The Biotech Soybeans of Lady Dai
Fermentation. Transformation. Immortality. The Soybean is Everything, Part II
What manner of things are the darkness and light? How did Yin and Yang come together, and how could they originate and transform all things that are by their commingling?
“Heavenly Questions” from the “Songs of Chu” (circa 4th century B.C.), translated by David Hawkes.
More than a thousand objects accompanied the spectacularly well-preserved corpse of Lady Dai, a Han Dynasty noblewoman buried at Mawangdui around 168 B.C. The burial items included musical instruments, furniture, silk textiles, lacquer dining sets, paintings, texts of philosophy, medicine, and astronomy, and a mouth-watering abundance of food.
The tomb-builders at Mawangdui even included an “Inventory of Burial Objects” carved into slips of bamboo. From this list we know that ceramic jars “120” and “301” contained dou chi, salted fermented soybeans, a condiment still very much in use today in multiple varieties of Chinese cuisine. No serving of Twice Cooked Pork Belly is complete without a healthy handful of these little black umami bombs.
The 1971 unearthing of the Mawangdui tomb complex is regarded as one of the most momentous discoveries in the history of modern Chinese archaeology, as it opened a window illuminating countless details of elite daily life during the early days of the Han Dynasty. Lady Dai’s husband, Li Cang, was the prime minister of the kingdom of Changsha, a subdivision of the Han empire. Today, Changsha is the capital of Hunan province. During the Warring States era prior to the unification of China, Changsha was part of the great state of Chu, an ancient Chinese cultural powerhouse.
Liu Bang, who founded the Han dynasty just fifty years before Lady Dai’s death, was born and raised in Chu. If the Qin, whose conquests ended the era of the Warring States, represented everything legalistic and hierarchical and organized down to the last totalitarian iota, Chu was Qin’s antipodes, a realm whose traditions reached back to prehistoric shamanic mysticism and southern fecundity.
I knelt on my outspread skirts and poured my pain out,
And the righteousness with me was clearly manifest.
I yoked a team of jade dragons to a phoenix-figured car
And waited for the wind to come, to soar up on my journey.
“Li Sao” (Encountering Sorrow), from the “Songs of Chu,” (circa 4th century B.C.), translated by David Hawkes.
By means of biochemical wizardry still not fully understood, Lady Dai’s body was so immaculately preserved that an autopsy revealed not only the afflictions she endured during her lifetime -- coronary thrombosis, arteriosclerosis, a fused spinal disk, gallstones -- but also what she was eating just hours before her death – muskmelons. Clearly a voracious eater in life, she was surrounded, in death, by food.
All your household have come to do you honor; all kinds of good food are ready:
Rice, broom-corn, early wheat, mixed with yellow millet;
Bitter, salt, sour, hot and sweet – there are dishes of all flavors:
Ribs of the fatted ox, tender and succulent;
Sour and bitter blended in the soup of Wu;
Stewed turtle and roast kid, served up with yam sauce;
Geese cooked in sour sauce, casseroled duck, fried flesh of the great crane;
Braised chicken, seethed terrapin, high-seasoned, but not to spoil the taste;
Fried honey-cakes of rice flour and malt-sugar sweetmeats;
Jade-like wine, honey-flavored, fills the winged cups;
Ice-cooled liquor, strained of impurities, clear wine, cool and refreshed;
Here are laid out patterned ladles, and here is sparkling wine.
O soul, come back! Here you shall have respect and nothing shall harm you.
“Zhao Hun,” (Summons of the Soul) from the Songs of Chu, (circa 3rd century B.C.), translated by David Hawkes
Remains of Lady Dai’s last feast -- provisions to span the ages -- still linger in her sublime lacquerware, vestiges of beverages and comestibles lurking amongst some of the sixteen distinctive types of lacquer objects discovered: pheasant bones, ox ribs and shoulder blades, mandarin-fish bones, and wheaten food in various dishes…. Tomb No. 1 contained forty-eight bamboo baskets of prepared meats, fruit, etc., fifty-one ceramic containers (most of them full of food), hempen sacks of cereals, vegetables, cakes of sticky rice with honey or jujube jelly… Meat, including wild and domesticated animals on hoof and wing, represented a veritable bestiary: sika deer, wild rabbits, suckling pigs, horses, cattle, sheep, dogs, boar, cranes, chickens, ringed pheasants, ducks, wild geese, owls, bamboo partridge magpies, turtledoves, quails, pigeons, Mandarin ducks, sparrows (and their delectable eggs), and bamboo pheasants… taro, lentils, soybeans, water chestnuts, rape, bamboo shoots, ginger, lotus roots, gourds, sow-thistle, chives, mustard-seed, garlic, red beans, mallow, mustard greens, shallots, knot-grass, and malva. Fruit: persimmons, Chinese strawberries, melons, pears, plums, arbutus berries, peaches, oranges, and jujubes.
The Last Feast of Lady Dai, by Julie Rauer.
The feast described in “Summons of the Soul” was a seduction. David Hawkes theorized that the song was written for a recently deceased King of Chu, as a poetic rendition of an ancient ritual whose goal was “to resuscitate a dead man by catching his soul before it had gone too far away.” Hawkes’ best guess was that the poem was written in the third century B.C. That would be roughly 200 years before Lady Dai was buried along with a cornucopia of food that is the physical embodiment of the soul-summoning spread.
The connections between Lady Dai’s tomb and the “Songs of Chu” have received much attention from scholars. But our focus here is not on the feast as a whole, but on a single condiment. According to H.T. Huang, author of Food and Fermentation Science, Volume 6, Part V of The History of Science and Technology in China, Wang Yi, the second century A.D. scholar who organized the “Songs of Chu” into the form we know them today, asserts that the word “bitter” in the line “Sour and bitter blended in the soup of Wu” is a direct reference to dou chi.
If true, this is the first textual reference to salted, fermented soybeans in the historical record, just as the dou chi in jars 120 and 301 of Lady Dai’s tomb are the earliest known physical specimens of a fermented soyfood known to history. Why do I care about this? Because where fermentation begins, everything else follows.
Residents of East Asia started fermenting alcoholic beverages in the far distant early Neolithic past; the fermentation of soybeans deserves particular attention because food is necessary for survival, whereas alcohol is more of a party favor.. Soybeans were cultivated because they grew in bad soil and could handle cold weather and dry conditions; but they weren’t easy to digest and were well-known to induce flatulence. The earliest consumption of soybeans was probably in some form of not particularly appetizing gruel.
We don’t know exactly when or where the residents of East Asia figured out the multi-step process that transformed raw soybeans into delicious flavor enhancers, but by the second century B.C. there is little doubt that dou chi were important culinary commodities. The Han dynasty historian Ban Gu tells us that around the time Lady Dai was buried, “two of the seven wealthiest merchants of the realm had accumulated their fortunes by trading dou chi.” The Grand Historian, Sima Qian, informs us that in 173 B.C., when Liu Chang, the prince of Huainan, son of the founding emperor of the Han, was exiled to Sichuan by his half-brother, the Emperor Wen, dou chi were itemized among the provisions he was allowed to take with him.
Liu Chang died enroute to the land of Shu and ended up making little mark on history. His son, Liu An, is a much different story. Some scholars credit Liu An with being the first person to gather the “Songs of Chu” into a single literary collection. He is most famous for his association, either as a writer or editor or mere figurehead, with the Huainanzi, a Daoist text that aimed at nothing less than the embodiment of all knowledge about the universe. He was also said to be a great devotee of Zhuangzi and a dabbler in alchemical quests for immortality. And for thousands of years many Chinese believed him to be the inventor of yet another chemically transformed (albeit not fermented) soybean product: doufu, (tofu).
“It is said that after a long and fruitless day of alchemical experimentation, Liu An felt tense and weary. He took a walk up a hill, and met eight elderly men coming down the slope. By their vigorous stride and energetic demeanor, he knew they were clearly no ordinary mortals. He took the opportunity to ask them what he should do in order to achieve immortality. The elder men immediately taught him how to grind soybeans to make soy milk, and how to curdle the milk to make bean curd.”
“This legend suggests,” writes H.T. Huang. “that Daoist alchemists could have played a key role in the original invention, subsequent development and eventual adoption of doufu as a processed food.”
Whether, after learning to create doufu, Liu An actually sprouted wings and ascended into the sky as an immortal, as one Song dynasty poet asserted, is challenging to ascertain. The more plausible story is that he committed suicide after being charged with treason by his nephew, the Emperor Wu. But regardless of how his story ended, there are potent intersecting forces connecting the narratives of soybeans and the “Songs of Chu” and Lady Dai and Liu An.
Transformation. Alchemy. Fermentation. Science. Immortality. The soybean is everything.
He that thoroughly understands the nature of ferments and fermentations, shall probably be much better able than he that ignores them, to give a fair account of divers phenomena of several diseases (as well fevers as others) which will perhaps be never thoroughly understood, without an insight into the doctrine of fermentation.
Robert Boyle, Offering Some Particulars Relating to the Pathological Part of Physick, 1663
Presumably, the original creation of dou chi was an accident. Some soybeans were left sitting around in a warm place, got moldy, and an intrepid, or possibly just very hungry, experimenter noticed that unlike many rotting and decaying things, these soybeans smelled not half bad. As luck would have it, the process of fermentation instigated chemical changes that made the soybeans far more edible than had previously been the case.
It is not until the sixth century that we get a detailed description of how to make dou chi. By this time the manufacturing process included the deliberate introduction of a ferment starter, known as “qu” in Chinese. The critical feature of the qu “ferment” is the presence of the living microbe aspergillus oryzae, which carries out its chemical transformations by releasing enzymes that convert inedible carbohydrates into tastiness.
Of course, the ancient Chinese knew nothing about the actual biochemical mechanisms in play. The very existence of microbial life remained a mystery until the Dutch lens crafter Antonie van Leeuwenhoek perfected his microscope in the 17th century, one of the key breakthrough moments in the European Enlightenment. But one doesn’t have to understand what one is doing to achieve results, and the implications of these ancient experiments still resonate today. There is a reason why science historians often call human-induced fermentation the first application of biotechnology. One living species is purposefully introduced into another, and catalyzes a transformation. All over the ancient world, witnesses of this biochemical magic trick, whether they were brewing beer or making bread or waiting for their dou chi to mature, found themselves deeply impressed.
(And I find myself wondering whether this act of transformation is, in principle, any different than a contemporary lab scientist using CRISPR/Cat9 technology to rewrite the code of a living being? But that’s a question to be explored in more detail later in this series.)
The bubbling that takes place spontaneously in the mass of vintage, or in the flour paste, appeared to them as the manifestation of some living spirit; fermentation became one of the favorite subjects for meditation and for experiments by the alchemists, and they derived from its study much of their language and ideology. The subtle changes in property that occur in the mass of fermenting material seemed to them the symbol of those mysterious forces which, instrumented by the philosopher’s stone, could convert the baser metals into gold.
Whatever their philosophical or religious faith, the natural philosophers believed that nothing could better demonstrate the ability of the human mind to unravel the riddle of life than to succeed in explaining these mysterious fermentations. And in fact, they were essentially right – if not in their surmises, then at least in their general view of the future course of science, for much of our understanding of the biochemical reactions of living processes has evolved from the study of yeast and of alcoholic fermentation. It is the enviable privilege of yeast and of the products of its activities that they have, directly or indirectly, fed the dreams and follies of man, inspired poets, and challenged philosophers and scientists to meditation and creative thinking.
Rene J. Dubos “Louis Pasteur: Free Lance of Science”
Dubos is referring here to European natural philosophers, but the same principle seems to have held for the ancient Daoists. Inspired by the transformations that resulted in the creation of various soyfoods, not to mention alcoholic beverages, they started seeking other, more spiritually infused, transformations. Most amazingly, in their quest for immortality, they ended up pioneers on a journey that eventually matured in the full glory of modern medical science.
Robert Boyle’s 1663 speculations on the connection between fermentation and disease proved to be spectacularly correct, although the passage of a few hundred years was required to nail it all down. The man who achieved this task, the French scientist Louis Pasteur, started down the path to securing his own immortality when he isolated and identified the microbes that made fermentation happen. Those discoveries, in turn, set in motion a sequence of hypothesizing and experimentation that led Pasteur to not only formulate the “germ theory of disease,” but also to figure out the mechanics of vaccine-induced immunity.
Pasteur’s biographer, Rene Dubos, writes that one of Pasteur’s original passions was the desire to understand, and if possible, recreate in the laboratory, the process by which life emerged from inanimate matter. This “alchemical” dream, however, was soon set aside for more practical pursuits, like helping the beet-sugar industry streamline their fermentation processes, diagnosing the causes of silk-worm disease, inoculating sheep against anthrax, and basically putting the whole infrastructure of modern medicine on a bedrock of scientific fact.
Pasteur’s experiments unlocking the secrets of fermentation in the service of commerce happened at roughly the same time the British were fighting the Opium Wars in China, a concurrence that will take on more significance as later installments in this series track the capitalist transformation of the world into a network of commodity exchange that encompasses everything from dou chi to opium to DNA.
We’ll get to that. But for now, let’s stay focused on immortality. Pasteur’s extraordinary success at lifting the veil that previously concealed the microbial universe is a critical link in the chain between ancient alchemists concocting elixirs that they hoped would grant eternal life and contemporary dreams of eradicating all disease and living forever, for real. I’ve often marveled at the not inconsiderable number of Chinese emperors who fatally poisoned themselves ingesting immortality elixirs, but as I was researching this topic it occurred to me that just a few miles south of where I live a motley crew of Silicon Valley titans is pouring billions of dollars into “anti-aging” research while also lobbying the FDA to let them ingest whatever experimental drugs they deem promising without prior proof of safety. The dream, and the folly, never dies.
It may seem that I have ranged far from the soybean. But this is not the case.
Planting soybeans, the seedlings are sparse,
My strength is spent, my heart is weary.
If only I had known of Huainan’s art
I could just sit idly and reap my gains.
Zhu Xi, 12th Century A.D.
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To Huainan there came hundreds, perhaps thousands, of vagrant soothsayers, poets, displaced warriors, experts in esoterica and the occult, magicians, philosophers, tacticians and strategists.
“Liu An, Second King of Huainan” Benjamin E. Wallacker
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[The Huainanzi’s] purport approaches that of Laozi: calm and still, lacking action, treading the void, guarding serenity, moving in and out of the warp-like Way. If one speak of its greatness, then it overspreads heaven and sustains earth. If one expound its fineness, then it eddies in the unlimited. [The scope of the book] extends to ancient and modern order and disorder, preservation and perishing, ill fortune and good fortune, and to affairs divergent and different, wondrous and odd within the age. The significance of it is manifest; the literature of it is rich. In the categories of things and affairs there is nothing which is not conveyed.
Kao Yu, second century A.D., preface to his commentary on the Huainanzi. (In “Liu An, Second King of Huainan” Benjamin E. Wallacker)
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A scholarly text says: when the Prince of Huainan studied the Way, he invited and gathered those who had achieved the Way under Heaven. He condescended as the ruler of a state to the masters of techniques of the Way. For this reason, the masters of techniques of the Way all gathered at Huainan, none of whom did not strive to invent rare recipes and strange techniques. The prince therefore was able to achieve the Way, his entire family was also able to ascend to Heaven, and the animals on his property all became immortals: his dogs barking in the sky and his roosters crowing in the clouds. It is said that this was because there was some leftover elixir that the dogs and roosters ate, and together they followed the prince and ascended to Heaven. Those who are fond of the Way and study immortality all believe that this is true.
Wang Chong “Lunheng” (“Discourses Weighed in the Balance”), first century A.D., translated by Hanmo Zhang in “The Author as a Patron: Prince of Huainan, the Owner-Author.”
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As for the “Li Sao”[Encountering Sorrow] it can be said that it combines the two. He left behind the cicada skin in the midst of the dirty mire to drift beyond the dust clear of any dirt and unsullied. [The way] he promoted this intention could even compete with the sun and moon in brightness.”
Liu An, commentary on “Li Sao.” Translated by Michael Schimmelpfennig in “The Quest for a Classic: Wang Yi and the Exegetical Prehistory of his Commentary to the Songs of Chu.”
The first sources connecting Liu An to the invention of doufu do not appear in the historical record until the Song Dynasty, more than a 1000 years after his death. This has encouraged contemporary soy chroniclers to be skeptical of the attribution. The only contemporaneous evidence that doufu ever even existed during the Han is the mural engraving pictured above, and even that is a subject of scholarly dispute.
Liu An’s actual claim to fame, as previously noted, derives from his association with the Huainanzi, a “syncretic” text that aimed, in the words of the Daoist scholar Nicholas Girardot, to encapsulate “a comprehensive knowledge of the world and its underlying unity in the hidden order of Dao.” Liu An was also said to have to supervised the writing of a volume that went into great depth describing various techniques for achieving immortality, but that text is lost to us.
Which is a shame, because one might hope its survival would shed some light on a question that has confused and irritated scholars and devotees of Daoism for centuries. How does one square the teachings of Laozi and Zhuangzi, which stress non-action and spontaneity, presence in the now and submergence in the flow, with the willful desire to transcend the limitations of one’s mortal body? Isn’t the desire to live forever fundamentally at odds with contentment in the moment? Can one imagine a human less Daoist than noted immortality seeker Peter Thiel? It just doesn’t make obvious sense, and many Sinologists have taken great pains to distinguish “philosophical” Daoism from the more populist “cult” of immortality-seeking.
This essay will not resolve that contradiction, if such a thing is even possible. All I can say here is that one of the key differences separating the Huainanzi from Laozi and Zhuangzi appears to rest in its conscious and explicit incorporation of multiple historically conflicting philosophical influences into one unified whole. Everything goes in a “syncretist” text. The descriptions of Liu An’s court at Huainan, teeming with “vagrant soothsayers, poets, displaced warriors, experts in esoterica and the occult, magicians, philosophers, tacticians and strategists,” also suggest that Liu An was a man of wide-ranging interests. Or perhaps there was just something in the air in Chu, some kind of cultural mind-infesting microbe that delighted in embracing contradictions.
“This community [at Huainan],” writes Harold Roth, “became a focal point of the distinctive culture of the former state of Chu, whose boundaries had included Huainan and spread to the south and west. The culture of Chu, which contained strong elements of shamanism and mysticism, also survives in the Chu Ci [Songs of Chu] and in the Zhuangzi, in addition to the Huannanzi.”
Transformations of all kinds are central to the “Songs of Chu.” Transformation is core to Zhuangzi’s most famous story – his butterfly dream. Transformation from this world to the next is the primary obsession of the tombs at Mawangdui. And transformation is what happens when you leave soybeans sitting around for aspergillus eryzae microbes to infiltrate.
Remember the “heavenly question” that opened this essay? “How did Yin and Yang come together, and how could they originate and transform all things that are by their commingling?” Liu An wanted answers to those questions. And while we don’t know for sure why Song dynasty philosophers and poets decided Liu An should be the culture hero credited with the invention of doufu, it’s seems at least possible that his well-documented interest in alchemical transformation made him a likely suspect. The reconfiguration of of soybeans into dou chi and doufu and soy sauce requires a bevy of biochemically induced change. Liu An’s alchemical fame, in other words, may have ended up associating him with a food product whose own creation process helped inspire alchemical experimentation. There is a certain ineluctable gravity to the feedback loop of this flow.
Another tantalizing factor is doufu’s popularity with meat-eschewing Daoists and Buddhists over the millenia, which may have encouraged Song Dynasty writers to look for a promising ancient Daoist for doufu affiliation. Because the truth is, the capaicty for soyfoods to deliver more protein and life-essential amino acids per ounce than any other plant-based food make them legitimate contenders for any “magical elixer” trophy.
Can you sense the plot thickening?.
In the 1960s and ‘70s, American hippies embraced soy products as miracle foods that they hoped could sustainably and healthily feed an over-populated planet. Their hopes have yet to pan out, but they are not crazy. Soybeans are an incredibly cheap source of protein whose cultivation restores soil fertility. If substituted for meat consumption (rather than consumed as animal feed!) soybeans could conceivably play an important role in mitigating the climate change impacts of human existence.
So if we focus our macrocosmic lens to zero in on species survival, rather than personal self-interest, soybeans are potentially a key ingredient in an elixir of immortality for all of human civilization. And isn’t that what really counts?
Liu An and Lady Dai will remain immortal as long as there are humans around to ponder and retell their stories. But as I sit here in front of my laptop, mindful of the orange skies that afflicted New York earlier this week, it’s an entirely open question as whether or not humanity will pull off the most transformative trick of all; figuring out how to live in harmony with our own planet.
We’re going to need better alchemists.