Beijing After Dark: What the Night Market Teaches You

Entomophagy, the eating of insects, is practised across a large portion of the world and has been for most of human history. The parts of the world that don’t do it are, broadly, the parts that could afford to develop protein sources that required less catching. China has a long record of insect consumption that runs through its culinary literature from the earliest texts, and the specific insects available at Donghuamen, the silkworm pupae, the water beetles, the scorpions and the cicadas, reflect regional traditions that have different specific geographies and different specific histories. The scorpion, in particular, has a history in Chinese medicine as well as in cooking, where it has been used for centuries in compounds for treating convulsive disorders, which is the kind of medical application that makes a certain amount of sense when you understand that scorpion venom contains peptides that have actual pharmacological properties, something that contemporary research continues to investigate.

None of this is what you think about while eating a scorpion at ten o’clock at night in Beijing. What you think about is whether to go back for another one, and the answer we arrived at was yes, and also whether to try the sea horse, and the answer we arrived at for that was no, not because of squeamishness but because it looked like something that had been dried for considerably longer than was ideal.

Beijing after dark is a different city from Beijing in the day, which is itself a different experience from most other cities. The hutongs, the old alleyway neighbourhoods that survive in decreasing numbers inside the ring roads, take on a different quality in the evening, the courtyard houses lit from within, the sound of cooking and conversation coming over the walls, the narrowness of the lanes creating a scale that the daytime city, with its vast boulevards and Soviet-influenced institutional architecture, entirely abandons. The hutong system dates from the Yuan dynasty, the Mongol period of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and the word itself is Mongolian, meaning a lane or alleyway formed by rows of courtyard residences. Beijing’s hutongs were at their most extensive in the eighteenth century during the Qing dynasty, when the city’s population had grown enough to require an enormous residential network. Since the 1950s the hutongs have been progressively demolished as the city has expanded, and since the 1990s the rate of demolition has accelerated to match the pace of development. By 2011 a significant fraction of what existed in 1950 had already gone.

The Harmony Hotel, where I had been staying, was itself a converted hutong courtyard house, the kind of building that in another decade might no longer exist in the form in which I encountered it. Ashley, who had arrived before me and established himself as the hostel’s unofficial welcome committee, had pointed this out on my first night with the quiet authority of someone who has been somewhere long enough to develop opinions about what it used to be and what it is becoming.

We went back to the market the following evening for more scorpions. The vendor recognised us. He held one up and it flexed its tail and we nodded. Some experiences are worth repeating.