Songjiang Four-Gill Perch

The four-gill perch has one of the longest documented histories of any Chinese table fish. 《后汉书·方术列传》 — the fifth-century dynastic history of the Later Han — records the Taoist adept Zuo Ci conjuring the fish from thin air at a banquet for the warlord Cao Cao. During the Sui dynasty, Emperor Yang received the fish as tribute from Wu commandery during his tour of Jiangdu and praised it as 东南佳味也 — the finest delicacy of the Southeast (per 《隋唐嘉话》) — preferring it prepared as fine-cut raw fish. The fish takes its name from Songjiang (now a district of Shanghai), where the tidal reach of the Song River provided the brackish-to-freshwater gradient essential to its catadromous lifecycle. A local tradition holds that the Qing Emperor Qianlong, during his southern tours, tasted the fish and named it 江南第一名鱼; this account appears in district gazetteers though independent documentation is limited. By the mid-twentieth century, wild populations had collapsed from over-harvesting. Through the 1980s, multiple teams including Fudan University and the Shanghai Fisheries Research Institute ran experiments in artificial breeding; successive trials failed to overcome the fry-hatching stage, and the eventual breakthrough was achieved in the early 2000s by Professor Wang Jinqiu's team at Fudan University. In 1988 the state listed the species as National Level II protected wildlife. All commercially available fish today are farmed.

Sweet, clean, and impossibly delicate — flesh that barely clings to the spine before dissolving into nothing. No trace of fishiness whatsoever. The skin, rich in gelatin, enriches the steaming juices into a light, fragrant pool in the plate. The natural sweetness is so complete it needs almost nothing added.

The perch reaches a maximum of 14 cm — a miniature anatomy whose fast-twitch white muscle fibers evolved for brief, powerful bursts of swimming rather than sustained effort. This fiber structure produces an exceptionally tender, fine-grained texture when cooked. The apparent four gills are not anatomical: during spawning season two crescent-shaped orange-red patches appear on each side of the operculum, a visual signal unrelated to gill function. Steaming at 95°C for 8–10 minutes gently gelatinizes skin collagen while denaturing muscle proteins just enough to set them without expelling moisture — the ideal window for a fish this small. The catadromous life history concentrates trace iodine and selenium from marine waters into the flesh, contributing a subtle mineral sweetness that distinguishes it from purely freshwater fish.