历史时期中国甜食的空间格局及其成因研究

A Historical Study of the Spatial Pattern of Chinese Sweet Foods and its Causes

中国的甜食不但历史悠久,且种类繁多。宋代以前,甜食在地域上形成了“北人嗜甘”的格局,其后逐渐演变成甜度“东高西低”。到了清代,北京、山东、黑龙江、江苏、浙江、福建、广东、湖南、湖北、四川、云南等地都有过比较突出的食甜表现。近代中国实际上形成了三个层次的甜食区域,分别是长江中下游和东南沿海重度甜食区、北方中度甜食区、长江中上游轻度甜食区,大致呈现出甜度“东高西低”或“东甜北咸”的分布趋势。从自然环境和社会人文影响因素来看,食甜分布格局的形成和变化与糖类作物种类分布、区域气候湿度、区域经济发展水平有明显关系。而近两千年来的食甜格局转变,与中国政治经济文化重心的东移南迁有相当大的关系,食甜重心往往与经济文化重心相重合。

Chinese sweet foods have not only a long history, but also a wide variety. Before the Song dynasty, the pattern was “the northerners preferred sweet foods”. In the Qing dynasty, people in Beijing, Shandong, Heilongjiang, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, Guangdong, Hunan, Hubei, Sichuan, Yunnan and other places had a preference for sweet foods to a certain extent. Early modern China saw three areas with different preference for sweet foods: 1. The people in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River and the southeast coastal region had the strongest desire for sweet foods;those in north China ranked second in terms of preference for sweet foods;those in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River had the least desire for sweet foods, thus more sweet foods in the east and less in the west, or more sweet foods in the east and more salty foods in the north. From the perspective of natural environments and socio-cultural factors, the formation and changes of the distribution pattern of sweet foods were obviously related to the distribution of sugar crops, regional climate and humidity as well as local economic development. It has also been evidenced that such changes in the preference for sweet foods in the past two thousand years were clearly related to the shift of the political, economic, and cultural center of China to the east and the south, a mirror of the Chinese history.