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very early morning and in the evening, when Chinese people flock to the colourful food markets that suddenly appear on every corner, they pass each other in the street with the greeting ‘ Ni mai cai qu? ’ (‘Are you going to buy vegetables?’).
    It was one of my Chinese teachers in Beijing, Hong Yun, a slender young graduate from Bei Da University, who enlightened me about cai and cai . She was explaining how Chinese people greet each other. The quaint phrase ‘ ni hao ’ ( literally, ‘you good’) means hello, but the Chinese use a variety of phrases depending on the time of day or the situation. ‘Have you eaten yet?’, as we have seen, is the usual acknowledgement around lunch-time. A man passing a neighbour on the way to work usually greets him with,‘Are you going to work?’, to which the reply is, ‘Going to work,’ spoken in a grunting sort of way, with a ‘humph’ at the end. In the late afternoon a similar exchange: ‘Are you going home?’ is answered by ‘Going home, humph. ’ Many Chinese people start the day with a trip to the zao shi or early morning market, when they say to each other ‘ Ni mai cai qu? ’ (‘Are you going to buy vegetables?’).
    The Chinese character cai (vegetable) also means a dish of food. Understand this and you will have unearthed the second, and possibly the most important, secret of the Chinese diet. When I first noticed the two uses of the word cai I assumed that I had made a mistake. Chinese is tonal, which means that when a word is pronounced with a flat tone, or with an upward inflection, or an up-and-down inflection, or a downward one, it has completely different meanings even though it sounds very similar to the untrained ear. The confusion between the spoken word, the tones, and the underlying Chinese characters is the biggest challenge for the student of Chinese, and even sometimes the Chinese themselves.
    The cai that means vegetables is pronounced with the same downwards inflection as that which means a dish of food. Some Chinese words are pronounced the same but written differently, but cai is written in exactly the same way, whether it is used to describe a vegetable in the generic sense or a dish of cooked food. Most Chinese characters are split into two parts, the first part, known as the radical, often gives a clue to the meaning of the word, while the remainder of the character might hint at the pronunciation. Cai has the grass radical, signifying that it is something that grows, while the lower part of the written character is indicative of the ai (pronounced ‘I’) sound.
    Living among the Chinese and witnessing the tricycles overflowing with greenery, and the locals returning from the market every morning with their loaded bags soon makes it clear that this double meaning is no coincidence. And sampling Chinese vegetable dishes confirms the fact that vegetables can be a meal in their own right, with small amounts of protein foods used to add interest.
    This is not to say that the Chinese do not eat meat: on the contrary, meat tends to be prized and valued, and there is no part of animal, fish or fowl that a Chinese chef cannot turn into a feast. The everyday diet, however, is based for the most part around vegetable dishes.
    Frequent visitors to Chinese restaurants or readers who have travelled in Asia may find this difficult to believe. Restaurants make their name and higher margins on meat and fish dishes and, because the same animal species are available across the globe whereas vegetable varieties vary greatly, the restaurant tradition has evolved this way. Most famous Chinese dishes are protein-based because these are the recipes that are usually recorded and passed on. Added to this, meat has a longer shelf life than most plant varieties, and is not seasonal. In ordinary Chinese homes, however, vegetables form the main dishes. Worthy of the same treatment as meat and fish, they are carefully prepared with slicing or dicing, interesting