Beijing

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).

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.

Tropical island — Wenchang chicken, coconut hotpots, South-China-Sea seafood.

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.