by carol huang
Thousands of vats of hot pot seasoning thicken the air around Nie Ganru’s home with a miasma of chilli as flame-red paste, thick with oil, bakes in the sun.
Nie lives and effectively breathes hot pot, the spicy cook-it-yourself communal Chinese meal that made his fortune, and has built a pot-shaped six-storey museum dedicated to the dish.
Now his home town, the megalopolis of Chongqing, is seeking national and ultimately global recognition for the food.
“It’s numbing, it’s hot, it’s very flavourful, it has an aroma that hits you in the face, and that’s why everybody likes it,” says the 70-year-old tycoon, who eats it about every other day.
Seated at a wooden table crowded with dipping options, Nie plunks capsules of duck blood into a simmering broth teeming with oil, chillies and hot and numbing Szechuan peppers. Others ladle out oil-coated slices of lotus root and cool their tongues with pickled vegetables.
“Everyone gathers around a table to eat and it’s harmonious, it’s lively, it’s warm – it’s a great environment,” he says.
The museum houses hundreds of pots Nie has collected over more than a decade, including one supposedly used in the palace of the Qing dynasty Qianlong Emperor in the 1700s and another dating to the Western Zhou dynasty of 1046 to 771 BCE.
