Visual feast

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Steamed Chinese cabbage in supreme soup, a traditional dish featured in Cat’s Kitchen (PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

When Jiang Xuan, 41, also known as Jiang Laodao online, started to create food videos in 2013, the short-video streaming and sharing sector was in its infancy. At that time the major video-sharing platform in China was Tudou, where Jiang launched the first episode of Cat’s Kitchen, a series of food video clips specialising in Chinese cuisine and traditional delicacies.

In 2015 he began to promote videos of Cat’s Kitchen on Bilibili, which is now one of the most popular video-sharing platforms in China. The video series was very well received and become even more popular on the platform. The team was one of the top 100 Bilibili content creators in 2018. By early November, the official account for Cat’s Kitchen on the platform had uploaded 459 video episodes, and boasts more than 6.29 million followers.

Jiang has also posted videos on YouTube. “Although we don’t think YouTube will bring us many business prospects, we are very keen for people in other countries to see our content and what we are trying to express and convey,” Jiang says.

He receives emails from many users in other countries about the dishes featured, he says. Some have even invited him to visit in person and cook with them once the pandemic is over. Because of that, he says, he feels “a sense of presence among many foreign friends when sharing videos on the platform”.

His team “often gets strong feedback when making a very traditional and Chinese-style dish”, he says. For example, a particularly popular episode featuring a traditional dish called steamed Chinese cabbage in supreme soup received 10 times the clicks compared to the average interactions with other videos they uploaded.

Jiang says that in 2020 the team made an episode of the Complete Manchu-Han Banquet, a palace feast that took place during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), of which 88 dishes from more than 100 years ago have been re-created. It is a banquet that features royal cuisine and local delicacies of both the Han and Manchu ethnic groups. The team spent more than two months on the video.

To his delight, their effort paid dividends. The video performed impressively – it has been viewed 140,000 times on YouTube. Jiang says that presenting ancient dishes is not easy. “When making modern dishes, there will be countless methods, but for some older cuisines, many ingredients are no longer available,” he says. “Also, there might be disputes or arguments among the viewers, since we can only present them through our understanding of the available historical references.”

Jiang believes that Chinese aesthetics contain many illuminating areas that can be illustrated, some of which “may get ignored, forgotten or taken for granted by us Chinese at certain times”.

Once they are dug out and presented, they will shine brightly.

Previously published on Chinadaily.com.cn