First discovered on a Malay desert island
In historical records, the first person who introduced swallow’s nest to China was Admiral Cheng Ho during the Ming Dynasty. When Admiral Cheng Ho and his crew sailed through the Malacca Strait. Bird’s nest is not a new food fad. Its history dates all the way back to the 15th century when an admiral from the early Ming Dynasty encountered thunderstorms while sailing across the South-East Asian seas and got stranded on a Malay island. Lacking food supply, the admiral and his crew resorted to eating birds’ nests which they discovered on the cliffs.
According to historical records, people in China first started eating bird’s nest soup during the Ming Dynasty (1368 – 1644). Some reports say that it was the Chinese admiral Zheng He, a.k.a Laksamana Cheng Ho a.k.a the same guy in your history textbook, who brought edible bird’s nest back to China for the Emperor.
Admiral Zheng He was an explorer, diplomat, and fleet admiral during China’s early Ming dynasty in the 14th century. He was placed in charge of a huge fleet which he used to conduct many expeditions across the globe.
Zheng He’s fleets visited India, Arabia, the Horn of Africa as well as Southeast Asia, including Brunei, Thailand, Java and of course Malacca, dispensing and receiving goods along the way.
As the story goes, Admiral Zheng was sailing in the Southeast Asian seas when he encountered a storm that forced him to anchor at a Malay desert island. On the island, food was scarce. So, the admiral instructed his men to go out in search of something to feed the crew.
They reportedly came across some bird’s nests hidden on cliffs. Admiral Zheng ordered his men to pick and wash these nests, and then cook them into a stew to feed his sailors.
After eating this bird’s nest stew, the admiral and his men regained their strength and felt more energetic. This led to him realising bird’s nest as a type of superfood with various health benefits. So, he brought it back to China and presented it to the emperor.
Bird’s nest then became a delicacy enjoyed only by Chinese royal families. In modern times, bird’s nest has become more accessible to anyone as long as they can afford it. Currently, edible bird’s nest is a billion ringgit industry in Malaysia annually.
While the story seems to attribute Tanah Melayu as the Malay island where Zheng He found the bird’s nest, it’s hard to pinpoint the exact location, since the entire area was under the Malay archipelago at the time.
Also, traditionally, bird’s nests were found in Indonesia, which happens to be the world’s number one exporter of edible bird’s nests today. Malaysia is number three.
It is believed that Admiral Cheng Ho（郑和）from the Ming Dynasty is the first person in the world who ate bird nest. According to legend, during the 15th century, he and his crew encountered a thunderstorm while sailing across the South-East Asian Sea. They were stranded on a Malay island and had no food supply. Fortunately, they discovered bird’s nests on the cliff and consumed them to stop their hunger. Admiral Cheng Ho and his crew became energetic and regained health after having them for some time. He soon realized that bird’s nest is a superior food that provides various health benefits and brought them back as a gift for the emperor. Ever since then, bird’s nest has become a supplement with high nutritional value for general well-being in China.
Other writings also said that bird’s nest was the daily diet of Yang Kwei Fei and Empress Wu in the Tang Dynasty. It was also mentioned in the Tang Dynasty’s poem that bird’s nest is an exquisite dish for generals.
Bird’s Nest which was primarily known as Swallow Nest in the early days was first found during the Tang Dynasty (A.D. 618-907) back in China nearly 1500 years ago. According to many historical data, in the classical Chinese Medicine Book (本草綱目) about healthy food, swallow nest was imported into China from the Southeast Asian region more than 500 years ago, Admiral Cheng Ho (鄭和) brought the precious bird’s nest from Southeast Asia to the Chinese emperor. Since then bird’s nest has been traditionally used by Chinese royalties and ancient beauties to maintain their beauty and body wellness.
From the classic literary masterpiece heroine Lin Dai Yu (林黛玉) to the enchanting Empress Dowager Tsu His (慈禧) and even the famous traveling Emperor Qian Long (乾隆) of the Ching Dynasty have all been known to consume bird’s nest everyday for its health and beauty benefits. In fact, the Empress Dowager Tsu His dined on not just one, but seven types of bird’s nest dishes for breakfast to preserve her health and youth. Even Empress Wu Ze Tian (武則天) , the only female Empress in China, is believed to have drunk bird’s nest for its beauty and health benefits.
The medicinal benefits of bird’s nest have been carefully documented since it became a superior delicacy and was widely recognized as one of the four great tonic foods in the late Ming (1405-1433 AD) and early Ching (1644-1911 AD) Dynasties. In the medical classic Pen Tsao Feng Yuan (本草逢原), bird’s nest was listed as the most tractable and versatile of foods as “it nourishes the lungs and stops colds as it clears up the chest”. Because of its scarcity, bird’s nest was also seen as a demonstration of wealth and power and widely regarded as items of high value and prestige.
During the golden period in the Tang Dynasty’s era, only the family of the Emperor and his court officials had the privilege to consume this supreme delicacy. It was after the era of Emperors ended, that the common people were introduced to swallow nest, which it was now widely termed as bird’s nest. Since then, due to its rarity and rich in nutritional and historical values, demand and price for bird’s nest have remained sky high.
Chinese empire and bird’s nest soup
Around 1400 B.C., The Ming emperor’s envoy, Zheng He, visited the island chains of SOUTHEAST ASIA to enforce political alliance and trading relationships, initiating various trade, birds’ nest among them. Since the 17th century the importation from SOUTHEAST ASIA of bird’s nest to China entered local official records in China, showing it became a regular trade. Before the 19th century, birds’ nest was initially collected by indigenous peoples in various parts of Southeast Asia, traded in port cities by businessmen from different cultural background such as Malays, Arabs, and Chinese, and finally consumed by the Chinese. By the mid-19th century, although collecting was still conducted by the indigenous, the trade of birds’ nest and their processing gave way to a Chinese monopoly, when immigrants gradually moved inland to the production region, and provided the natives with Chinese industrial products at a highly competitive price, and sending bird’s nest back home served as a mean of immigrant remittance.
Colonial impacts and the birds’ nest trade
Significantly, it is true that Chinese trading for luxury food items precedes Western colonial forces, and mercantile contacts of the 18th and 19th centuries and the trading monopoly in luxury seafood had never fallen outside Chinese hands. However, it was the colonial forces that greatly transformed the ways and structures of commercial and migration networks, when European colonialists began to collaborate with Chinese emigrants to develop a worldwide trading system. Moreover, the demand for labor in mines and plantations all over the world, coupled with unstable political situations and social unrest in China within this period, led to an increasing number of Chinese immigrants to SOUTHEAST ASIA, America and Australia. In this picture, the originally “peripheral” of the Chinese world such as Hong Kong, Macau and other port cities along the coast of south China, have historically served as centers for foreign trade, emigration and foreign labor recruitment. It also explains the reasons of the great demand for birds’ nest in China, especially in southern China, during the Ming and Qing Dynasty.
Formation of the market
Bird’s nest trade and market formation in the 19th century went through three stages. In the 18th and early 19th century, Fujian Merchants took Xiamen as the center of overseas trade between Nanyang and China. With the fall of Chinese control over overseas trade, in the mid-19th century, the merchants of Fujian and Guangdong took Shanghai as the center of the entrepot trade, and formed a market organization composed of domestic trade and foreign trade. In the late 19th century, Teochew Merchant’s entrepot trade centered around Hong Kong was further derived from the development of an independent section in the trade network, i.e. bird’s nest processing. It concludes the rise and fall of modern Marine trade port in China, the changing division of labor between sailing boat and steamship, changing trend and path of immigration, along the development of manufacture, constitutes the motivation for this historical development.
Commerce in early modern empires, and nation-states during colonial expansion, stimulated the circulation of food and migratory populations beyond regional or national boundaries. The Chinese diaspora around the world, especially during the past five centuries in SOUTHEAST ASIA, has contributed to the current status of Chinese foodways.
