Where happiness tastes sour

In Huichang, Jiangxi province, summer rain arrives without warning — sudden, heavy and absolute. By the time I stepped into Old Tree Cold Bar, one of the county's most beloved snack shops, the storm had just passed. The pavement was still slick, and rainwater pooled on the empty plastic tables outside.

Business is always slow when it rains, the owner, Zhong Lanping, told me with a shrug. She seemed used to it.

The shop sits deep inside a residential alley, tucked between aging apartment blocks, the kind of place you would almost never find without a local guide. Its name suggests shade and roots, yet there isn't a tree in sight. Huichang's famous twin banyans in the theater district are a five-minute walk away.

Ordering here doesn't begin with a menu. Instead, it starts with a gesture: pointing at trays of prepared dishes lined across the counter.

The snacks are divided into cold and hot dishes. The cold offerings include deep-fried eggplant and sweet potato, chilled taro and dried tofu. The hot dishes range from beef and chicken soups to steamed meatballs wrapped in sweet potato starch, and dumpling-like cakes made from mugwort leaves and glutinous rice. Only locals can name them all correctly.

Zhong has run the shop for nearly 20 years. Counting both local specialties and recipes she picked up elsewhere, she estimates she makes nearly 100 kinds of snacks — far more than what's listed on the wall. But I had come for one thing: suanshui, literally, "sour water".

I had heard of tangshui, the cooling sweet soups of southern China. But sour water?

In the long, damp, plum-rain season of southern China, when the air is thick enough to kill your appetite, the mere thought of something sour feels enough to wake the taste buds.

Near the entrance, a metal pot simmered, clouded with pale broth and steam. Inside floated baby taro, bamboo shoots and radish — humble vegetables that are easy to find in the surrounding hills and fields.

Enduring appeal

When I told Zhong I wanted to try it, she muttered something in the local dialect and assembled a cautious sampler: a little of everything in a small bowl, topped with chopped scallions and dried chili.

"Out-of-towners don't always like it," she said. "Better to see if you can handle the taste first."

I braced myself for vinegar-level aggression. But the sourness, when it came, was unexpectedly gentle and round.

The acid gives taro, a type of food that usually has little personality of its own, an unexpected spark. Chewing it feels almost like biting into a thundercloud: soft and sticky, yet alive with tiny bursts of energy striking against the roof of your mouth. The bamboo shoots and radish are just as layered, though in different ways. Locals, Zhong said, often drink the broth down to the last drop.

The secret, she explained, lies in the liquid.

In rural Huichang, nearly every household once kept a clay jar of pickles by the door. The broth for suanshui comes from that fermenting water. But unlike pickles, where vegetables are left to sour in the liquid, suanshui uses the fermented brine to cook fresh vegetables directly.

Like many enduring dishes, it comes with a legend. During the Tang Dynasty (618-907), a starving young monk collapsed while begging for food. An elderly woman rescued him, but had nothing at home except taro and radish — and fetching fresh water meant walking too far. So she improvised, boiling the vegetables in the sour brine from her pickle jar. The monk survived, and later sold the dish on the street, earning the nickname "the Sour Water Monk".

Whether the story is true hardly matters. In Huichang, suanshui feels indispensable.

"If you open a snack shop here, you have to sell it," Zhong said."Eighty or 90 percent of people in Huichang love sour water."

She learned the craft from her mother. As a child, Zhong watched her mother sell the snacks outside schools, earning enough to keep the family afloat.

Later, Zhong left Huichang with her husband to work in Zhejiang province. But homesickness, she said, always tasted like sour water.

"The first thing I'd do after getting off the train was come straight here," she told me. "If I didn't eat it, I couldn't sleep properly."

In 2007, after the birth of her first daughter, Zhong and her husband returned home and took over a snack shop near the banyan trees. They kept the original name — Old Tree Cold Bar — even after relocating.