燒賣

The earliest known written reference to shaomai appears in a Yuan Dynasty cookbook from the thirteenth or fourteenth century, where the dish is written 稍麥 (shāomài), meaning a little wheat, describing the thin skin that barely enclosed the meat filling. Inner Mongolian teahouses introduced the open-top dumpling to Han Chinese traders moving along caravan routes between Inner Mongolia and Shanxi. The absence of a sealed top was practical: it let the buyer inspect the filling before purchasing.

By the Ming Dynasty the name had shifted to 燒賣 (shāomài, cook-sell), confirming the item had become a commercial product rather than a home preparation. A Ming-era restaurant menu from Beijing lists shaomai alongside wonton soup and steamed buns, placing it in the urban breakfast repertoire. The pork and glutinous rice filling common in northern China today consolidated during this period, replacing the older lamb-based fillings of Mongolian origin.

Cantonese cooks in the nineteenth century adapted shaomai for the teahouse yum cha culture of Guangzhou. They substituted minced pork and shrimp for the northern glutinous rice, used a thinner yellow wrapper made with egg, and garnished the top with orange fish roe or a single green pea. This is the version most diners outside China know, carried to Hong Kong and then to overseas Chinatowns by Cantonese migrants in the twentieth century.

Shaomai entered Japan as shūmai (シュウマイ) through Yokohama's Chinese quarter, Nankinmachi, in the late Meiji period around the 1890s. The Kiyoken company in Yokohama began selling their own cold version in 1928, using pork and scallop in a smaller form designed for station bento boxes. Kiyoken's shūmai became so identified with Yokohama that the city uses it as an unofficial food emblem, a fact that would surprise the Yuan Dynasty teahouse vendors who first folded the open-top skin.