Feng Rui slapped the fish, hard, on the edge of the bath. Then he took a knife and started scraping away its scales, which flicked into the air in a glassy scatter. But the fish was still alive. It flexed violently, and jumped out of his hands. Feng Rui snorted in exasperation, seized it and then whacked it, harder this time, against the enamel. The fish, stunned, became still, allowing him to scale it clean, rip out its blood-red gills, slit its belly open and finger out the bulging slickness of its guts. By now the small bathroom was a mess of scales and slime, but, unconcerned, Feng Rui simply gathered up the debris and threw it into the bin. Back in the kitchen, he made a few incisions in the fish's side, rubbed it with salt and wine, smashed a clod of ginger and a couple of spring onions and stuffed them into its belly. Then he lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. 'You know, you won't believe this, but in Guangdong they actually eat fish intestines! Imagine! How disgusting. Those Cantonese, they eat anything.' I cast my eye to the kitchen counter, where a bowlful of chicken intestines were marinating, ready for our lunch, and smiled to myself.

'You're the one who likes cooking, aren't you?' he said, slurring his words. Already, I was becoming known in the university district for my interest in food. I had pleaded my way into the kitchens of several restaurants, and was regularly seen in conversation with street vendors and market traders. But this was the first time I'd had my culinary investigations used in a chat-up line. I agreed with the drunken man that, yes, I was the lao wai who was an aspiring Sichuanese cook.

It was late and the dance floor was nearly empty. As I sashayed away with my friends, I noticed a dishevelled Chinese man trying to catch my eye. He looked vaguely familiar, so when the track ended I wandered over to investigate. Standing unsteadily, his hair rumpled, he thrust out a cigarette packet and offered to buy me a beer.

Feng Rui had tried to pick me up the night before in the Reggae Bar, the only 'cool' nightclub in Chengdu, run by the only 'Rastafarian' in China, a Sichuanese artist with laboriously contrived dreadlocks, a fine CD collection and an obsession with Bob Marley.

'Well, I wouldn't be a true Sichuanese if I didn't offer to give you a cooking lesson,' he replied, 'And I've got these friends, top chefs who used to work at the Jinjiang Hotel. We're cooking together tomorrow. Want to come?' Normally I wouldn't accept invitations from strangers in nightclubs, but when he mentioned red-oil chicken and twice-cooked pork, I felt ready to agree to almost anything. And then, when I realised that he was actually the owner of the Bamboo Bar, my favourite restaurant, I told him I'd love to come.

Grinning tipsily, he professed innocence. 'Ah, you see, for perfect food you have to balance the yin and yang.'

'Great,' he said. 'How about bringing along a couple of female friends?'

'What's this,' I laughed, 'a cooking lesson or a seduction?'

It was the beginning of a wonderful friendship. Over the next few months, Feng Rui and I spent many happy hours together in the kitchen. I soon learned, however, that his cooking lessons were not for the squeamish. Like any good Chinese chef, Feng Rui insisted on using extremely fresh ingredients, which he chose for himself in the local market. So I went shopping with him, and began to learn the tolerance for slaughter that I needed if I was to learn to cook seriously in China.

Around the eel stall alone, there was always a bloodbath. The eels were paddy eels, their shiny skins a dark grey-green, thin as a finger, a yard-or-so long, coiled like snakes in tubfuls of water. Preparing them for sale was a simple but messy business. The vendor, seated on a low wooden stool, cigarette on his lip, grabbed a specimen by its neck, and, as it flicked and flailed, impaled its head on a spike at the top of a strip of wood propped up between his knees (a crunchy, squelching sound). Fag still in mouth, he took a small dirty knife, slit the twitching creature from neck to tail, and scraped the mess of its spine and guts into a bucket at the base of the board. A few stray bits of intestine or internal organ splattered to the ground. Finally, he chopped off and discarded its head and tail, and tossed the blood-streaked body into another plastic pail. 'You have to eat them fresh,' said Feng Rui, 'Leave them for an hour and their flavour spoils.'

I'd been to many Chinese markets before that outing with Feng Rui, and had at first been amazed -- and appalled -- by the cruelty I witnessed. It was the sheer nonchalance of it, the way people scaled fish as though they were simply peeling potatoes, skinned live rabbits while smoking a cigarette, joked with a friend as the blood drained from the throat of a bewildered duck. They didn't kill animals before they cooked and ate them. They simply went about the process of preparing a creature for the pot and table, and at some random point it died. But there, perhaps, is the crux of the matter, embedded almost invisibly in those last two sentences. In English, as in most European languages, the words for the living things we eat are mostly derived from the Latin anima, which means air, breath, life. 'Creature', from the Latin for 'created', seems to connect animals with us as human beings in some divinely fashioned universe. We too are creatures, animated. In Chinese, the word for animal is dong wu, meaning 'moving thing'. Is it cruel to hurt something that (unless you are a fervent Buddhist) you simply see as a 'moving thing', scarcely even alive?

Culture shock hit me hardest when I was invited to lunch by a motherly middle-aged woman in her special rabbit restaurant, not long after I had arrived in Chengdu. 'Come into the kitchen and watch,' she urged me. When we entered, the main ingredient for our stew was sitting sweetly in the corner of the room, nibbling lettuce. The following is an extract from my diary, written in the kitchen that day as I watched:

Slit its throat.

From live rabbit to dish on table in less than ten minutes.

Hit rabbit over the head to stun it.

Chop brutally into small pieces with a cleaver.

Death of a rabbit

Immediately peel off skin.

Hang up by foot.

Some of the cruellest tales of Chinese eating are apochryphal. A late-nineteenth-century account of life in Beijing by a Dr D. F. Rennie included a description of cooking a live turtle. The special pot used, he said, had a hole for the turtle's head in its lid, so the poor creature, growing thirsty with heat, could be fed with spiced wine, which perfumed its flesh as it cooked. He also recounted how live ducks were stood on a hotplate over a fire in order to cook just their feet. Were they true, these ghoulish stories? Dr Rennie admitted that they were secondhand, told to him by a Shanghai merchant. An elderly Buddhist monk once described to me with wide eyes and a solemn manner a Cantonese dish called 'san jiao' (three cries): 'The first cry,' he told me, 'is when they pick up the wriggling new-born mouse in their chopsticks, the second when they dip it in the sauce, and the third when they bite off its head.' I wasn't sure whether to believe that they really ate live mice in southern China, or simply that this gentle monk, a lifelong vegetarian, was trying to put me off my meat.

[…]

Still reeling from the brutality of what I had just witnessed, I was led into the dining room and presented with a steaming bowlful of rabbit stew. I didn't want to eat it. But Mrs Li looked at me with such proud anticipation, such sweet and generous eagerness, that I did.

But if the most infamous examples of Chinese culinary cruelty are urban myths, the everyday cruelty of Chinese cooking can be shocking. Once I was served with a dish called 'sauna prawns' in a smart hotel in Chengdu. The waitress brought in a tabletop burner, and a potful of hot water covered by a grill and a perspex lid. When the water was boiling, she took off the lid, threw in a plateful of live prawns, and then replaced it. We watched through the perspex as the prawns writhed and flicked on the grill in their 'sauna' steam. When they were cooked, we were supposed to remove the lid and eat them, with a soy sauce dip. I didn't find the dish very appetising. But I couldn't say there was anything sadistic about the enthusiasm of my Chinese companions, because, although they were amused by the agonising display on the table before us, as far as they were concerned, the prawns were just moving, not feeling.

All over the world, people have heard of that notorious Chinese delicacy, live monkey brains. The monkey, so they say, is strapped to the table, its head immobilised in some kind of vice. Then the waiter slices off the top of its skull, and you eat its brains with a spoon, like pudding. But has anyone actually seen this practice? A journalist writing in the Japan Times in 2002, Mark Schreiber, said his own exhaustive investigations had produced no first-hand accounts, and suggested that the legend might be traced back to a tongue-in-cheek newspaper column on Chinese eating habits written in 1948.

That morning at the market, Feng Rui took me to a poultry stall where toffee-coloured chickens stood around in a woven bamboo pen, mobile and jittery. The ducks lay more serenely on the ground, their feet bound with bunches of rice straw. Every day the city's duck sellers brought in clumps of ducks on carts attached to three-wheeled bicycles; their heads and necks swayed elegantly above their anchor of straw as the sellers negotiated their way through the maelstrom of bicycles and buses. Like the eels, the chickens and ducks met a bloody, public end. 'Let's have a look at that one,' said Feng Rui. So the vendor snatched the chicken by the scruff of its neck and held it up for his approval. Feng Rui prodded it and peered at its feet. 'You can tell its age by the feet,' he told me, 'This one, you see, its thumb has scarcely developed, that means it's quite young, its flesh will be tender. If the thumb is long and gnarled, it's an old bird, best for making soup. Yes, I'll take this one,' he told the vendor.

As time went by, of course, I dirtied my own hands in the blood of the markets: I insisted on seeing my fish and chickens killed in front me so that I knew they were fresh; I watched nonchalantly as the eel vendor wreaked carnage for my lunch. Although the Chinese attitude to dong wu continued to disturb me, at least it was honest, I thought. Back at home in Britain, the stench of death hung in the background of a carnivorous meal like a guilty secret; people bought their meat safe and sanitised, while the animals languished in battery pens. In China, you saw what meat meant, there was no avoiding it. You chose to eat it, with your eyes open.

So the vendor drew back the head of the bird and slit its throat with a knife. He shook the blood into a plastic bag, plunged the fowl into a potful of hot water that sat on a charcoal stove. The bird was still twitching as he sat down on his stool and began to strip off its feathers. Then he dipped it into a potful of bubbling tar that clung to it like rubber, set the tar in cold water, and peeled off the sticky black shroud with all the stubby quills and remaining tiny feathers, like a leg wax. Working quickly, he slit open its belly and disembowelled it, discarding the stomach and gall bladder in a shambles on the ground, keeping the prized gizzard, liver, heart and intestines, which he handed over to Feng Rui with the small bagful of blood. The other live birds hung around nearby, stupidly.

Feng Rui and I ambled back to his friend's flat with our purchases, the chicken with all its inner accoutrements safely bagged up; a live carp, flapping around; a hunk of pork rump; bunches of onions. The two top hotel chefs he had mentioned the night before were waiting for us inside. One of them was sitting in an armchair, smoking a cigarette. The other was chopping a flattened smoked rabbit into small chunks. Feng Rui rinsed the chicken's intestines, cut them into sections with a sharp cleaver, and sprinkled them with a little salt. Then, having dispatched the carp in the bathroom, he put the whole chicken and the chunk of pork into a panful of water, and set them to boil on the stove. 'Your "European chickens" (ou zhou ji),' he said with disdain, 'They may be tender but they're completely tasteless. It's all that artificial feed, it plumps them up, but it makes their flesh unhealthy. Our Chinese birds, they are fed on leftover rice and stuff, and they run around in the farmyard, so they have much more flavour.' He continued to talk as he put the bagful of chicken blood into a panful of simmering water, where it set to a jelly, and blanched the intestines to clean them. And then he prodded his taciturn friend to give me the recipe for smoked rabbit, which involved skinning the animal alive, rubbing it in a marinade of salt and spices, flattening its body between two heavy stones, crucifying it on a cross of wooden sticks, and then smoking it over a smouldering fire of pine, camphor and cypress leaves. I wasn't sure how easy it would be to reproduce that particular recipe in London, but I took notes assiduously, eager to miss nothing.

A former chef, Feng Rui owned two or three modest restaurants and bars in Chengdu. He was a small-time businessman, taking advantage of the new economic liberalisation to escape the inferno of the Chinese restaurant kitchen. But he was fascinated by the art and science of cookery; it was his passion as well as his profession. I understood this from his perfectionist attention to detail, the tenderness with which he talked about food and his obvious pride in passing on some of his knowledge to a curious foreigner. But this pride, and his pleasure, were always tinged with bitterness.

'These cultured people,' he would say, his face clouding, 'they despise cookery. They think it's low status. It's so unreasonable.'

As I came to know Feng Rui better over the next few years, I learned about his own, troubled family background. His father, Feng Mang, had been a military man, an engineer in the Nationalist air force, and when the Nationalists were defeated in the Chinese civil war, he found himself on the wrong side of history. During the Cultural Revolution, Feng Mang was 'struggled against' because of his political background, and imprisoned for seven long years, during which time he never saw his family. In the eyes of the revolutionary state and its brainwashed society, his six children were all contaminated by the seeping stain of their father's ideological misdeeds. Feng Rui, only four when the Cultural Revolution started, was bullied at school, and lost a year of his education. Later, he was excluded from military service. 'We had no political prospects, no future, and no "face" in society,' he told me. 'We were always under pressure.'

But Feng Rui found his solace in the kitchen. As a child, he hovered around the family stove, learning from his parents. At the age of only eight or nine, eager to develop his culinary skills, he began helping out at wedding banquets. People were poor then: it was the height of the Cultural Revolution; food was rationed, and life was harsh. But at weddings the chefs had a rare chance to show off their skills. 'I have loved cooking for as long as I can remember,' Feng Rui told me one day, 'and by the time I was twenty I wanted to be recognised as a chef.' In 1984 he qualified as a 'Chef of the Second Rank' in the official Chinese culinary hierarchy, and was the envy of those around him, because people knew, in those hard times, that chefs were guaranteed a decent diet. Yet in the eyes of the educated, cooks like him were little more than servants.

Cooking is traditionally a lowly profession in China. The development of a refined palate and an appreciation of food was part of the education of the Confucian gentleman, but the actual cookery fell to the lot of the uneducated masses. Boys from poor households went into service in restaurants or private kitchens, often simply because their families knew they would be given three square meals a day. Many were illiterate, and they passed on their skills from one generation to another without the use of written manuals. They were known, disparagingly sometimes, as the 'fire-head army'. Snobbery about kitchen work has its roots, perhaps, in the writings of Mencius, one of the great Confucian philosophers, who lived in the fourth century BC. Mencius saw a chasm between mental and manual work, and famously said that 'the gentleman keeps his distance from the kitchen'.

This is not to say that there aren't a few chefs in the Chinese history books. Yi Yin, a legendary cook of the Shang Dynasty, impressed the King of Tang so much with his knowledge of cooking that he was made prime minister. In the Zhou Dynasty, another chef, Yi Ya, was promoted at court after enrapturing the Duke of Qi with a series of midnight feasts. In a dark twist to the tale, he also steamed his own son to satisfy the Duke's desire to taste the flesh of an infant. Despite this monstrous act, he is still fondly remembered for the brilliance of his cooking. Chefs in Hunan province still revere Yi Ya as the ancestor of their profession: until the Cultural Revolution they made offerings to his image in a dedicated cooks' temple. Most of the famous names in Chinese culinary history, however, are those of gourmets, members of the literati who enjoyed eating, and who wrote about it in prose or poetry.

Perhaps the most famous among them is Yuan Mei, an eighteenth-century essayist and poet. He retired early from the civil service, and based himself for the rest of his life in the southern city of Nanjing, where he bought a piece of land and built the 'Garden of Contentment', a series of gracious pavilions laid out in a romantic landscape. Among his writings, Yuan Mei left to posterity a remarkable cookery book, The Food Lists of the Garden of Contentment. In it, he wrote of culinary theory and technique, advising on hygiene and the selection of ingredients, outlining his own food taboos, suggesting which flavours went harmoniously together, and offering hints on menu planning. He also recorded some three hundred recipes, ranging from simple vegetable stir-fries to elaborate duck preparations. But Yuan Mei never sullied his own hands in the kitchen. He was an observer, standing at the shoulder of his skilled personal chef, Wang Xiaoyu, tasting, taking notes, and asking questions.

Yuan himself gave due credit to the man who worked such magic for his dinner parties. After Wang died, Yuan missed him so much that he wrote his biography, an account of the life of a 'lowly person' that sat somewhat uneasily alongside his more conventional biographies of literary and upper-class figures. Two and a half centuries later, however, the name of Wang Xiaoyu has faded into obscurity, while Yuan Mei's lives on in the memories of all those who are interested in Chinese culinary culture. It's a similar story with other notable gourmets: the dishes they loved bear their names, but the men who worked so hard to feed them are forgotten. One of the few exceptions is the Song Dynasty poet Su Dongpo, who wrote so lovingly about pork that he was immortalised in the name of the Hangzhou dish 'Dongpo Rou', but who also liked personally to prepare food for his wife and his favourite concubine. Mostly, though, it was the masters who ate and pontificated, while their nameless chefs slaved away over the stove and the chopping board.

In the post-reform era, highly skilled chefs in China can command lofty salaries. One I know wears designer clothes, has two cars, two apartments and various investments, and likes to go on holiday to the wild places of Tibet. Cooking has become a more attractive career, particularly since it offers the possibility of working abroad. Yet the prejudice against it as a respectable profession runs deep in Chinese society. One of my mentors, the Cantonese cookery writer Yan-kit So, who began her career as a first-class historian, had to defy the disapproval of her well-educated and well-heeled friends when she turned her attention to food. It just wasn't the kind of thing a nice girl should do. And my own Chinese friends have always been baffled by the fact that I choose to associate with dumpling makers and beancurd sellers as well as 'intellectuals'.

But, for Feng Rui and countless other people throughout Chinese history, the pleasures of food have also been a refuge from the difficulties of personal and professional life. Eating was the solace of the exiled and the excluded; it offered sweet respite from the bitterness of life. In a society fraught by political danger, where individuals were subject to the arbitrary rule of their imperial or communist masters, and careers and reputations could be broken on a whim, it was a safe pleasure, one in which you could lose yourself without fear. The poet Su Dongpo started growing his own vegetables and experimenting in the kitchen only after the collapse of his official career and the start of an impoverished exile. Feng Rui, ostracised in his formative years, his father persecuted and imprisoned, found joy in the colours and flavours of the kitchen. It gave him his freedom, and it unleashed his creativity.

Despite his lingering bitterness and resentment of society's wrongs, Feng Rui put the best of himself into his food. That first morning in the kitchen with him, I was impressed by his skill and his serenity. I stood at his side, notebook in hand, breathing in the aromas that filled the kitchen. There was the smell of the fresh shiitake mushrooms he added to the chicken's cooking broth to make a simple soup; the overwhelming, citrussy scent of Sichuan peppercorns, slow-roasted in the wok; the gentler exhalations of warm chicken and pork.

One of the dishes Feng Rui chose to make for lunch that day was just an afterthought. It was chao ji za, stir-fried chicken miscellany, a concoction that would have seemed more at home in the kitchen of a country cottage than on a restaurant menu. It was made with all the parts of the chicken that most European cooks would throw away: the blood, set to a jelly, the gizzard, the heart, the liver, and the intestines. They were all cooked in the wok with pickled red chilli and ginger, and batons of slender, fragrant Chinese celery. Each innard was prepared in a way that would make the most of its particular qualities of taste or texture.

It was typical of the careful economy of Sichuanese home cooking that almost nothing of Feng Rui's chicken was wasted. And it was the same with the fish that I'd seen slaughtered in the bathroom (apart from its intestines -- fit only, as Feng Rui had told me so disparagingly, for the foul-feeding Cantonese). Virtually every edible morsel was to be savoured: even, and especially, the silky strands around the eye, the tender flesh in the cheek, the eyeball. We would leave only bones and fins on the plate.

I had had some, limited acquaintance with this kind of cooking at home in Oxford. My mother brought me up knowing how to joint chickens, roast bacon rinds as a snack, make bones into stocks, reuse leftovers to make tomorrow's supper. And we did eat offal, too, on occasion: mostly liver and kidneys, although once my mother made brain croquettes, serving them with some sleight of hand. But this was nothing compared to China.

There, in the mid-nineties, memories of famine and rationing were still fresh and raw, at least for the older generation. Children were told, as Chinese children had been told since time immemorial, that every grain of rice was produced by the sweat of a peasant. Their parents, many of them, had spent years in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, eking out a hard living from the land. There was a sense that food was precious, and that you should make the most of it.

As the months slipped by in Chengdu, I too learned to appreciate the bits of fish and fowl that I would have left on my plate in England or never seen at all (mostly, they are spirited away before the meat reaches the butcher's counter or the supermarket shelf). Feng Rui's stir-fried chicken miscellany was delicious, as was his twice-cooked pork, served in a sumptuous sizzle of chilli-bean paste and garlic leaves. The fish, whose journey from tank to table I had watched with trepidation, was steamed and then scattered with shreds of ginger and spring onion. He finished the dish with a libation of fizzing-hot oil that awakened the fresh fragrances of the onion and ginger, and then a slow, dark trickle of soy sauce. Lastly, Feng Rui placed a bowlful of winter melon and mushroom broth on the table. There was rice too, he said, if we wanted it later. We raised our chopsticks, and ate.

So Feng Rui fulfilled what he saw as his duty, and gave a nosy foreign girl a lesson in Sichuanese cookery. After that, he let me study in the kitchen of the Bamboo Bar whenever I wanted, and he took me out for various amazing dinners. I don't imagine he had any idea what he had started. In a sense, you could say he was my first Sichuanese shi fu (cooking master).