China has eight great cuisines. Chicken Manchurian isn't one of them

Most of us in India grew up with one idea of Chinese food. Chilli chicken, Hakka noodles, a plate of Manchurian. I like that food. I was born in Calcutta, and Chinese has been a core cuisine in many of the restaurants I've built.

But China's own table is much wider than what reaches ours.

Chinese chefs recognise eight great regional cuisines, the Ba Da Caixi. Four of them were established by the early Qing dynasty. The other four joined later. Each has its own techniques, its own pantry and its own masters.

Shandong (Lu). The oldest. Its cooks ran the Ming and Qing palace kitchens. Salty, savoury, built on stock. Try sweet and sour Yellow River carp.

Sichuan (Chuan). Numbing pepper first, then chilli. Chilli only reached China from the Americas in the late 1500s. Try mapo tofu.

Cantonese (Yue). Freshness and wok hei. Guangzhou was China's only port open to Western traders until 1842, so this is the Chinese food the world met first. Try har gow and char siu.

Jiangsu (Su). Knife work and gentle sweetness. Its Huaiyang dishes were served at the 1949 founding state banquet. Try lion's head meatballs.

Fujian (Min). Soups and broths, red fermented rice, seafood. Try Buddha Jumps Over the Wall.

Zhejiang (Zhe). Shaoxing wine, Longjing tea, Jinhua ham. Try Dongpo pork, named after the poet who governed Hangzhou in 1089.

Hunan (Xiang). Often hotter than Sichuan, with no numbing. Fresh, pickled and smoked chilli. Try chopped-chilli fish head.

Anhui (Hui). Mountain food. Bamboo shoots, wild herbs, slow braises. Try stinky mandarin fish. It tastes far better than it sounds.

The rest of China cooks too. Peking duck, Lanzhou beef noodles and Shanghai's xiaolongbao are all loved. They just aren't part of the eight.

Then there's Tangra.

The first recorded Chinese settler in Bengal, Tong Achew, arrived in the late 1700s. Hakka families followed and worked the tanneries on Kolkata's eastern edge. Their home cooking slowly bent to Indian taste. In 1975 Nelson Wang made the first chicken Manchurian in Mumbai, and the formula spread everywhere.

Indian Chinese runs on soy, vinegar, green chilli and cornflour. It tastes much the same in Kolkata as it does in Delhi. Schezwan sauce shares a name with Sichuan and very little else. Gobi Manchurian and chilli paneer have no counterpart in China. And Hakka cooking isn't one of the eight.

I think Indian Chinese is a cuisine in its own right. I'd only ask that we stop mistaking it for the food of China. The real thing deserves to be tasted properly.

I've put the eight on one map, with a dish to order from each. It's attached.

Which of the eight would you most like to see cooked properly in India?