The Cleaver and the Butterfly

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The road to Shu is hard. Harder than climbing the sky. On a Cathay Pacific flight from Hong Kong to Chengdu, in April 2019, a few weeks into the beginning of the Year of the Pig, I am reading a passage in "Looking for Chengdu," a diary kept by the feminist Marxist anthropologist…
A dish that contains multitudes, collapses peripheries and explains the rise and fall of empires.
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Or: How everything I knew about hogs in Chinese homes was wrong. The Cross-stitched Pig, Part III
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From Neolithic dinner parties to the "vast, existential inequality" of the Shang, as told by culinary ware. Part III of The Annals of Neolithic Globalization
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This is how the new year begins: with flowers, new pens, and the cleanest of slates
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Big dings, mortuary selfishness, and the mandate of heaven: Part II of The Annals of Neolithic Globalization
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Assuaging pre-election jitters with a sharp knife and some exuberant poetry
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What does a 3000-year-old lightshow on the streets of Chengdu really mean? Part I of the Annals of Neolithic Globalization
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In honor of the newsletter's third anniversary, here's some data to chew on and couple of amazing vegetarian Sichuan recipes.
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The Cross-Stitched Pig, Part V
From North Carolina to Berkeley to Chengdu, a price-point sensitive love affair to die for. (The Cross-Stitched Pig, Part IV)
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Regular production of this newsletter was delayed over the last two weeks by the extensive preparations involved in putting together a feast for about…
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The Cleaver and the Butterfly

Sichuan food, globalization, and the Dao.

The Cleaver and the Butterfly

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© 2023 Andrew Leonard
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