There's soya sauce and then there's real soya sauce. Tsang He Wan, 74, makes real Soya sauce, the dark, viscous kind the great Chinese chefs used thousands of years ago, known as "black gold" when Dutch merchants brought it to the kitchens of Sun King Louis XIV in late 17th century Versailles.
In a small factory in Hong Kong's rural outskirts, she is one of the last people preparing the sauce to the ancient formula.
When she dies, she says, perhaps it will die with her. She is unwilling to see it simply commercialised without respect. A biochemist from China, Tsang learnt the secret art from one of the last soya sauce masters in the 1950s, before Mao Seedling's chaotic Cultural Revolution put an end to such traditions.
"When I die, this will get lost," she said at her company factory, I-Ho-Yuan Food Product Ltd. "There is nobody interested enough in soya sauce with the necessary scientific knowledge."
Her thick sweetish sauce is known to bring out the best tastes from food, particularly when used for boiling meat.
It has been served at banquets for Chinese Communist leaders and found favour among gourmets in places as far away as Japan, and France.
The best soya sauce is used in moderation.
It has similar culinary pedigrees to such ancient condiments as the famed fish sauce of the Roman Mediterranean world, the detailed recipes for which were lost. Outside her office, the ground is lined with round ceramic jugs and square concrete boxes in which soyabeans, the base ingredient, ferment for up to a year and more.
Tsang says the secret lies in the fine chemical balance of the fermentation and in spotting selected beans with the right micro-organisms in a room where humidity and temperature are under strict control.
Dipping her fingers to test the sticky mixture of soyabeans, salt and wheat, the tall old woman said: "I am good at technology, though I am not strong in business development."
With the help of two assistants, Tsang produces about 20 tonnes of sauce each month. After fermentation, it is cooked on a slow wood fire before being funnelled manually into bottles.
Historians believe the Chinese invented soya sauce some 2,500 years ago, making the liquid seasoning from the salty paste of fermented grain.
Buddhists, who were vegetarians and shunned meat-based sauces, developed it.
But Tsang said that during the Cultural Revolution, China lost most of the recipes which soya masters had passed down through the generations.
Some recipes were recovered afterwards from Japan, which had taken them from China in the 13th century, but they had been modified to suit Japanese tastes.
Even the best Japanese soya sauce is not as thick, being more suited to raw fish than meats.
Born the fourth of seven children to a chemistry professor, Tsang studied biology, chemistry and physiology in Xiamen, a coastal city in the southern province of Fijian.
In the 1950s, she joined Amy Corp in Hong Kong, a food giant specialising in Chinese products.
She said she acquired the soya formula from Young Da San, the soya master at Amy whom the company had brought from Xiamen.
As a young woman, she became friends with Young, a proud man in his 80s who turned away other high-paid scientists or apprentices.
"He let me stay with him and watch him making the sauce because I respected him, treated him with good tea and listened to his stories," she said. "I treated him with my true heart."
Each evening, she said, she went back to the laboratory and experimented until she deciphered the formula.
With support from a wealthy family friend, Tsang launched her own soya sauce business in 1974. Her husband fell ill, and she had to support her two boys. "It would have been quite expensive to start a canning factory," she said.
Soon her business took off and she was asked to advise various companies on setting up soya sauce factories in countries as far afield as Australia, the United States and the Philippines.
Once, she turned down an invitation to head a project in Houston, Texas. Her sick husband preferred to stay in Hong Kong.
Tsang may not pass on the recipe, and seems more concerned these days in spending her evenings in the kitchen, extracting Chinese medicines from plants, fungus or insects as a hobby.
Tsang said that, although several companies wanted to learn the soya sauce method, they had no sincerity. "I am a researcher more than a businesswoman, and money is not everything."
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