Chopsticks have seasoned Sinosphere tables for three millennia
Chopsticks are matched equal-length sticks used as kitchen and eating tools across most of the Sinosphere for over three thousand years. Held in the dominant hand as finger extensions, they date at least to the Shang dynasty (1766–1122 BCE), with Sima Qian suggesting even earlier legendary use.
The oldest chopsticks found so far are six bronze sticks 26 centimetres long from the Ruins of Yin near Anyang, dated to about 1200 BC in the Shang dynasty and probably used for cooking. Early chopsticks stirred fires, served and picked up food rather than serving as eating tools, partly because millet porridge, the staple of North China before the Han, was eaten with spoons. As rice eating grew under the Han, chopsticks joined spoons at meals, and only in the Ming dynasty did they take over serving and eating completely, gaining the name kuaizi and their present shape.
The old character zhu gave way in speech to kuài, meaning quick, and the modern character adds a bamboo radical to that sound. English 'chopstick' may come from pidgin 'chop chop', meaning quickly. The earliest European mention is by the Portuguese writer Tomé Pires, in Malacca in 1515, who described Chinese diners holding the bowl near the mouth and eating with two sticks. Japanese calls them hashi, Korean jeotgarak, Vietnamese đũa and Mongolian savkh.
Table chopsticks run 23 to 26 centimetres, while cooking pairs reach 30 to 40 centimetres; Japanese kitchen ryōribashi are 30 centimetres or longer and handle hot food with one hand. Chinese and Vietnamese sticks tend to be blunt, Japanese ones sharp and pointed, and Korean ones often have flat handles. Dipping a wet wooden chopstick into oil tests frying temperature: gentle sizzling means ready, loud crackling too hot, silence too cool.
Bamboo and wood are cheap, grip well and conduct little heat, and nearly all cooking and disposable chopsticks use them, while plastic ones such as melamine wear well but are slippery and cannot take cooking heat. Han Chinese migrants carried chopsticks to Thailand, Myanmar, Malaysia, Singapore, Cambodia and Nepal, and a saying falsely credited to Mencius, that an upright man allows no knives on his table, is a modern addition to the classical line.
Source: Chopsticks
