吴华侠Wu Huaxia

A recipe kept for nearly three centuries is not held by a building. It is held by a pair of hands — and, in each generation, those hands belong to one person.

Today they belong to 吴华侠. As the eighth-generation keeper of Duyichu's shaomai, she still rolls the scalded wrapper each morning, laces its rim with the 走槌, and presses it into the twenty-four folds — one for each of the year's solar terms — that have defined a 都一处 shaomai since 1738. What the Qianlong Emperor tasted on a New Year's Eve in 1752 is, fold for fold, what she shapes today.

For carrying the craft forward she was elected a deputy to the National People's Congress and named a National Model Worker, and she holds the national China Pastry Golden Tripod Award. In 2008 the technique she keeps was entered on China's register of Intangible Cultural Heritage — the recipe made a nation's inheritance, and left in her keeping.

She teaches it the only way it can be taught: master to apprentice, hand over hand, at the counter of the Qianmen house — so that when these hands set it down, another pair will already know the twenty-four folds by heart.