Food
Where does Dim sum come from?
Dim sum, Cantonese for 'touch the heart', grew up in the teahouses of Guangzhou, where travellers stopped for tea with a few small bites. The custom, called yum cha ('drinking tea'), later flourished in Hong Kong.
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Food
Couscous
📍 Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco & Tunisia)
Couscous isn't a grain: it's tiny balls of semolina, rolled by hand and steamed. It began with the Berber peoples of North Africa, and in 2020 Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia put it on UNESCO's heritage list together.
Food
Feijoa
📍 Southern Brazil & Uruguay
New Zealanders love feijoas so much that many think they are a Kiwi fruit, but they come from the highlands of southern Brazil and Uruguay. Plants taken from Uruguay to France in 1890 later reached California and then New Zealand.
Food
Gumbo
📍 Southern Louisiana, USA
Gumbo is a melting pot in a bowl: a southern Louisiana stew mixing a French roux, the Choctaw thickener filé (ground sassafras leaves) and okra, whose African name, ngombo, gave the dish its own. It was first described in 1802.
More from Asia
Game
Gateball
📍 Memuro, Hokkaido, Japan
Gateball was dreamed up in 1947 in Memuro, Hokkaido, by Eiji Suzuki, who handmade sticks and balls so children short of toys after the war could play a croquet-like game. It later became a favourite of older people.
Invention
Bullet train (high-speed railway)
📍 Tokyo–Osaka, Japan
The world's first high-speed railway, Japan's Tōkaidō Shinkansen, opened on 1 October 1964 between Tokyo and Osaka, just before the Tokyo Olympics. Its round-nosed trains reached 210 km/h and cut the trip to four hours.
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Word
Durian (the word)
📍 Malay Peninsula & Sumatra
Durian comes from Malay duri, 'thorn', after the fruit's spiky husk. Called the 'king of fruits' in some regions, it smells so strong that Singapore bans it on its metro trains.