Last month, friends visiting from Hong Kong brought me two tins of cookies from Jenny Bakery \u2013 a popular local treat I had somehow never tried in two decades of living in the city.<\/p>\n
When I finally opened one, the aroma caught me off guard: rich, buttery and instantly familiar. It smelled exactly like the coffee buns from the Malaysian bakery chain Rotiboy, which I used to eat far more often than I should admit.<\/p>\n
I paused for a moment, tin in hand, trying to place that recognition. Maybe it was a coincidence \u2013 two bakers, two places, arriving at the same recipe. Or perhaps one borrowed, knowingly or not, from the other. Food has a way of carrying echoes, and sometimes what we taste is less an invention than a continuation.<\/p>\n
China has been doing this \u2013 absorbing, adapting, making its own \u2013 for a very long time. As early as the second century BC, it had already taken in an import that had travelled thousands of miles along the Silk Road: hubing<\/em>. The name itself says as much. Bing<\/em> is a broad category of flour-based foods, but the prefix hu<\/em> marks it as something foreign, something that came from elsewhere.<\/p>\n The story begins with Zhang Qian (c. 195BC-114BC), a Han-period envoy who journeyed west and returned with more than diplomatic contacts.<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/img.i-scmp.com\/cdn-cgi\/image\/fit=contain,width=1024,format=auto\/sites\/default\/files\/d8\/images\/canvas\/2026\/03\/31\/a98ad5a7-7db8-462c-b47d-fef46682daa9_f5a656b4.jpg\" "\\"A")
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