Chinese Change the Peruvian Diet

Professor Jorge Salazar has a Chinese grandmother and is an expert on the history of the Chinese in Peru. He suggests that Chinese servants of a Spaniard delegation may have introduced Chinese food to Peru as early as the sixteenth century. Their greatest contribution came in the quarter century that followed 1849, when over one hundred thousand Chinese migrants, mostly from Canton (now Guangdong) replaced black workers after Peru abolished slave labor. The Chinese migrants worked as contract laborers in sugar plantations, on the Andean railroad, and in guano mines. Some moved into domestic service. Although they worked under exploitative contracts, the Chinese laborers demanded rice, essential to their diet, as part of their payment. This forced landowners to grow and import rice, a new food for this South American country.