Eating after dark on Pozi Street

The street runs level and straight for about a kilometre, east from Huangxing South Road down to Xiangjiang Avenue and the river bank, and it has been part of the city's core since the Warring States period, more than two thousand years ago. Its current look is recent and deliberate. The whole street burned in the Wenxi Fire of November 1938 — Changsha's destruction by its own defenders — and was rebuilt after the war; in 1971 its upper and lower sections were merged with neighbouring lanes into the single Pozi Street of today. At the century's end the city demolished the street once more and rebuilt it in imitation Ming-and-Qing style, brick facades and upturned eaves, moving old brand-name firms back in to anchor the reopened frontages. The Qing gazetteer had already marked the spot: describing the salt merchants' autumn trade, it recorded that the city's busiest commercial stretch ran from the south gate offices up and down Pozi Street. Food is the current version of that trade. The street is officially a folk-and-famous-foods commercial street, the concentration point of Changsha's surviving century-old snack houses, and the city's own guidebooks name it, with the Nanmenkou quarter, as one of the two great snack streets.

The anchor is the Fire Palace (火宫殿), the best-known of those century-old food houses, standing on the snack street itself; the city's own account names the palace and the street together as the place where Changsha's old food brands concentrate. Around it, the restaurant world has been arguing for a century. By the end of the Qing, Changsha already sorted its Hunan-cuisine restaurants into two classes; in the early Republic the trade organised itself into named schools — the Dai school, the Sheng school, the Xiao school, the Zuyu school — each with its masters and partisans, a rivalry that fixed Hunan cooking's prestige in the city. The most storied kitchen of the age opened in 1913, when a cook thrown out of work by the revolution's abolition of official households joined a Hanlin scholar to found the Quyuan restaurant, hired four of the most famous Hunan cooks and, in the phrase of the time, astounded Changsha. That competitive, school-against-school scene is the tradition the Fire Palace consolidated on this street: many old kitchens under one roof and one name, selling the breakfast and supper foods the city had eaten for generations. On a summer night the palace's counters and the street outside work as one room, with the queue doing the sorting the schools once did.

The menu rewards a first-timer who reads it literally. Stinky tofu is the signature — black squares fried to a crust, listed among the classic dishes of the Xiang River style of Hunan cooking — sold at street stalls across the city and named by locals with affection. Around it come rice-flour noodles in soup, the sweet fried dough called sugar-oil baba, spicy crayfish, duck necks, and the long local catalogue of griddled and braised snacks. Chilli is the province's signature taste, and its history here is surprisingly shallow: the first local record of chilli planting dates only to 1684, in the Kangxi reign. Out of that late start grew a cuisine defined as 'dry hot' — fresh chillies used liberally, with shallots and garlic underneath — which its neighbours contrast with Sichuan's numbing-and-hot, and which leans on smoked, cured and fermented meats as a second register. Yet even in Changsha heat is a tool rather than the dish: by the traditional count only about a fifth of Hunan dishes are cooked to be strongly hot, and many use chilli only for its aroma. The hours are the final local trait. Crowds thicken after dark, and the street stays packed past midnight, because in Changsha the late supper is a civic institution rather than an afterthought.