How Lee Kum Kee Has Helped Chinese Food To Spread – And Evolve – Around The World

From San Francisco to Singapore, Melbourne to Manila, and London to Lima, you’ll see them.

Rows of succulent char siu (barbecued pork), siu yuk (roast pork) and siu aap (roast duck) dangling behind glass windows of stalls and restaurants. These amazing dishes originate some 3,000 years ago, and they take skill and dedication to master. They symbolise at once timeless heritage and tradition – but also a culinary identity that is alive and evolving for the Chinese diaspora around the globe, with Lee Kum Kee at its side.

Immigrants from southern China took Cantonese food to the rest of the world centuries ago, when they left their homes in search of new beginnings. Settling into foreign lands, they adapted their cooking using whatever ingredients they could find, giving us the diversity and spread of Chinese food we have today. Lee Kum Kee has been there alongside home cooks and chefs across the world, supporting them for more than 100 years. Its sauces and condiments have enabled immigrants to cook up a taste of home – and entrepreneurs to set up restaurants and flourish.

It all started in the Chinatowns, in the centre of major cities. As the Chinese diaspora spread, they started by gathering together and creating a sense of community, no matter how far they were from home. London’s Chinatown started in the 18th century in the city’s eastern docklands, before shifting in the 1950s to its current location in the entertainment district of Soho. It’s a destination that throngs with people of all nationalities in search of something delicious, from dim sum and Peking duck to hand-pulled noodles and mapo tofu.

These are sights and scenes repeated across countries and continents, many of them with colourful histories. Vancouver’s Chinatown is a designated national historic site, a 130-year-old mini-Hong Kong where the smell of freshly baked egg tarts and pineapple buns wafts down the street; while Melbourne claims the longest major continuous Chinese settlement in the Western world, taking root in Australia’s gold-rush days of the 1850s.

And indeed, subsequent generations of immigrants came from farther afield, bringing with them their own regional cuisines and expanding well beyond Chinatowns. The Sydney suburb of Ashfield is a slice of Shanghai, where homesick migrants rub elbows with Anglo-Australians feasting on xiaolongbao, pan-fried dumplings and thick strands of stir-fried noodles. Flushing, in the borough of Queens, has surpassed Manhattan as New York’s main Chinatown. Here, you can find numbing-spicy Sichuan hotpot or delicacies such as Xinjiang-style breads and skewers of cumin-coated grilled lamb.

One feature of Chinese cuisine is its versatility, adapting depending on local conditions, ingredients and the tastes of residents in other parts of the world. Some elements remained timeless: but others shifted and evolved.

Some dishes popular in North America, the UK and Australia would be unfamiliar to compatriots in China or unrecognisable from the original. This includes chop suey, a saucey stir-fry made using any combination of vegetables or meats on hand; and General Tso’s chicken, a battered and deep-fried dish believed to have been dreamed up in America.

Equally fascinating is the fusion of Chinese and local fare to create a distinct cuisine: an evolution driven by new cultures and identities. One of the best-known is chifa in Peru, where large numbers of workers from China’s Guangdong and Fujian provinces headed during the 19th century. They were responsible for creating some of the country’s most popular dishes, including lomo saltado – beef stir-fried with soy sauce and served with rice, potatoes and ají amarillo yellow chilli pepper, and arroz chaufa (fried rice) accompanied by sopa wantan (wonton soup).

But it’s in Asia where the influence of Chinese food culture can be most widely found, from the ramen noodle stalls of Japan to the lumpia spring roll vendors of Indonesia and the Philippines. In great food cities such as Bangkok, a large Thai-Chinese community has introduced myriad street food to locals and tourists alike. Every day, diners all over town can be seen slurping bowls of fish balls with egg noodles, as well as jok, congee rice porridge, or scoffing plates of khao moo daeng (red pork rice).

And in Singapore, with its majority ethnic Chinese population, visitors come from far and wide to eat at its famed hawker centres and food courts. While here, they seek out seriously addictive char kway teow, rice noodles fried with lard in a blazing hot wok to impart that essential smoky flavour.

Singapore and neighbouring Malaysia have also spawned a unique food, known as Peranakan or Nyonya cuisine. It’s a marriage of Chinese and Malay ingredients and techniques to produce mouthwatering dishes like coconut-creamy laksas and ayam buah keluak, a rich, dark chicken stew made with an indigenous nut that must be properly treated to remove its toxins. It’s a cuisine that not only shows off the ingenuity and mastery of the cooks – but also how adept the Chinese are at integrating into different societies. And with the help of Lee Kum Kee, they’re celebrating old traditions and creating new ones, one dish at a time.

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