Chinese Cabbage

Calling something Chinese cabbage is about as meaningless as a cook calling something lettuce, which is to say that there are at least a dozen varieties of common Chinese cabbage and each of them tastes, looks, and cooks differently. It is not, alas, merely a matter of a sloppy or an unspecific English name. The name given to the very same cabbage will change from one area of China to the next, which means that the only way to separate one cabbage from its cousin is to describe what it looks like.