Hainan

Numbing-spicy heat built on Sichuan peppercorn and fermented broad-bean paste — bold, layered, unapologetic.

Fresh produce, live seafood, delicate steaming — taste the ingredient first.

Mountain and sea together — dried seafoods, silken broths, Buddha Jumps Over the Wall.

Hearty stews, sour cabbage, guo bao rou — the food that survives winter.

Drier, sharper heat than Sichuan — smoked chiles and sour-pickled notes.

Northern seafood tradition, clear broths, knife-work learned from imperial kitchens.

Precision knife-skills, sweet-savoury balance, slow braising.

Wheat-and-lamb Silk-Road heart — biangbiang noodles, rou jia mo, Xi'an Hui-Muslim influence.

Southwest borderland — wild mushrooms, crossing-bridge noodles, 25-ethnic-minority kitchen.

Wild herbs, mountain mushrooms, and the fermented funk of stinky mandarin fish.

Light, bright, honest — West Lake fish, Dongpo pork, and the poetry of water towns.

The refined seafood cooking of the Chaoshan plain — galangal-scented master-stock goose, hand-pounded beef balls and beef hotpot, raw-marinated crab and cockles, cold 'fish rice', oyster omelettes, and an endless family of steamed rice cakes (粿).

Imperial roasting, deep savoury broths, and the craft that defined palace banquets.

Sweet red-cooking, oil-rich, and the quiet confidence of 本帮 home cooking.

China's noodle heartland and the home of aged vinegar — knife-shaved noodles and a hundred other hand-formed pastas, oat 'kaolaolao', cured Pingyao beef, the vinegar-bright 'guoyourou', and Taiyuan's tonic breakfast 'tounao'.

Zhuang-minority sour-funk — Liuzhou snail noodles, Yangshuo beer fish, fermented bamboo.

Hexi-Corridor Silk Road — Lanzhou beef noodle, Hui-Muslim halal traditions.

Mountain cooking built on sourness and fermented chili rather than the numbing heat of Sichuan — red sour-soup fish, fish-mint, pounded-chili 'laziji', rice-noodle bowls, and the silk-roll snacks of Guiyang.

Sock-pulled milk tea, baked pork chop rice, dim sum perfected — Cantonese rewritten by colonial trade.

Central-plains imperial heart — hu la tang at dawn, Henan stewed noodles, Song dynasty heritage.

Central freshwater fish kitchen — Wuhan re-gan-mian, Wuchang fish, sanxian doupi.

The cooking that rings the capital, in three streams: the Zhili governor's banquet cuisine of Baoding (crispy wrapped pork knuckle, governor's tofu), the donkey-meat sandwich of Baoding and Hejian, and the frontier game and lamb of imperial Chengde.

Fresh-hot rather than numbing cooking from the Gan River basin — clay-pot urn soups, blood duck, artemisia with cured pork, smoked bamboo, and a deep tradition of rice noodles.

The river-and-sea cooking of the treaty port at the mouth of the Hai River, where nine rivers drain to the gulf. It runs to the steamed-bun craft of Goubuli, the breakfast crepe jianbing guozi, the fried sweets of the city's 'Three Wonders,' and a wok line of fierce, oil-bright stir-fries like lao bao san.

The thrifty, salt-loving cooking of the migrant Hakka — stuffed tofu and stuffed vegetables (酿), salt-cured and salt-baked poultry, preserved mustard greens, rice-wine chicken, and a whole family of rice-flour 粄 cakes and thunder tea.