. This was likely in part down to the fact that his life spanned the tumultuous Northern-Southern Song transition. In 1127, Bianjing 汴京 in the north, which had been capital of the Song state for a few hundred years, was invaded and captured by the Jurchens, along with the northern part of the empire. The Song emperor was abducted, leaving his brother to pick up the dynastic line. In 1132, this new and unexpected Emperor Gaozong 高宗officially relocated the capital to a southern city called Lin’an 臨安. A peace treaty was not formalized until 1141, making this a prolonged period of banditry, unrest, mass migration and continuous threat at the border.
Wang died around 1160, leaving behind many poems, writings on poetry, and the Sugarfrost Handbook (Tangshuang pu 糖霜譜). In seven chapters, the Handbook aims to provide a comprehensive walkthrough of all things crystallized sugar. It does not just include practical instructions for the production process from the planting and juicing of sugarcane through to the difficult method of crystallization, but also an overview of this kind of sugar’s history as a commodity, including associated folklore and literature.
Commercially produced crystallized sugar. In English, usually known as “rock candy” or “rock sugar,” whereas the Chinese language imagines it along different lines. Bingtang, as it is known now, literally means “ice-sugar.” In historical texts one can also find the word tangshuang, or “sugar-frost.” Photo by Elizabeth Smithrosser
“It is a universal fact that a produce which is rare and hard to obtain is seen as a treasure,” muses Wang Zhuo. “For this reason, chestnuts, pears, oranges, tangerines, lychees and prunus, of which the whole world cannot produce enough, are valued greatly by society.” Unlike perishable goods like the fruits Wang lists here, however, crystalized sugar was easy to package and transport, and could be trusted to survive long journeys in warm weather. This made it a suitable gift for friends who lived far away. Some of the earliest existing references to crystallized sugar we have are thank-you poems penned by delighted recipients. For example, at the turn of the twelfth century, famous literatus Huang Tingjian 黃庭堅 (1045–1105) was gifted some crystallized sugar while living in exile. In reply, he wrote:
Your cane-frost sent from afar
outdoes Master Cui’s crystal salt
in its flavorsomeness.
My tongue reached the tip of my nose
faster than a cloth wipes the floor.
No counsel required!
遠寄蔗霜知有味
勝於崔子水晶鹽
正宗掃地從誰説
我舌猶能及鼻尖
“Master Cui” here refers to Cui Hao 崔浩 (381–450), advisor to an emperor over seven hundred years previously. The story goes that following a particularly insightful piece of counsel, the emperor made him a gift of salt and wine, announcing that Cui’s advice, just like these two products, was worth savoring at length.
Crystallized sugar was not just sent as a gift amongst friends. As with many of the finer things in life, areas with a reputation for high quality crystallized sugar were required to submit a specified weight of is to the capital as an annual tribute to court during certain points in Chinese history. Such orders were usually cast from above without much consideration for the actual production capabilities of an area. This sometimes had devastating results for the livelihoods of people in such communities. Wang Zhuo’s case in point was the county of Suining 遂寧 (in present-day Sichuan), where a requirement to produce several thousand half-kilograms of the delicacy per year had once brought half of the sugar making households to financial ruin.
Far from coincidentally, Suining happened to have a reputation for the best crystallized sugar in the realm, at least when the Sugarfrost Handbook was written. Of the Suining sugar, Wang Zhuo declares, “That from Suining alone is the best. That produced by the other four sugarfrost making counties is very thin and brittle. It is light in color and without depth of flavor, and can only be compared with the most inferior from Suining.” This phenomenon seemed to baffle him to a certain extent. “The sugarcane produced by the surrounding areas is all of high quality, and yet their sugarfrost is not renowned.”
In explanation, he offers a local legend of how crystallized sugar first came to the area:
In the Dali period (766–779) of the Tang dynasty lived a monk by the name of Zou. It is unknown from whence he came. Astride a white donkey, he rode up Mount Umbrella and thatched a house for his home. Whenever he needed salt, rice, firewood, vegetables and the like, he would write it on paper, tie some money to his donkey, then send it off to the marketplace by itself. People knew this was Zou’s doing, so they would take out the correct amount, hang their wares onto the saddle and send the donkey back home.
One day, the donkey munched on the sugarcane sprouts belonging to a Mr. Huang from the foot of the mountain. When Huang requested compensation, the monk said, “You don’t know how to heat cane sugar into sugarfrost. That would be worth ten times as much. How about I tell you and you forgive my debt?”
Huang tested it out to find that this was indeed true. Afterwards, he shared the method with others. In the case that a sugarfrost maker was close to or in view of the mountain, it would work as desired. If not, then he could try a myriad methods and be unsuccessful for the rest of his days.
The story continues to recount that when Venerable Zou suddenly leaves the mountain, the villagers attempt to follow him to no avail. They find only a stone likeness of the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī with a white lion (in place of the donkey). Wang Zhuo claims this to be the beginning of a local custom whereby sugar makers drew pictures of Zou for worship purposes, based on the image of Mañjuśrī. In addition, his thatched cottage at the top of the mountain went on to become a cloister.
Wooden sculpture of the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī and lion. Mañjuśrī is often depicted riding a blue or white lion, symbolic of the fact that he has tamed the wild beast that is the human mind. In Chinese Buddhism, a bodhisattva is a being who has attained enlightenment, and yet chooses to stay behind to help other living beings to do likewise. Photo courtesySmithsonian – National Museum of Asian Art
Origin stories aside, it is a reasonable inference that the optimum recipe and method for making crystallized sugar was a secret kept among the sugar-making households of Suining, at least before Wang wrote his Handbook. From his remarks on the sugar produced outside Suining being light in both color and flavor, it would appear that Suining sugar used a particular kind of caramelization technique. On top of this, since the sugar outside Suining was supposedly “thin and brittle,” we can also presume that Suining had developed an improved method or technology for the crystallization process – i.e. the stage in which heat is used to turn the liquid sugar syrup into a solid chunk of sugar. So it probably didn’t matter how good sugarcane from the surrounding areas was, since the question was not merely one of raw materials, but also of technology.
After the sugarcane was harvested, each individual cane was chopped up into manageable lengths. For the sake of efficiency (and presumably also comfort), this was done from a seated position, on a made-for-purpose “sugar-cane stool,” which was essentially a stool with an elongated seat containing a hole into which a few canes could be inserted at once, vertically. Next, the sugarcane was crushed to extract the juice. According to Wang Zhuo, large quantities were crushed at once using oxen and a millstone weighing over 500 kilograms.
While the above stages were shared with the production of other kinds of sugar, the trickiest part was the crystallization process. This involved the steady use of heat over a long period to boil down a sugar syrup and solidify it into a crystallized form, as shown in the below diagram.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
If you would like to see more, many of the stages of sugar production appear in the below video from Sichuanese internet megastar Li Ziqi 李子柒, where she makes non-crystalized sugar from scratch according to traditional methods.
Elizabeth Smithrosser is a PhD Student in Chinese Studies at the University of Oxford. Click here to view her university page.
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