We can find the earliest clear record about "the first person to eat crabs in the world", only the "The Ghost of Hanwu Cave" written by Guo Xian in the Eastern Han Dynasty. In Volume 3, there is a saying: "The country of Shanyuan tasted a crab, which was nine feet long and had a hundred feet and four claws, so it was named as a hundred feet crab. Boiling its shell is better than yellow glue, which is also called chelating glue, and it is better than the glue of phoenix beak. " Therefore, it can be seen that the crabs that China people eat for the first time may be sea crabs.

Meng Xi Bi Tan records that people in Guanzhong don't know crabs. After someone received a dried crab, they hung it on the door as a "mascot" to prevent malaria.

The ancients were superstitious. It was generally believed that the human body was suffering from malaria because a malaria ghost was at work. Crab, an animal like Weichi Gong, a keeper, can effectively scare off malaria ghosts, so as long as a crab is hung at the door, the disease will not dare to visit people's homes. Meng Xi Bi Tan also mentioned that the crabs of Guanzhong generation "are not only ignorant of people, but also ignorant of ghosts".

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This shows that hanging crabs on doors to prevent malaria was common at that time, but the effect was not very good. It can be said that until the Song Dynasty, the traffic in China was not very developed, so the people living in Guanzhong had never seen what crabs were. However, cities close to the sea and villages and towns near rivers and lakes have long had the custom of eating crabs.

Zheng Xuan, a Confucian scholar in the Eastern Han Dynasty, made a textual research on the history of China people eating crabs, and thought that China people had already started eating crabs as early as the Western Zhou Dynasty. However, there is a big gap between the way the ancients ate crabs and the way they eat them now. At that time, there were no "eight crabs", so eating crabs was a very troublesome thing.

Zhou people only eat crabs. The so-called "crab sauce" is a kind of crab sauce. Qingzhou people in the Western Zhou Dynasty invented this delicious and convenient sauce (later, the shrimp sauce of Shandong people also had the same effect). It can be seen that as early as two weeks ago, the ancients became "crab eaters" and regarded them as delicious and enjoyable.

In the Eastern Jin Dynasty, there was an official named Bi Zhuo, who was a drunkard who had no drink and no joy. He always likes to eat a few crabs when he drinks. Bi Zhuo often interferes with his work because of drinking. Every time he smells the brewing in the neighborhood, he jumps into someone else's yard at night to steal wine, and is often caught red-handed by his neighbor's servants.

The servant didn't know Bi Zhuo. He just regarded him as an ordinary thief, caught him, beat him up and threw him into the woodshed. It was not until the next morning that the neighbor discovered that the thief was actually Lang Bizhuo, the official department, so he quickly released it and presented some newly brewed wine as a gift. Bi Zhuo once said: "When you have hundreds of boats full of wine, you can put them at both ends at four o'clock, holding a glass in your right hand and a crab claw in your left hand, and you can pat them in a floating wine boat for a lifetime." Holding a glass in one hand and a crab in the other is the lifelong pursuit of Bi Zhuo, a native of the Eastern Jin Dynasty.

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In The Book of Jin, a guy with a low official position and no outstanding achievements like Bi Zhuo was actually biographied by historians, mostly because of his unique dietary preferences. With the popularity of eating crabs in the south,