As I began to explore new culinary regions of China beyond my old stamping grounds of Sichuan and Hunan, I found my thoughts drifting towards Fujian Province. Fujian lies on the south-eastern coast of China, sandwiched between Guangdong and the southern Yangtze region, and although it is now little known abroad, it was once at the forefront of Chinese international trade. In the Song Dynasty, Arab merchants sailed their galleys into the Fujianese ports of Quanzhou and Xiamen or Amoy, where they exchanged their cargoes of East Indian spices and luxury goods for Chinese porcelain and silk. Europeans traded at Xiamen from the sixteenth century until the mid-eighteenth. Later, the Chinese closed it to foreigners, but the British forced its re-opening as an international treaty port in 1842, after the first Opium War. As an entrepôt, Fujian has long exerted a steady, though rarely recognised, influence on the outside world: it is one of the most important sources of Chinese tea (the word 'tea' itself, and all its European variants, derive from Amoy dialect), and Fujianese immigrants, though less conspicuous than the Cantonese, are a powerful economic force in Western Chinatowns.

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