tahu

The Chinese credited Liu An, Prince of Huainan, with inventing doufu around 164 BCE, though the first clear written record appears in Tao Gu's Qing Yi Lu from the 10th century CE. By the Song dynasty (960-1279), doufu was common across China. In Fujian Province, home of the Hokkien-speaking merchant communities, the word was pronounced tāu-hū. That pronunciation crossed the South China Sea on trading vessels and became the Indonesian word tahu.

Chinese merchants arrived in the Indonesian archipelago in significant numbers from the 14th century onward. By the time Admiral Zheng He visited Java in 1405, Chinese traders were already settled in port cities from Tuban to Banten. They established bean curd workshops in the Chinese quarters of coastal towns, bringing both the food and the Hokkien word with them. The Javanese and Malay populations adopted both, and tāu-hū settled into local speech as tahu.

A VOC survey of Batavia from around 1650 records Chinese tofu-makers supplying the city's markets daily. By the late 17th century, tahu was produced throughout Batavia, Semarang, and Surabaya. Javanese cooks adapted it into new forms: tahu goreng (deep-fried until crisp), tahu bacem (braised in coconut sugar and coriander), tahu gejrot (smashed and dressed with palm sugar and chili vinegar). These were Javanese inventions with a Hokkien word at the center.

Tahu is now among the most consumed proteins in Indonesia, made in small factories and sold fresh each morning from bicycles and market stalls. The word traveled further too: in Suriname, where Javanese contract workers settled after 1891, tahu appears in the local food vocabulary alongside lontong and sambal. In the Netherlands, where Indonesian independence in 1945 prompted large-scale migration, Dutch-Indonesian cookbooks from the 1950s printed tahu recipes alongside Indonesian pronunciation guides. The Hokkien word became Indonesian, then became global.