Wonton

01

Thin wrapper, little filling, plenty of broth

A wonton is mostly wrapper and broth: the filling is small, and the soup does half the work.

Wontons and jiaozi are both wheat dough around a filling, but they are built differently. A jiaozi wrapper is a round disc rolled for each dumpling, crimped shut around a generous filling, and the dumplings are eaten drained with vinegar. A wonton wrapper is a square cut from a large sheet rolled very thin, folded around a much smaller dab of meat, and the wontons are eaten floating in broth, which is why cooks talk about a good wonton soup rather than a good wonton.

Shanghai sums it up with a saying the food writer Shen Jialu quotes: “northern jiaozi, southern wontons.” But wontons are eaten everywhere. Liang Shiqiu, who grew up in Beijing, wrote that they were found “north and south alike,” and Shen lists the family’s cousins scattered across the country: chaoshou in Sichuan, yuntun in Guangdong, bianshi in Linhai in Zhejiang. Names can be confusing even inside China. Shen tells of a guest in a Shanghai restaurant who ordered “a clear soup” and was furious to be given a bowl of plain broth, until an old waiter recognized the accent and brought out wontons instead: in Poyang in Jiangxi, wontons are called 清汤, “clear soup.”

Sources [1][3]

02

One wrapper, many names

What a wonton is called tells you roughly where you are.

Yuan Tingdong, a Chengdu historian, notes that the dish is made in most parts of China under different names and in much the same way. These are the names a traveller is most likely to meet on a menu.

Sources [3][5][8]

03

Older than the jiaozi’s name

Wontons are among the oldest dumplings with a physical record.

The best evidence is not a text but a grave. Fuchsia Dunlop describes how, in the 1950s, archaeologists excavating Tang-dynasty tombs at Astana near Turpan in Xinjiang found completely dried-out wontons and a bowl of crescent-shaped jiaozi that looked just like the boiled dumplings eaten in northern China today. An eighth-century text, Dunlop adds, listed twenty-four kinds of wonton among the delicacies offered to the emperor. By the Tang, wontons, jiaozi and spring pancakes were all part of the snack repertoire.

The name has attracted stories. Liang Shiqiu thought it “a very odd name” and quoted the Song scholar Cheng Dachang, who reported that people said wontons were invented by two frontier clans called Hun and Tun; Liang added that the story was “not necessarily believable.” Shen Jialu cites the late-Ming writer Zhang Dai, who credited Shi Chong, a famously rich man of the Western Jin, and then notes that the records put wontons no later than the Han.

Sources [1][3][6]

04

Old Beijing: the wonton cart and the restaurant stockpot

In Republican Beijing, wontons were street food, tavern food and restaurant food at once.

Liang Shiqiu remembered the hawkers who came through the lanes in the afternoon calling “wontons, the pot is open!” Their broth was made from bones boiled so long it turned cloudy and thick; the wrappers were thin and the filling so small you could barely taste the meat. What made the bowl was the seasoning: scallion, coriander, dried shrimp, preserved winter vegetable, soy sauce, vinegar and sesame oil, and finally black pepper shaken from a section of bamboo. Nobody else, Liang wrote, had the time to boil such a big pot of bones, so those wontons could not be had anywhere else.

Tang Lusun, another Beijing writer, places the same carts outside the city’s big wine-jar taverns. Drinkers would finish with a bowl of wontons, and only at those taverns, Tang noticed, did people say they would “drink” a bowl rather than eat one. Restaurants made a finer version. Liang’s local Shandong restaurant sold wontons and small buns in the morning, with a clear, deep stock, a few cubes of chicken blood and some pea shoots. The most famous belonged to Zhimeizhai, whose fried wontons Liang liked best of all: each was folded so its thin edges stood up like a nun’s white cap, fried slowly until golden, then steamed for a moment and brought to the table in the steamer, soft with a slight chew.

Tang Lusun also praised the chicken wontons of Xilaishun, and gave a rule for them: the quality is half the filling and half the wrapper. The chicken had to come from a freshly killed bird to be smooth, and the wrapper had to be rolled with a pin, because the machine-cut wrappers of noodle shops were too thin, though it must not be thick either.

Sources [1][2]

05

Shanghai: big wontons for a meal, small wontons for pleasure

Shanghai treats its two sizes of wonton as two different dishes.

Shen Jialu calls big and small wontons “brothers who have shared hard times and good times,” different in size but equal in rank. Big wontons are for hunger: two bowls make a meal, and a dozen laid around a pot of old-duck soup turn it into a feast. Shanghai people’s favorite, Shen writes, is the big wonton filled with pork and shepherd’s purse, with a little bok choy chopped in because shepherd’s purse alone is too dry. The city government’s own guide describes the same filling and a clear broth of pork bones, chicken bones or ham, seasoned with salt and a spoon of lard, with scallion, strips of egg crepe and dried seaweed on top.

Small wontons are for pleasure. The best wrappers, Shen writes, used to be pushed by hand in shops run by people from Hubei until they were so thin you could read newsprint through them. Wrapped loosely around a smear of pork, they open in the bowl like goldfish tails; the style is called 绉纱, “crepe,” and the small wontons of Qiaojiazha in Laoximen were the ones Shen remembered best. Visitors from the north used to laugh at a city that sold grain coupons for half a liang; after a bowl of small wontons, Shen says, they stopped laughing.

Wontons were also a family occasion. In the years of shortage, wrappers had to be ordered from the rice shop in advance with money and grain coupons, children were sent to queue, and the first pot went to the grandparents and then to the neighbors. On the fifteenth night of the first month, old Shanghai ate wontons shaped like silver ingots, called “wealth wontons.” At night the chaipan wonton vendors came out, named for the scrap firewood they burned. The city guide says they were widely believed to have been brought by people from Anhui, carrying a stove, bowls, seasonings and a cash box on a pole, and newspaper advertisements show pork and vegetable wontons were a familiar menu item by the 1930s and 1940s. In 2022 a family shop in an old house on the city’s edge still cooked on a wood-fired earth stove, sold three small wontons for one yuan and took only cash.

The habit runs through the neighboring cities. In Wuxi, Zhang Jianping writes, the morning means xiaolongbao, noodles and wontons rather than Shanghai’s four breakfast kings; one tiny shop sold hand-pinched Anqing-style small wontons next door to a youtiao stall, so customers bought a fried stick while they waited and tore it into the bowl.

Sources [3][4][8][9]

06

Guangdong: yuntun, shrimp and dried flounder

Cantonese yuntun gave the world its word for the dish.

A visitor from Suzhou in Republican Guangzhou, in an account collected by Zhou Songfang, found the city’s yuntun “very different from ours.” There were fish-skin yuntun, whose wrappers were made from pounded fish, egg-skin yuntun with egg worked into the dough, and chicken yuntun; fillings were char siu, pork or egg; and the broth was boiled from dried flounder, pork tail bones and dried scallops, “a perfect flavor.” Dried flounder is still the signature. In the steamed yuntun of Guangzhou’s dai pai dong, dried-flounder powder is what gives the filling its fragrance, along with pork three parts fat to seven parts lean, cut fine and then roughly chopped so it keeps some texture.

Cantonese wrappers are made with alkaline water, which makes them yellowish and springy; the ones used for steamed yuntun are about 8 cm square, folded corner to corner and then pinched at the sides. Guangzhou eats yuntun in soup, deep-fried, steamed and above all with thin egg noodles, which has its own page on the atlas. Because Cantonese restaurants dominated Chinese food abroad for a century, the Cantonese name became the English one, and the small shrimp-and-pork yuntun became what most of the world pictures as a wonton.

Sources [7][8][10]

07

Sichuan: chaoshou in chili oil

In Chengdu the wonton is chaoshou, “folded hands,” and its most famous shop is not named after anyone.

Many famous Chengdu snack shops carry their founder’s surname, but Long Chaoshou does not. Yuan Tingdong explains that it was started in 1941 by Zhang Guangwu and several friends, who planned it in a teahouse and chose 龙, “dragon,” because in wartime it promised luck, like a dragon reaching water. It grew into the city’s best-known snack restaurant. The traditional standard Yuan describes is exacting: a wrapper thin enough to read a newspaper through, and pork stripped of sinew and pounded with the back of the cleaver rather than chopped with the edge. In its banquet form a bowl holds only four small chaoshou on a base of specially simmered stock, meant for tasting rather than filling up.

The everyday versions are bigger. In 2022 the main restaurant served large bowls of ten for 19 yuan in three styles: clear broth made from pork bones, red chili oil, and dry with ground chili, peanuts and sesame. Four people ate a spread of chaoshou, dan dan noodles at 13 yuan and other snacks for 103 yuan. Red-oil chaoshou are the ones Sichuan restaurants across China copy: boiled wontons tipped into a bowl of chili oil, soy sauce, a little sugar and garlic.

Sources [5][11]

08

Making wontons at home

The two rules are a saltier filling than for jiaozi and a seasoned bowl waiting before the wontons are cooked.

Wonton wrappers are sold fresh in Chinese markets and supermarkets, in thicker squares for big wontons and very thin ones for small wontons. The method below is the Shanghai pork and vegetable kind, with the bowls set up the way many home cooks do it.

Sources [8][12]

09

Wontons abroad

Outside China the wonton most people know is Cantonese, or something invented in America.

The wonton soup of overseas Chinese restaurants is the Cantonese model: small pork or pork-and-shrimp wontons in a light broth, sometimes with noodles or greens. Fuchsia Dunlop also points to a purely American offspring: deep-fried small wontons filled with cream cheese, called crab rangoon, which became as standard on American Chinese menus as sweet and sour pork balls in Britain. Neither the Shanghai big wonton nor the Sichuan chaoshou is common abroad, which is a good reason to order them in China.

Sources [6]

10

What wontons cost

Wontons are one of the cheapest hot meals in China.

In 2022 three small wontons still cost one yuan at a wood-fired wonton shop in Shanghai, while a bowl of ten chaoshou at Long Chaoshou’s main restaurant in Chengdu was 19 yuan.

Sources [9][10][11]

11

More on the atlas

Related dumplings and bowls.