How Salted Fish Lost the Name of Abalone
Bastillepost · 1 SOURCES1 day ago2 MIN
Summary
A plate of steamed minced pork with salted fish, served with congee or rice, remains a standard comfort meal for many Hong Kong people. The Bastille Post article argues that in ancient Chinese usage, the word now read as “abalone” originally referred to salted, fermented fish, while the shellfish prized today was called by another name. Over time, pronunciation shifts and popular usage reassigned the prestigious label, leaving salted fish as a plainly named everyday food.
Key Points
- The article cites Kongzi Jiayu as saying that living among bad people is like entering a shop of “baoyu”, where the smell becomes unnoticeable over time; here “baoyu” meant salted fish, not modern abalone.
- Xu Shen’s Shuowen Jiezi defined “bao” as spoiled or fermented fish preserved with salt, showing the ancient term carried foul-smelling and negative associations.
- Records in Shiji say that after Qin Shi Huang died at Shaqiu, officials loaded one shi of “baoyu” onto carts to mask the corpse’s odour, a detail used as evidence that the term meant salted fish.
- The shellfish now sold as luxury abalone was called “fuyu” in older texts; Shuowen Jiezi described it as a sea creature, and Han-era writings treated it as elite food.
- The article says pronunciation drift from the late Tang through the Ming and Qing periods led common speech to read “fuyu” as “baoyu”, allowing the luxury shellfish to take over the older name.
Why It Matters
For Hong Kong readers, the story connects a common local dish to a longer history of language, class and food culture. It also reframes salted fish not simply as a cheap staple, but as a product whose name, status and meaning changed as society and speech changed.