HW Faculty Fellowship China 2019 with Fuchsia Dunlop

The trip of a lifetime. I helped organize and lead an exciting HW faculty fellowship trip to China with James Beard Award-winning author Fuchsia Dunlop. As our tour guide, she curated all our meals in Chengdu, Hangzhou, and Shanghai, introducing all the dishes with background on the history, lore, and ingredients. Thanks to a generous HW family for making this experience available for 20 HW faculty and staff.

I have been a fan of hers for many years, having read her books and watched her on food documentaries. When planning this trip, I was most concerned about getting a tour guide who could satisfy the expectations of HW faculty. You needed to have someone who not only had the expertise, but needed to be someone who could speak the native language as well as English. I told our host that we needed someone like a Fuchsia Dunlop. He suggested, why not ask her? Not having any connection to her, I reached out via DM on Instagram, and she responded! That started a dialogue which led to her joining our tour!

Based in London and arguably one of the leading experts on Chinese food in the English speaking world, Fuchsia is a fluent Mandarin speaker. Whether dealing with restaurant managers and chefs or street vendors in farmers markets, people were fascinated by this white woman who spoke and wrote fluently in Mandarin, routinely impressing with her knowledge of obscure Chinese foods and ingredients in their native language. Cambridge-educated and the first non-Chinese to enroll in the renown Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine (四川高等烹饪学校), Fuchsia was the perfect tour guide.