Lychee Bay's past and present

It was a historical district in Guangzhou known as the place to go if you wanted elegant female company for a price. Nine decades later, it is better known for nostalgia and food. Pauline D. Loh wanders through the streets of the famous Lizhi Wan.

My grandfather used to say the best food in Guangzhou was in Lychee Bay after midnight.

It was a place of "red lights and green wine", where pretty girls leaned over first floor balustrades trying to catch the eyes of rich young men strolling below. It was a place where decadent pleasures of wine, women and song congregated.

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A county of chefs

The best chefs in China come from Guangdong, and the best Cantonese chefs, they say, come from only one place - Shunde county, known as the Normandy of China. Pick a Chinese executive chef in any five-star hotel chain, and there is a 50-percent chance that he is a Shunde native.

It is here that the best produce from mountains, plains and sea congregate, providing a rich artistic palette for Shunde chefs. They, in turn, have repaid nature's bounty by creating a branch of Cantonese cuisine that is known for its rich diversity, delicacy of taste and its dairy products.

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Fresh is the main flavor

When you have access to the freshest ingredient, the next step you take is to make sure you give it the respect it deserves. In Guangzhou, the cuisine is founded on the availability of produce that is either swimming, wriggling or walking around hours before they settle on the dining table.

After our visit to the Huangsha seafood wholesale market, we go back to the kitchens of the Four Points Sheraton where executive chef Ben Huang gives me a few lessons.

We had bought a kilo of banded flower prawns, brought home in a plastic bag pumped full of oxygen so the crustaceans retain their bounce.

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Fish, shells and crustaceans

Every Cantonese chef or serious home cook would have visited Guangzhou's Huangsha seafood wholesale market at least once. It is the mecca of freshness, where everything is breathing, swimming or wriggling.

Located along the river in the Lizhiwan or Lychee Bay area, it commands a huge spread of land that is escalating in price every day.

Property developers are invading its fringes, building high-rise, high value condominiums that cost a cool couple of millions each. That is the reason why there have been so many attempts to get the sprawling wholesale market to move - but with little success.

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