Political forces from the Central Plains of China started to actively expand their territory southwards since the Eastern Han dynasty (25-220AD). Every time they crossed the Yangtze river and the mountains of the southeast, however, a large number of troops would fall victim to an unknown endemic fever, causing significant losses to the army in their invasion campaigns. “The disease originating in Lingnan (south of the mountains), ” wrote Chao Yuanfang, doctor erudite in the Sui Dynasty, “originates from a ‘poisonous fog’ that is present in the humid and warm water bodies in the mountains.” While here the behaviourism of the epidemic is analyzed as a product of the particularities of geography and climate, the idea of a ‘poisonous fog’ had more subjective implications for the broader society, transforming into a fear of the colonizing power towards the unknown south, and the intuition to disparage the people living there as intoxicated, thus inferior, humans.

As more expansion campaigns were carried out over the next millenium and integration was proved to be necessary, the ‘poisonous fog’ has conveniently slipped out of the main discourse of Chinese history. Today, the southern ‘barbarian’ land has become home to some of the biggest cultural and economic powerhouses in Southeast Asia. Yet the idea of geographical and climatic division lived on, becoming an intrinsic part of forming a modern cultural identity. One of the building blocks of Guangdong cuisine, for instance, is making soups with fresh ingredients of the season, believed to help regulate the systems in the body in relation to climatic conditions in Chinese medicine terms. In my culture, the act of making soups bears complex sociocultural meaning, transcending from a homemade defence mechanism into a subtle symbol of care for our loved ones.

When I was a kid, my mum would insist that I duly drink my soups and herbal medicine. She’d keep hammering me on how we people from the South need those to get rid of the toxins that threaten the wellbeing of our internal systems. I was lost in thought as I held my breath and gulped down that horrendous medicine: where in particular is this South that everybody talks about? And where is the North that opposes it? Who exactly draws these boundaries after all? And such are the questions I still don’t have an answer for.