Cumin, Camels, and Caravans

  The fleet lingered near the island of Pulau Sembilan off the Strait of Malacca until the sailors were sure that they could reach a site nearby where the legendary agarwood (or eagle-wood) could be found. Many of Zheng’s sailors and merchants had likely smelled the incense before, since its fragrance was well known for centuries by Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike. Its Chinese name, chenxiang, means “sinking incense” or “heavy incense,”18 so-named because it comes from the dense wood of a tropical lowland tree (Aquilaria malaccensis) infected with a fungus that makes the wood moldy but intensely fragrant.19 As Zheng He’s shipmate Fei Xin reported the incident in 1409,

  In the seventh year of Yongle, Zheng He and his associates sent the Emperor’s troops ashore to cut incense on the island (then known as Jiuzhoushan). They encountered a dead tree from which they obtained six massive logs, each eight or nine chi in diameter [nearly three meters] and six or seven zhang in length [or eight to twenty-one meters in length]. Their aroma was pure and powerful enough to range far from the tree. The pattern of the wood we cut was black with fine striations embedded in it. When they saw the fine logs that we had selected and carried through their settlement, the people of the island opened their eyes wide and stuck their tongues out in astonishment. Referring to our achievement, the locals told us that we were true soldiers of the Heavenly Court, and that our prowess was awe-inspiring, like that of the gods.20

  Today, agarwood incense has been so depleted from the coastal forests of Malaysia and Indonesia that its host is now considered a threatened or vulnerable tree throughout its range. Although the biological depletion of incense and spice resources is difficult to link to a particular cultural era, this brief passage reminds us that globalized trade in aromatics has not been achieved without long-term ecological costs.

  Whatever trophies were gained and publicly promoted reasons were articulated for mounting these expensive and time-consuming maritime expeditions, they were less about making a quick profit from teas and incenses than they were about renewing long-term trade options for the Ming dynasty. But the restoration of trade and tribute networks could hardly be done without forging stronger alliances with Muslim spice merchants and sultans that offered assistance in sustaining maritime trade when and if overland trade was once again disrupted by Mongols and Turks. It has been hypothesized that these alliances were initiated to accomplish tasks that the emperor and his imperial eunuch director may not have been able to reveal fully to the Han Chinese at the time. Although the evidence to support this hypothesis is scant and difficult to confirm, it is a tantalizing reminder that the policy decisions of nations or empires are sometimes guided by personal, familial, or religious reasons that are not disclosed to the general public when they happen.

  What was not widely known during their lifetimes was that Zheng He and the Yongle emperor were linked to each other more deeply than through the ties that security, military, or political alliances typically develop. One of Zhu Di’s descendants, Yusuf Chang, a Chinese Muslim from Taiwan, has recently revealed that both the Hongwu emperor and his fourth son, the Yongle emperor, were crypto-Muslims in Buddhist robes.

  According to Yusuf Chang, who admittedly has a Muslim lens on historical events, several generations of his family have believed that Empress Ma, the consort of the Hongwu emperor and mother of Zhu Di, was a Muslim, as her Hui name suggests. Family oral histories passed on to Yusuf Chang suggest that Empress Ma was the only person allowed to prepare food or tea for the men of her family, and that she did it in accordance with halal principles. In addition, not only was wine banned from the royal chambers, but the Hongwu emperor banned its consumption throughout his empire, even though Han Buddhists were fond of it. Curiously, Yusuf Chang’s ten indicators that the imperial Ming family was crypto-Muslim read much like those that contemporary Judaic scholars tentatively use to identify crypto-Jews in the Americas.21

  Zhu Di’s father was indeed known to have constructed a mosque and to have written poetry in praise of the Prophet Muhammad. And yet, like Zheng He, Zhu Di may have also practiced Buddhism when necessary, to show his Han Chinese supporters his solidarity with them. According to legend, Zheng was instructed to make a pilgrimage to Mecca on his master’s behalf. (Perhaps the already-described journey that Ma Huan and Hong Bao took to Mecca on behalf of Zheng He actually satisfied the desire of both Zheng and the emperor to complete the hajj.)

  It is clear that the emperor sanctioned Zheng to reestablish alliances with Muslims and even to offer support for mosques in ethnic Muslim communities that had been scattered across the seas, sometimes becoming so isolated that they had stopped making pilgrimages to Mecca and had fallen out of the spice-trade networks earlier influenced by the Islamic empire. Zheng found a way to renew these connections by offering generous gifts to their leaders in return for the promise of tribute contributions for the emperor. These Southeast Asian Muslims may well have seen their part of the exchange in much the same way today’s merchants assume that sales taxes are a customary cost of doing business.

  Some contemporary Southeast Asian Muslims claim that Zheng left Hanafi Muslim sailors to work in these communities and used Ming resources to finance some of the first openly public mosques constructed in the harbors of Sumatra, Java, Malacca, the Philippines, and India. Some of his sailors may have also erected the shrines still found on Pate Island in the Lamu Archipelago off the coast of Kenya, though admittedly the shrines are of uncertain religious affiliation.22 Today, in many of these places, Zheng He is regarded as a special Muslim saint.

  After Zheng returned from his first expedition’s encounter with Arab Muslims along the Malabar Coast, it appears that he urged Zhu Di to draw up a landmark edict regarding religious tolerance. The edict, released on June 16, 1407, while Zheng He was on his second expedition, not only protected all Muslims in the practice of their faith but also safeguarded their mosques throughout China from religious intolerance. Transcribed onto a tablet placed on the garden wall outside the Ashab Mosque in Zayton, it praises the Muslim inhabitants of China as loyal, sincere, and capable subjects of the empire “most deserving of commendation.”23

  According to a recently translated stone inscription found at Lingshan (Miracle Hill) in Quanzhou, Zheng He took time out in 1417, before his fifth voyage, to burn incense and pray on a grassy knoll at a Muslim cemetery there.24 It is claimed in Hui oral tradition that Zheng He also went out from Zayton to the coastal Muslim villages near Chendai, where he recuperated in between his expeditions among the Ding Hui, who continue to revere him as a Muslim saint today.

  Even before the death of the Yongle emperor in 1424, there were moves to curtail the voyages of Zheng He, which many courtiers deemed too costly. Despite their efforts, in 1431, Zheng began one last voyage, this time under the leadership of Emperor Zhu Zhangji, Zhu Di’s grandson. As noted earlier, the expedition apparently returned to China two years later without much of Zheng He, beyond a shock of his hair, a few of his personal items, and the memories of his confidants, mercantile envoys, translators, soldiers, and sailors. His death marked the end not only of the Treasure Fleet but also of state-sponsored large-scale naval exploration and trade for centuries. Modest commercial trade and black market smuggling between China and India continued, so China never retreated into full isolation as some historians have suggested. But direct contact between the Ding Hui of the eastern seacoast of China and the larger Islamic world would be curtailed for much of the next five hundred years.

  • • •

  • SICHUAN PEPPER •

  The dried two-seed berries of a group of Asian citrus trees known as prickly ashes (Zanthoxylum spp.) provide one of the most piquant and sizzling taste sensations of any spice on earth. Sichuan pepper is so distinctive that its peculiar spiciness has a name of its own in Chinese, ma.

  As I approached a fifteen-foot-tall prickly ash in an orchard terrace along the Yellow River, the tree’s lemony aroma and wispy appearance initially reminded me of trees fro
m which sumac fruits are harvested. I immediately spotted a cluster of berries that were turning from olive green to a dull blood red, ready for harvest. As I popped a single berry in my mouth, it had a crunchy texture and an initial taste that was limelike, followed by grassy, tannic, and oily aftertastes. But none of that prepared me for the next forty-five minutes of throbbing numbness hitting my lips, nor for the gush of saliva flowing like a flash flood off my tongue and down the back of my throat! I had been “bitten” by the zesty essence of ma!

  Even the smallest nibble of the berry’s pulp can trigger an anesthetic sensation that spice experts have called shocking, tingling, tickling, fizzy, and electrical in its intensity. This is a plant so loaded with a strange chemical brew of alkamides, alkaloids, flavonoids, lignoids, essential oils, and tannins that chemists regularly continue to identify additional components.

  The prickly ash most commonly used as a spice is Z. piperitum, which ranges from central and eastern China through Korea and over to Japan; several other species are harvested in the Himalayas and Southeast Asia. The first encounter I had with this piquant “pepper” was the one described above, which took place in the semiarid foothills of the Gansu Corridor portion of the Silk Roads that once passed through western China. In late July, entire local families, both Han and Hui, move out into their orchards, where they climb trees and ladders to harvest berries for the next twenty days. They strip a dozen or so berries off of each prickly branch on trees fifteen or eighteen feet tall, drop them into wicker baskets, and then dump the baskets upside down onto mats and tarps, where they leave the berries for a full day to dry in the sun. Middlemen from Sichuan Province come around in early August to purchase truckloads of these peppers, paying the orchard keepers sixty to eighty yuan (ten to thirteen dollars) per kilogram for their dried berries.

  The Chinese name that is generically used for the berries of all the prickly ashes that offer the ma sensation is jiao. The specific term for Z. piperitum is shanjiao in Chinese and sansho in Japanese, meaning “mountain pepper.” In the highlands of Sichuan Province, these “peppercorns” are a key ingredient in the classic Sichuan-style fivespice powder, which is now employed throughout China in savory stews and condiments. When used at the family table, freshly toasted Sichuan pepper berries are typically the last ingredient to be sprinkled on a dish. It is what adds the bite to shanjiao bao yangrou, a dryfried lamb, bell pepper, and chile dish that has gained popularity in the West, where it is known as three-pepper delight.

  Because Sichuan pepper is so distinctive and identifiable, its names in languages of nearly every other culture outside the Far East are variants of “pepper from Sichuan (Province), China, or Japan.” It may be that its diffusion beyond that area is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the late 1960s, its importation to the United States was prohibited due to the lamentable fact that it is a carrier of a bacterium that causes citrus canker, a major pathogenic threat to Florida’s orange groves. For a while, the ban only encouraged Sichuan pepper traders to go underground, smuggling it into ports in California and the Pacific Northwest where Japanese and Chinese immigrants could hardly do without it. But in 2005, heat-treated (nongerminable) Sichuan pepper was allowed to pass through U.S. ports of entry, and the spice is now available in Asian shops and some spice shops, particularly on the West Coast.

  Green, Aliza. Field Guide to Herbs and Spices. Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2006.

  Katzer, Gernot. “Gernot Katzer’s Spice Pages.” http://gernot-katzers-spicepages.com/engl/index.html. Accessed May 8, 2013.

  • TUOCHA PU-ERH • CAMEL’S BREATH TEA

  There is an ancient form of fermented brick tea that consists of loose tea leaves, stalks, and dust pressed into the shape of a small bird’s nest, hockey puck, or melon. A thousand years before Westerners had ever heard the word cha, tea growers in southern China, starting with lightly oxidized green tea known as maocha, had begun to dry, roll, and then ferment the foliage and buds of a species of tea plant with particularly broad leaves (Camellia sinensis var. assamica) with the help of Aspergillus and Penicillium molds and various yeasts. After a half year of fermentation, the cured pu-erh tea was pressed into bricks of various shapes.

  Indigenous mountain dwellers of China’s Yunnan and Fujian Provinces have been cultivating this broad-leaved variety in terraced tea gardens for upward of seventeen hundred years. But it was the tea growers near the ancient pu-erh trading post in Yunnan Province who began to press aged black tea into doughnut-shaped bricks for storability and transportability. Pu-erh bricks soon became the primary form in which tea was consumed and distributed beyond the Yunnan and Fujian highlands, up until the Ming dynasty in the late fourteenth century.

  The doughnut-shaped bricks became known as tuocha, named for the Tuo River that marked the beginning of the ancient trade route. For easy transport by camel caravans, the bricks were strung together on ropes and loaded onto the animals. The result was that the flavors of the bricks were further enriched by their postfermentation ride to other regions of China and beyond under the saddles of Bactrian camels. According to legend, the tuocha bricks developed a distinctive fragrance and flavor that became known by the quixotic name “camel’s breath.” It is now impossible to determine whether it was the sweat or the breath of the camels that imparted such an earthy taste to the aged tea when it was rehydrated in boiling water, but we do know that the bricks yielded a dark, intensely flavorful, full-bodied beverage. One aficionado has discreetly called the flavor “sturdy,” and another has boldly claimed that it has the same “kick-ass” qualities as a syrupy espresso. Although tuocha bricks are still made today, they are nest or bowl shaped and lack the center hole, ending the possibility of stringing them together on a rope.

  After the Ming dynasty, brewing loose-leaf tea became the fashion. That meant that pu-erh brick tea became less common, particularly in the tea trade beyond the Great Wall. But a recent resurgence of interest in pu-erh tea bricks by tea connoisseurs in Europe and the United States has raised their prices to astronomic levels.

  I have recently seen pu-erh tea bricks proudly displayed in beautifully colored paper wrappings everywhere in China from Beijing and Quanzhou in the east to Ürümqi in the west. Although camel’s breath tea is too rare to appear in every tea shop, I did find it along one of the old Silk Roads, in a store on the steppe that edges the Tian Shan range in western China. I have also sampled it in a similar landscape halfway around the world, on the short-grass prairies below the Front Range of the Rockies near Boulder, Colorado. Whenever I encounter a brick of the tea, I hold it up to my nose, close my eyes, and smell the camel caravans passing by.

  Ahmed, Selena, and Michael Freeman. “Pu-erh Tea and the Southwest Silk Road: An Ancient Quest for Well-being.” HerbalGram 90 (2011): 32–43.

  Hohenegger, Beatrice. Liquid Jade: The Story of Tea from East to West. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007.

  • DAJAJ GDRA BIL-LAWZ •

  Spiced Chicken in Almond Sauce

  What did Zheng He eat when he arrived in the Muslim-dominated harbors of Hormuz, Aden, or Malindi in the fifteenth century? No one knows, but it is clear that he would have been offered the high cuisine of his era, which fused elements of the Persian, Arabic, and Moorish kitchens. He may have tasted an Old World precursor to the chicken moles of southern and central Mexico, the remnants of which still reside in North Africa (farther than he himself traveled), along the Strait of Gibraltar in Morocco. In my mind, the closest recipe to a mole still found among Berber and Arab populations is this spiced chicken with almonds cooked in the large pot, or gdra, that forms the lower chamber of a couscousière. It can also be made in a small tagine, the clay cooking pot with a cone-shaped lid that is used on the Moroccan brazier known as a kanoun.

  I think of this dish as an ancestor to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century moles of Mexico because of its four elements: poultry, in the form of chicken or turkey, to provide both a rich broth and meat; a coloring, such as saffron, turmeric, chile,
or achiote, to brighten the broth; nuts or another thickener, like almonds, sesame seeds, peanuts, walnuts, or even chocolate, to give the broth body and flavor; and a medley of spices, such as cumin, cinnamon, and coriander, to impart a chorus of warm, savory tastes to the dish. A variant of this dish is made in Morocco with chestnuts instead of almonds, demonstrating the interchangeability of ingredients as long as they serve one of the four essential functions.

  Serve over couscous. Serves 4.

  1 chicken, 3½ to 4 pounds, cut into 4 to 6 pieces

  2 large or 4 medium white onions, finely chopped

  1 tablespoon sunflower or sesame oil

  2 tablespoons butter or ghee

  2 cups water

  Ample pinch of saffron threads

  1 teaspoon ground ginger

  1 teaspoon freshly ground cumin seeds

  1 teaspoon freshly ground coriander seeds

  1 teaspoon freshly ground cassia cinnamon

  1 teaspoon freshly ground allspice berries or melegueta pepper

  1 tablespoon paprika or ground cayenne pepper

  1 bay leaf

  Black pepper

  1¾ cups almonds, finely ground

  Sea salt

  1 tablespoon honey

  2 cloves garlic, minced

  ¼ cup fresh flat-leaf parsley leaves, chopped

  Juice of 1 lemon or lime

  Place the chicken pieces, half of the onions, the oil, the butter, and the water in a gdra or other large cooking pot. Add the saffron, ginger, cumin, coriander, cinnamon, allspice, paprika, bay leaf, a few turns of the pepper mill, and the almonds, place over high heat, and bring to a rolling boil. Turn down the heat to low, cover, and simmer gently, turning the chicken pieces once or twice, until the chicken is tender, 30 to 45 minutes.