An archaeology professor's crossover and breakthrough

Archaeologists have always given the impression that they do not eat the fireworks of the world, and their study of bronzes and tombs seems to have no connection with the current society.

An archaeologist decides to become a "short video food blogger" and delves into the market with the most smoke and fire, wondering how soup dumplings and ducks are born.

Step into the back kitchen

Under the heat, the guy shuttled back and forth with the cage drawer stacked almost a meter high. This is a steamed bun shop located in Suojin Community, Nanjing, with a large number of regular customers. There is a handwritten price list at the door, and the cheapest soup dumplings are 12 yuan per cage.

Facing the steam, the two silver-haired old ladies walked up to the owner of the bun shop, patted him on the shoulder, and told him to treat him next time. The boss smiled and agreed: "Go slowly, treat yourself." ”

A "fresh face" wearing a beige baseball cap and carrying a light backpack stood next to the boss, observing the boss talking and laughing with the guests, and also smiling along with the chin. With his arms in front of him, he looked restrained with a literati spirit.

The man carrying the backpack was Zhang Liangren, 55, a professor of archaeology at Nanjing University. In the era of short videos, he also joined the trendy trend in his spare time, becoming a Douyin food blogger, and visiting the store with more than 2 million netizens. The work of archaeologists is often driven by a strong curiosity, a habit that Zhang Liangren maintained after becoming a food blogger. Whenever he went to a store, he would always chat with the owner for a few days, asking them where they were from and why they came here to open a store. He likes to look for small shops in the community and observe the relationship between the shopkeeper and the residents of the neighborhood.

The store is not large, and diners are crammed into a few square meters of room to eat, and there are also a few tables outside the house. The boss went outside to sit at Zhang Liangren's table and chatted with him about the busyness of waking up every morning. "Wake up at five o'clock and go to the store and make noodles. "His steamed bun shop always unfolds a picture of market life full of fireworks in the early morning. Every day at around 5:40, the bun shop welcomes the first customers, including people who have been playing mahjong all night and are ready to go home, elderly people who are exercising in the morning, and taxi drivers. As the cage drawer moved, the scroll continued to add brushes.

图 | 张良仁在包子铺与老板交流

The human flavors of a small restaurant are remembered by Zhang Liangren, and they are also likely to be filmed in the video afterwards and perceived by the audience. Unlike most food bloggers, Zhang Liangren is not very keen on showing an appetizing expression and feasting pictures to the camera, nor is he like some chef-turned-bloggers who can start from the taste and method of the dish, and analyze it in an authentic way.

In Zhang Liangren's Douyin videos, "eating" is often just a short link, and the unique feature is the voiceover of the video. He will combine his professional knowledge and experience to explain the historical background behind the various foods in ordinary people's lives.

In the shot, Zhang Liangren gently picked up a steamer on the dining table to play, and outside the screen, he slowly explained: The steamer has a history of nearly 7,000 years and was made of pottery and bronze before. The screen switches to the data image, and he continues: "My colleague found a mural of an ancient kitchen in an Eastern Han Dynasty tomb in Dahu Pavilion, Mi County, Henan Province, with a steamer inside. ”

The video of the visit to the soup dumpling shop was posted on Douyin and received 87,000 likes. Some netizens praised and said: "It's really comfortable to watch learned people shoot videos", and felt that they had learned knowledge while watching video entertainment.

Figure | Zhang Liangren's Douyin homepage

Today, Zhang Liangren's footprints are all over the city of Nanjing. He found that many shopkeepers had come to Nanjing from other places to make a living, and he was attracted by Nanjing's inclusiveness, and he had never heard from shopkeepers from other places about being ostracized. The owner of this soup dumpling is a native of Wuhu, Anhui Province, who was an apprentice in Shanghai in his early years, and later felt that life in Nanjing was more harmonious and comfortable, so he opened the shop in Nanjing, which has been open for 20 years.

Another owner from Anhui Province has tried to open a variety of restaurants, and in the last two years, he has chosen to cook his hometown cuisine. Zhang Liangren thought that he had often heard people ridicule Nanjing as "Huijing" before, and felt that the boss's experience of going around was very interesting.

In the Lu restaurant in the area of Mingyang Street in Qinhuai District, Zhang Liangren ate nine turns of large intestine and roasted sea cucumber. He inquired into the back kitchen of the restaurant and learned that the neighborhood was a settlement for Shandong people, and this small restaurant became a resting place for Shandong people who wandered in Nanjing. However, in order to entertain local guests in Nanjing at the same time, the boss has somewhat improved the dishes and reduced the amount of soy sauce.

With his residence as the center of the circle and constantly expanding the radius of exploring the vicinity, Zhang Liangren perceives the texture of a city in the process of shooting a video of Douyin to visit the store. Shaanxi people who eat noodles, Shandong people who eat Shandong cuisine, and Anhui people who eat stinky mandarin fish, he originally only had a vague impression of the population composition of this immigrant city, but now he has more real feelings in face-to-face communication.

In the process of visiting the store, he also got to know some folk masters and strange people. Once, when he visited a restaurant with antique decoration, the owner told him that he wanted to completely reproduce the Dongpo meat from the ancient book. To do this, the owner rummaged through history books to study recipes, buy the best ingredients, and worked on recipes with the chef. Although he is a professor of archaeology, Zhang Liangren has never been involved in the field of food archaeology before. Listening to the boss talk about his practice of reading books such as "Tokyo Menghualu", "Youyang Miscellaneous" and Ming and Qing Notes to study Dongpo meat, he was quite admired.

From an archaeology professor to a food blogger, Zhang Liangren is the first person in China. Such a choice is related to his academic situation. After the 80s of the last century, he was the first scholar in China to engage in foreign archaeology. In China, there are very few Chinese scholars who study foreign archaeology, and it is difficult to apply for research funding because of the lack of direct counterparts.

Lacking funds for many years, Zhang Liangren thought of engaging in new media, shooting short videos to increase the public's attention to foreign archaeology, and also thought that he might be able to obtain some economic income to subsidize archaeological research.

After being introduced, he chose a video team to work with. At first, Zhang Liangren only wanted to talk about archaeology in the video, but the team members found the format relatively boring and difficult to arouse the interest of readers. At the meeting, the choreographer proposed Zhang Liangren to be a "food blogger", visit the restaurant in Nanjing to taste the food, and then explain the archaeological and historical knowledge behind it by the food on the table.

Previously, many of the food bloggers in Zhang Liangren's memory were large pots of food in front of them and swallowed in large gulps, which in his opinion was neither beautiful nor healthy. Thinking about his colleagues' suggestions, he thought that in recent years, some gourmets on Douyin who have taste and fine tasting one or two dishes are also very popular, and from food can be extended to agriculture, animal husbandry and many other topics, there is a lot of archaeological knowledge to tell, Zhang Liangren decided to try.

Since then, Zhang Liangren has been attending classes at NTU every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, holding group meetings for graduate students, and recording store visits in the streets and alleys of Nanjing at other times. The food is fresh and attractive, and Zhang Liangren's historical knowledge is vivid and interesting, and it quickly gained people's attention when posted on Douyin. From July 2023 to the present, more than 2 million people have followed Zhang Liangren on Douyin after watching his store visit video.

To a certain extent, what Zhang Liangren is doing is to show his neighborhood to the public, and also show the traces of ancient life hidden behind ordinary food. At the snail noodle shop near the school, stirring the spicy soup powder, he rambled about the snails unearthed from ancient tombs.

Zhang Liangren has traveled to Gansu and Xinjiang many times to participate in archaeological excavations and academic conferences, and the locals slaughter sheep to entertain guests, and he gradually fell in love with eating barbecue. After coming to Nanjing, he was recommended by a student to go to a nearby Turkish-owned barbecue restaurant several times, and he liked it very much. Later, he also went there to shoot a video of the store visit. Grilled meats, crepes and onions are served, long and wide steel skewers filled with pieces of meat dressed in them, accompanied by Zhang Liangren's movements as they are brought off, and in the voiceover he explains the history of Turkey from skewers to rotisserie.

Return from afar

Zhang Liangren was born in the countryside of Chun'an, Hangzhou. In 1987, he was admitted to Peking University from the village high school, becoming the farthest wave of young people in the village, and once caused a sensation in the entire county. From the current point of view, he is considered a "small-town problem-solver", but Zhang Liangren feels that he is far from having the current student "volume", but he is only a little harder than others.

Looking back now, he felt that his only advantage was that his brother worked in the county and bought him teaching aids in Haidian, Beijing. Life was so closed back then. A book from afar can change the fate of a teenager.

Zhang Liangren's high school is near the village, with no shops, factories or even roads around, no outsiders passing by, and the students only face each other and their teachers every day. In the closed environment, information is not circulated, Zhang Liangren did not have the opportunity to develop interests in the three years of high school, and he was even more ignorant of the major of university. A teacher foresaw the trend of China's economic take-off and helped him choose an international finance major. As a result, he missed the college entrance examination by a few points, and he accepted the transfer to the archaeology major.

In college, he was confused. His knowledge was difficult, and he wrote a string of pottery according to the board calligraphy, not knowing what the connection between these knowledge and his own life was. After graduating from work, he participated in field excavations, and wrote a large-scale thesis for the first time in graduate school, and he gradually understood that this job, like thousands of other jobs, does not necessarily have a clear connection with real life, but what he studies is actually related to reality, such as studying ancient history, he will have a clearer understanding of the laws of social development.

After getting started, new troubles followed. He began to feel that it was difficult to come up with new ideas in Chinese archaeology, and many topics had already been studied by his predecessors. At the beginning of the millennium, Zhang Liangren decided to go to the United States to study for a doctorate and study foreign archaeology.

At the beginning of his Ph.D. at UCLA, he and his supervisor determined the direction of his future research: Russian archaeology, because Russia shares a border with China and has a lot of historical contacts with China. He learned Russian from scratch and traveled to Russia many times to search for materials, rummaging through the library of the Novosibirsk Institute of Archaeology and copying useful information when he saw it. When Zhang Liangren graduated, he consigned these materials back to China, packed more than 100 boxes in total, and spent more than 2,000 US dollars.

Figure | Years of research fill the office

The experience of studying abroad broke Zhang Liangren's bottleneck. His doctoral dissertation was a comparative study of the Bronze Age in Russia and China, analyzing why the level of social development in the two regions of the same era was so different, with the Shang Dynasty in China already entering the national phase, while Russia was still in the tribal stage, with a small population and much simpler architecture. He concluded that the Shang dynasty developed agriculture, while Russia was dominated by animal husbandry. Agriculture led to a population boom, which in turn led to political and cultural development.

Throughout the young adulthood, Zhang Liangren was always running to distant places. From 2015 to 2019, he spent one to two months a year taking students to Iran or Russia for archaeological excavations.

Previously, Zhang Liangren had devoted most of his energy to academics, and occasionally noticed the "nearby". In a melting pot of nationalities like the United States, he observed the diversity of people in the city on his way to and from school, and found that Los Angeles was predominantly Mexican, while New York was predominantly black. In Iran, he saw many old cafes on the streets, and it was natural to think that Iran had close relations with France in the 19th century, and Tehran, the capital of Iran, was known as "Little Paris" and was heavily influenced by Western culture. The women on the street wear bikinis, perm their hair, go to the pool, play in the pool, and drink coffee. Now these are gone, and the traces that remain are the common French cars, cafés and salad habits on the streets.

Figure | Zhang Liangren conducts archaeological work in Russia

In recent years, under the constraints of funding and the epidemic, Zhang Liangren has not been able to explore far away. The days are full of papers and materials in front of me, and in addition to attending classes in school, I read papers and write papers in the office.

His family lives in the faculty community opposite NTU, and he commutes to work by bicycle every day, at two o'clock and one line, and eats basically in the cafeteria. During the repetitive journey, he would only deliberately observe the tired elementary school students who were carrying heavy school bags when he passed by them. In addition, he has little contact with the neighborhood.

Sometimes he would go to the food court at the entrance of the community to buy food. There were always NTU students gathered in the nearby shop, and he felt embarrassed and didn't want to stay in the store longer.

In the past, he spent a lot of energy focusing on the distance, geographically, and temporally. Now, because of his work as a food blogger, details that he had never thought about in close proximity began to flock to him.

After living on campus and faculty for nearly ten years, he stepped into the well-known food street in the center of Nanjing for the first time, and learned a lot about "eating". During a visit to the factory where the duck is made, the owner explained in detail the steps of making the duck, down to the water temperature at each step of the cooking process. He recalls these steps with a radiant glow.

Be an archaeologist by your side

After becoming a university teacher, Zhang Liangren thought of his ignorance when he first studied archaeology, and considered adding archaeological knowledge to his junior course to real life to arouse the interest of new students. He talked about the geographical characteristics of Japan's many volcanoes from the case of archaeological fraud in Japan: because of the large amount of volcanic ash, many cultural relics cannot be preserved, which provides space for fraud. From Robinson Crusoe's story of Robinson's domestication of wild goats and wheat cultivation, he deduces the origins of agriculture in the Near East.

When he taught this course, he saw that the students were playing less with their mobile phones, their expressions were focused, and they would laugh when they heard interesting content.

Making short videos also requires such connections. For each video, after the director decides on the topic, the young people of the team first search for basic historical materials, write a script, and hand it over to Zhang Liangren. Zhang Liangren will review the accuracy of the knowledge in the script, and on this basis, add some more in-depth archaeological knowledge. In a video about the shipwreck Nanhai No. 1, the screenwriter combed through the gold belts and snake bones unearthed from the shipwreck, and then Zhang Liangren added details about the excavation.

During an interview shooting, in order to show the reporter the "history of the steamer" that could not be searched on the knowledge network, he stepped on the ladder in the office and dug out a thick archaeological book from the bookcase - "The Discovery and Research of Yin Ruins".

Figure | In the video, Zhang Liangren explained the history of the steamer to netizens

Gradually, he will also develop some topics on his own. During the Spring Festival this year, he went to the United States to visit relatives and friends, and decided to visit a few stores in the United States by himself. He was reminded of the improved Chinese food "Panda Fast Food" that became popular in the United States. When he was a student, he had also seen panda fast food on the streets, but he rarely dabbled in it because its taste was too western.

Changing his identity, he went to the restaurant with questions, wanting to find out how Chinese food developed in the United States and how it integrated into American society. Looking for information, Zhang Liangren found that Panda Fast Food has developed rapidly in recent years and has more than 2,000 branches. He even further thought that maybe he could also run a Chinese restaurant abroad in the future and design a few distinctive dishes. Such thoughts had rarely crossed his mind before. In the past, "doing academics" and "life" were two separate parts, and there was no intersection, and he devoted most of his energy to academics.

For now, he plans to visit some overseas restaurants in the future, and use his academic and life experience accumulated in the United States, Russia, and Iran.

Figure | Zhang Liangren visited Panda Fast Food in the United States

Now, the identity of a food blogger has also fed Zhang Liangren's academic career. The comments from netizens will give him a lot of academic inspiration. Once, a netizen asked him: When did "stir-fry" appear. This question is worth pondering, and it is necessary to explore when the ancients minced whole pieces of meat during cooking, and when they began to transition from eating barbecued meat and drinking meat soup to stir-frying. He is already asking students to explore topics about food archaeology, and may design a course specifically for food archaeology in the future.

Before becoming a blogger visiting a store, Zhang Liangren once felt that "the neighborhood is disappearing", because people are more and more fond of huddled at home, and shopping can be solved from the Internet. After becoming a short video blogger, Zhang Liangrentan's shop is mainly a fly restaurant hidden in the community, and his actions have invisibly aroused people's interest in returning to local life and building connections with the neighborhood. After watching his video, many netizens visited the shop and felt the fireworks in the city.

On Douyin, there are also many bloggers who pay attention to local life and make authentic and interesting videos of visiting stores. According to the 2023 Douyin Life Service Annual Data Report, the number of store visitors increased by 2.89 times that year, more than 580,000 people relied on store visits to obtain stable income, the total transaction volume of influencers increased by more than 2 times, and the number of influencers helped physical merchants increase their income by 94.6 billion.

The owner of the soup dumpling shop once lamented to Zhang Liangren that the short video has spread widely, and many students come to taste the soup dumplings in the name of Professor Zhang. When many new customers arrive, they are first curious about the process of making soup dumplings. The semi-open kitchen is in front of the shop, and when you get closer, you can see the whole process of the boss and his buddies rolling dough, stuffing, and making buns.

There are six communities in Suojin Village, where the store is located, and many residents are regular customers of the bun shop for 20 years. A middle-aged woman said that she had been eating in the store for more than ten years, and that she had been "very good at this bite" since she went to college. Her grandmother used to make soup dumplings, and after her grandmother passed away, she tasted the taste of "old people" at this shop.

In the winter of 2023, Zhang Liangren revisited this soup dumpling shop. The cage drawer that had just come out of the pot was steaming, and Zhang Liangren picked up a soup dumpling and dipped it in vinegar and chili oil and sent it to his mouth, his face was satisfied. Last time, due to the shooting of the picture, the entrance of the bun was already cold, but this time he ate it while it was hot, and the taste was good. After eating, he went to the door of the store and chatted with the boss again.

"Induction" is probably the habit of professors. He analyzed the composition of "fireworks" with the boss: a small shop that serves the common people, and there are regular customers in and out. The most important thing is that the boss communicates with the regular customers and establishes a harmonious neighborhood relationship.

- END -

Written by | Tong Chang

Edit | Wen Lihong