No one has ever been to Beijing without drinking bean juice.

When I watched the Peking Opera "Soya Bean Juice" (i.e. "Hong Luan Xi", also known as "Jin Yu Nu", and "Strike the Thin Man"), I didn't know what "Soya Bean Juice" was, and I thought that it was tofu syrup.

Bean juice is the scraps for making mung bean vermicelli. It is very cheap. In the past, the seller of raw soybean juice, push a covered wooden bucket with a cart, string backstreets, hutongs. No need to "call the head" (the ringer to attract customers), and do not yell. Because where to string every day, most have the right time. When the time comes, there will be a woman carrying a container out to buy. With the bean juice, this day to eat the nest can not boil thin porridge. This is the food of the poor. Jin Yunu's father, Jin Song, was "on the pole" (called "flower head"), so if the family had leftover bean juice, they could give Mo Ji a bowl.

The seller of cooked bean juice, a stall on the side of the street. A copper pot with a pot of bean juice is simmering over a low flame. Simmering bean juice can only be used with a small fire, the fire is big, the bean juice a big bubble, it's good. Bean juice stalls are equipped with spicy shredded pickles - water pimples cut into thin julienne strips and poured with chili oil, baklava, burnt rings - similar to doughnuts, but made into a circle, burnt and crispy. If you are a hard worker, you can sit down at the stall, ask for a couple of sets of baklava, two bowls of bean juice, and a little bit of spicy pickles, that's a meal.

The savory dishes on the bean juice stall are not counted as money. A Baoding hometown sat down, took out two steamed buns, asked "how much is a bowl of bean juice," the seller of bean juice told him, "pickles?" --"Pickles don't cost anything." -- "Then give me a plate of pickles."

Before and after the 18th year of the Qing dynasty's Qianlong reign (1753 AD), it was introduced to the palace. Every year, the old calendar September to the following year, five days after the summer, the Qing Palace Royal, Shou two dining room to make soybean juice, the emperor, after the wine and meat, are drinking soybean juice to relieve grease.

It is said that Xianfeng Zigong (Lingzi) back to Luang, East and West, the two empresses led the Tongzhi Emperor just returned to the Palace, that is, to the Royal Catering Room to drink bean juice.

In the folk, the patrons of the bean juice is not divided into noble and lowly, where the decent people in the temple to eat "enema" or "sheep cream sausage", often will be laughed at, but only to drink the bean juice is not shameful.