Why Jjajangmyeon Is Korea’s Chinese Food and Not Zhajiangmian

On 31 August 2011 the National Institute of Korean Language added 39 items to the list of accepted standard forms, and 짜장면, spelled with a doubled consonant, was one of them. A Sidae Ilbo anniversary piece sums the ruling up as both jjajangmyeon and jajangmyeon being correct.

Until then only 자장면 had been standard, a spelling fixed by the 1986 loanword rules, even though the newspaper reports a 2009 SBS survey in which 91.8 percent of respondents said they used the other form. A decision that took 25 years to arrive was meant, in the words of the institute’s former director Kwon Jae-il, to ease the inconvenience of the gap between the rule and everyday speech. The same ruling admitted words such as 먹거리 (food) and 택견 (the martial art), which until then had to be written 먹을거리 and 태껸.

A spelling that took 25 years to settle

The 1986 rule treated the word as a Chinese loan. Its root is the Chinese 炸醬 (zhajiang) plus 麵 (noodles), and under the rules for writing Chinese sounds in Korean, the zh sound is written with the plain consonant ㅈ, which gives 자장면. That was correct on paper and strange on the street. Neighbourhood Chinese restaurants wrote 짜장면 on their signs, and the Sidae Ilbo notes that only newspapers, broadcasters and publishers held to the official form. The complaint sharpened when jjamppong, jjajangmyeon’s usual companion on the menu, was accepted as a standard word first, which made the exclusion of jjajangmyeon look arbitrary.

The newspaper also recalls a 2000 novel by the poet Ahn Do-hyun titled 짜장면, in which a character insists on that word whatever the rule says. The 2011 change did not rule on the dish; it caught the dictionary up with how people already spoke. The Standard Korean Dictionary now defines 짜장면 as a Chinese dish of noodles mixed with Chinese bean paste fried with meat and vegetables, and gives 자장면 as its equivalent. The same gap between the official account and the actual bowl shows up again in the history of the sauce.

Shandong’s fried sauce and the black paste Korea made of it

The Folk Encyclopedia entry on jjajangmyeon starts from the Chinese dish zhajiangmian, a noodle topped with fried sauce, where the sauce is a sweet flour paste (tianmianjiang, 甜面酱). Everything Koreans call jjajangmyeon branches off that idea.

The paste

The entry says a Chinese resident of Korea named Wang Songsan made the paste Koreans now know in 1948 by mixing caramel into that sweet flour paste, giving a sweeter, softer taste close to what is eaten today. In Shandong, it adds, people ate a dark fermented paste of steamed soybeans, wheat koji and salt and dipped scallions in it, so it was called chung-jang (葱醬, scallion sauce), and the pronunciation drifted to chunjang. The entry also notes why Korean cooks took to it so easily: they already ate fermented pastes such as doenjang and gochujang, and the Chinese regions where zhajiangmian thrives are likewise paste-eating regions.

The sauce

The first Korean version was heavy. In the same entry, early cooks fried the paste in oil and put it on the noodles as it was, which tasted greasy to Korean palates. They then poured the oil off, used only the fried paste, and added vegetables and a starch slurry, which produced the less salty, savoury-sweet, thick sauce that is now standard.

A 2010 Korea JoongAng Daily article, supplied by the Korea Tourism Organization, tells it from the Incheon side. It says Chinese settlers began to arrive after Jemulpo port opened in 1883, that restaurants sprang up for them, and that an Incheon restaurateur turned the genuinely Chinese zhajiangmian into the Korean dish in the mid-1950s. By its account the Chinese original was too salty for Korean customers, so the cook used more onion and chunks of minced meat, then added water and starch to thin the paste.

The two accounts date different things. The Folk Encyclopedia gives 1948 for the paste, and the 2010 article gives the mid-1950s for the dish that was sold to Korean customers. Read together, they fit one sequence: the sweetened paste first, then a restaurant bowl built on it.

A disputed founder at Incheon’s Gonghwachun

The JoongAng Daily sets the dish’s birth in Incheon’s Chinatown, and the best-known address there is Gonghwachun (共和春), a restaurant in the former Chinese quarter whose building now houses the Jjajangmyeon Museum. A 2026 Kyeongin Ilbo report describes the museum as opened in 2012 in the old Gonghwachun building, with the structure designated a national registered cultural heritage, and calls Gonghwachun the restaurant said to have first sold jjajangmyeon in Incheon. That is a popular claim, not a settled fact: the JoongAng Daily says only that the dish was first developed at one of the Chinese restaurants there, without naming it.

What the museum sign says

The sign at the entrance, the Kyeongin report says, names Woo Hee-gwang (于希光, 1886 to 1949), a Chinese settler from Shandong, as the founder. It describes the predecessor as Shandong Hall, a combined inn and restaurant in the Qing concession, which moved to the present site in 1911 and a year later took the name Gonghwachun, meaning spring of the republic, to mark the founding of the Republic of China.

What the share certificates show

Inside, the same report says, two exhibits complicate that story. A share transaction certificate dated 1914 names a different person, Kwak Chu-bang (郭秋舫), as the representative. A second one from January 1922 lists Woo Hee-gwang only as the manager, with Wang Sim-bo as the representative. A professor at Incheon National University, Lee Jeong-hee, wrote in a 2017 paper that Gonghwachun was a joint-stock company with several shareholders, and Woo’s great-grandson, who donated the certificates to the museum, told the paper that his ancestor did help found it, as a manager on the floor. One reading the report offers is that Woo began as the manager, built up his shares over the years and ended as the last owner of the building.

So the date and the founder are both still argued over, and a vice-president of the Incheon Chinese Association quoted in the report asks for closer study of the documents. A recipe needs neither.

How a special-occasion bowl became weekday food

The JoongAng Daily writes that until the 1970s jjajangmyeon was a luxurious dish eaten on special occasions, and it describes a restaurant outing for a bowl of the glossy noodles as exciting to children as a family-restaurant trip would be now. What changed it, the Folk Encyclopedia says, was flour. Large amounts of American flour arrived as aid from the 1950s to ease a food shortage, and the mixed-grain promotion campaign of the 1970s pushed the price of flour down, which fixed jjajangmyeon in place as a national food.

Delivery finished the job. The entry ties the rise in demand to the iron delivery box and to technology, with landline telephones widely installed from the 1980s and mobile phones spreading rapidly from 1999, so a bowl no longer required a trip to the restaurant. The 2010 article claims more than 7 million bowls were being sold nationwide each day, a figure repeated here only as that article’s claim, since the article gives no source for it. The same article says the recipe was gaining popularity overseas, even back in China.

Building the bowl the way the card does

The recipe card serves two. It has four tablespoons of chunjang fried in three tablespoons of oil, 200 g of diced pork, a large onion (about 250 g), 150 g of cabbage and about 120 g each of potato and zucchini, with a tablespoon of sugar divided between the stages, a tablespoon of soy sauce, 300 ml of stock or water, a cornstarch slurry and 400 g of fresh noodles.

The order of the pan

The prep is plain: everything is cut into even 1 cm dice and kept in separate piles, and a pot of unsalted water is held at a low simmer for the noodles while the sauce is made. The card also says plain water is genuinely fine in place of stock because the sauce carries itself, and that 1/4 teaspoon of ground ginger can stand in for fresh, with a flatter, less bright result. Then the method follows a strict order. The paste fries first, on medium-low heat for 2 to 3 minutes with 1 teaspoon of the sugar, until it loosens, darkens slightly and smells toasted and nutty rather than sharp and raw. It is scraped into a bowl. Pork browns for 4 to 5 minutes, ginger goes in for 30 seconds, onion cooks for 3 minutes, and the potato, cabbage and zucchini follow for another 4 to 5. The fried paste then returns for a minute of tossing, stock and soy sauce go in, and everything cooks 6 to 8 minutes until the potato is tender. The starch slurry goes in last, a minute before the sesame oil, and the noodles are boiled separately and sauced at the table.

Both routes agree on one idea: the paste is cooked before the sauce is built. The Folk Encyclopedia’s short method stir-fries chunjang over high heat with pork and onion, while the card fries the paste alone on medium-low heat, scrapes it out and returns it for a minute at the end, so it reads toasted and nutty rather than sharp and raw. The Folk Encyclopedia also describes how early cooks learned to pour off the oil and keep only the fried paste. The water and starch added near the end are the two additions the 2010 JoongAng Daily article credits to the first Incheon cook.

Recipe card photo: Jajangmyeon (mixed).jpg by 최광모, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

A hotel chef in a failing noodle shop: Wok of Love

Wok of Love (기름진 멜로) was announced as an SBS Monday and Tuesday drama for a 7 May 2018 premiere at 10 p.m., with a script by Seo Suk-hyang and direction by Park Seon-ho, in an iMBC Entertainment preview dated 30 April 2018. Lee Jun-ho plays Seo-poong, a chef who falls from a hotel’s Chinese restaurant to the kitchen of a failing neighbourhood Chinese restaurant, and Jung Ryeo-won plays Dan Sae-woo, the daughter of a bankrupt conglomerate family.

Other screen meals tied to real places are gathered in meals tied to Seoul filming locations.

Black Day, delivery boxes and the packet versions

The Folk Encyclopedia records one more custom: 14 April is called Black Day, when people who received no gifts on Valentine’s Day or White Day wear black and eat black jjajangmyeon to console themselves. It also lists the menu spin-offs, among them ganjjajang (served with a thicker sauce), yuni-jjajang, samseon-jjajang with seafood, jjangban-jjajang, gochu-jjajang and yuseul-jjajang, and says that from the late 1970s food companies sold jjajang ramyeon so the dish could be made at home. The JoongAng Daily article describes two of those variants in plain terms: ganjjajang comes with a thicker paste and the sauce and noodles in separate bowls, and samseon-jjajang adds seafood such as squid and shrimp. The Folk Encyclopedia adds that some regions top the bowl with a fried egg, cucumber matchsticks, a boiled egg or boiled quail eggs, so the toppings are as local as the sauce is standard.

Packet versions get their own treatment in the instant version of black bean noodles, and the sweet-and-sour pork that often shares a Chinese-Korean menu is cooked in the fried-twice tangsuyuk method.

Do not skip frying the paste

If one step is going to be skipped, it should not be this one. Give the paste the full 2 to 3 minutes at medium-low heat, stirring, and take it out when the scent turns from sharp to toasted and nutty.