Beijing is located at the northern end of the North China Great Plain, surrounded by Hebei Province.
Beijing, referred to as "Beijing", is the capital of the People's Republic of China, the political center and cultural center of the country, and is a world-famous ancient capital and modern international city. Beijing is located at 39 degrees 56 minutes north latitude and 116 degrees 20 minutes east longitude, located in the north of the North China Great Plain, adjacent to Tianjin city to the east, and the rest are adjacent to Hebei Province.
Terrain: High in the northwest, low in the southeast. Surrounded by mountains to the west, north and northeast, to the southeast is a plain that slopes slowly towards the Bohai Sea.
Climate: Beijing's climate is a typical warm temperate semi-humid continental monsoon climate, with high temperature and rainy summers, cold and dry winters, and short spring and autumn.
Area: As of April 2019, Beijing has a land area of 16,410.54 square kilometers, and the city has a total of 16 districts. Beijing has jurisdiction over 16 municipal districts, including Dongcheng District, Xicheng District, Chaoyang District, Fengtai District, Shijingshan District, Haidian District, Shunyi District, Tongzhou District, Daxing District, Fangshan District, Mentougou District, Changping District, Pinggu District, Miyun District, Huairou District and Yanqing District, with a total of 147 subdistricts, 38 townships and 144 towns. The southeastern part of Beijing is part of the Great Plain of North China; the western and northern parts are the mountains belonging to the Taihang Mountains and the Yanshan Mountains. The plains are flat and fertile, producing rice, wheat, corn, sorghum, millet (millet), buckwheat and various vegetables. The mountainous area produces chestnuts, walnuts, dates, pears, persimmons, sand fruits, hawthorn, peaches, apricots and other dried and fresh fruits.
Beijing has a long history, and the Peking Ape Man and the Cave Man on the top of the mountain have lived here successively. Beijing is the main transportation route between the North China Plain and the Inner Mongolian Plateau. Since ancient times, it has always been a distribution center for the exchange of commodities between the agricultural economy of the Central Plains and the grassland animal husbandry economy in the north, and it is also a military strategic town that must be contested by soldiers and families.
Since the Spring and Autumn Period when the Yan state was established here, there have been Successive Liao, Jin, Yuan, and Ming successively exported to Beijing. However, at that time, 78 out of 10 ordinary residents in the capital, including well-off families, were mainly fooded by miscellaneous grains. In years of disaster or war, the poor often find it difficult to eat even mixed noodles (corn flour with a little soybean noodles). Poor and small households rarely eat sesame oil throughout the year. Medium-sized people eat less meat, and only during the New Year's Festival, in order to sacrifice or entertain guests, they slaughter chickens and geese, buy fish and buy meat. According to statistics from the late Qing Dynasty, the residents of Jingshi claimed to be 1.2 million, with about 600 pigs and 800 sheep.
The amount needed for the New Year's Holiday must be doubled. Fresh fish and other aquatic products, mainly from Jingu, but the price is expensive, and it is difficult for ordinary civilians to ask for it.
In recent decades, Beijing's population has surged, and the population from all over the country who have settled in Beijing has accounted for a considerable proportion, and they have brought with them the food customs of various regions, which is an unprecedented great integration of food customs in various parts of our country. Beijing's traditional eating habits and eating customs have gradually faded.
Due to social changes and economic development, the consumption level of Beijingers in diet is increasing day by day. The amount of fish, meat, poultry and eggs on the market every day far exceeds the market volume of the past year.
Those who can represent the achievements of Beijing's food culture should first promote Beijing's dishes.
Beijing cuisine, also known as Jingbang cuisine, is based on northern cuisine and incorporates local flavors. With the special status of the capital city, Beijing integrates the culmination of the national cooking technology and continuously absorbs the essence of food from all over the world.
In the Ming and Qing dynasties, the main people who operated restaurants in Beijing were Shandong people, so Shandong cuisine occupied a dominant position in the market. The Tan family cuisine, which absorbs the essence of the han manchu and other ethnic diets, and the Tan family cuisine formed on the basis of Cantonese cuisine and the long-term flavors of various regions, also brings brilliance to the Jingbang cuisine.
Among the most characteristic of Beijing cuisine, the most distinctive are roast duck and shabu lamb. Roast duck is a famous dish in Beijing, the earliest roast duck shop old cheap shop was moved from Nanjing in the fourteenth year of Ming Yongle (1614 AD), indicating that it originated from Jiangnan; but Beijing duck is an excellent breed of artificial breeding, and there is a difference between open oven and stew oven in roasting, so Beijing roast duck is far from being comparable to Nanjing roast duck.
Shabu-shabu lamb, roast beef, and roast lamb were originally the food methods of ethnic minorities in the north, and in the murals of the tombs of the Liao Dynasty, there is a picture of people eating shabu-shabu lamb around a hot pot. Nowadays, the ingredients used in shabu lamb are rich and varied, the taste is delicious, and its preparation method is almost a household name.
In addition, There are many commendable famous foods in Beijing, such as: mille-feuille cake (88 floors) originally a snack of the Qing Dynasty, the delicacy Sachima that appeared with the establishment of the capital of the Qing Dynasty in Beijing, the famous radish silk cake of "Zhimei Zhai", the famous point of "Hemp Bun" in Tanjia cuisine, the pastry of "Zhengming Zhai", the sauce beef of "Yuesheng Zhai", the sauce elbow of "Tianfu", the pickle of "Liubiju" and "Tianyuan Sauce Garden", the autumn pear paste of "Tong Sanyi", the sour plum soup of "Xinyuan Zhai", etc. Although not every citizen can eat these foods, let alone become people's daily food, it has added luster to the food life of Beijingers after all.
In the past, there were many restaurants in Beijing, ranging from large to small, from south to north, to west. There are about five kinds of Chinese restaurants: one is a noodle shop, a bun shop, a dumpling shop, a wonton shop, etc., selling noodles alone. The second is the second meat shop, "Old Beijing Trivia" Yun: "The second meat shopper is the land where the common people are fed." The so-called "two meats" means that only pigs and mutton are fried vegetables, and the staple food is steamed buns, flower rolls, flapjacks, and ramen noodles (noodles). Third, there are small restaurants with special dishes, and the name of the shop is often called so-and-so Xuan and so-and-so Spring, such as "Sanyixuan" and "Spring of the Four Seas". Fourth, medium-sized restaurants, also called rice zhuangzi, have many elegant seats, which can set up ten tables and eight tables for banquets, generally called so-and-so building, so-and-so spring, so-and-so residence, and so-and-so. The fifth is the big rice village, which specializes in the business of various large-scale banquets such as red and white weddings, birthdays, and official receptions. There are often several large courtyards, large canopies, and stages for singing and playing. There are dozens of tables and hundreds of tables at the banquet. The name is always called so-and-so hall, such as Fushou Hall, Tongxing Hall, etc.
In the past, restaurants selling Western food, called "Fan Cuisine Restaurant" in Beijing, sold bread, soup, vegetables and so on. In restaurants opened by the Japanese, those who sell Western food are called "Western cuisine" and those who sell Chinese food are called "Indochina Judgment.". (To be continued)