China is a fruit lovers paradise.  On almost every city block in every Chinese city you are bound to find a few of the same shops: a noodle place, hair salon, newspaper stand, and a fruit shop.  Though China largely lacks the European pleasures of small specialized cheese shops, decent bakeries, or wine shops the country makes up for it with its own Chinese style specialized food shops.  There’s the Chinese medicine shops lined with rows and rows of small wooden drawers filled with exotic dried herbs, the tofu shop, the noodle shop, in Hong Kong there are shops that sell only dried seafood specialties like shark fin, and maybe the greatest of them all the fruit shop.  You can literally tell what time of year it is by looking at what is on sale at the fruit shops and in the wet markets.  While America has great fruit when you shop at a farmers market most people buy their fruit at supermarkets where the fruit has most likely been shipped from some far off country where they breed the flavorless fruit to survive the long journey and weeks spent on a shelf.  China has that same sad fruit but they definitely appreciate the better stuff and the fact that every block in my Shanghai neighborhood has its own large fruit shop testifies to the Chinese people’s appreciation of good fruit.  No fruit sums this up more so than the water honey peach (水蜜桃), the world’s greatest peach.

I have long known about this famous peach that comes to market in July and August but being a New England boy peaches are not always my first choice when it comes to fruit.  My past year in Hunan the fruits I regularly are were mostly watermelons, other assorted melons (especially the amazing 哈密瓜), mangosteens (illegal in America), bananas, wax berries (杨梅), apples, dragonfruit, lychees, and most importantly the great (and cheap) mandarin oranges grown all over western Hunan.  But that was Hunan.  Shanghai in the summer is the land of peaches.  The rural areas of Jiangsu province and Zhejiang province to the west of the city are where the world’s best peaches are grown.

To be honest I didn’t know this until today when when I was reading the New York Times Dining section’s blog and stumbled upon a link to a Wall Street Journal article about these amazing peaches.  All over eastern Asia fruit is highly prized for its taste and medical benefits, and the prices reflect this attitude.  My year of teaching in Hunan often meant that my throat suffered and my Chinese coworkers always told me to eat pears, since they are good for the throat.  During the dark days of Mao’s reign to buy a watermelon in China one needed a doctor’s prescription.

So after reading the article I immediately went out into Shanghai’s heat and humidity and walked half a block to the nearest fruit shop.  They had four different varieties of water honey peaches, differentiated by where they were grown.  The largest and most beautiful were from Yangshan, each individually wrapped in a thin protective sheaf of Styrofoam.  The price tag was 16.8 rmb/jin ($5/kilogram), far more than the other peaches.  I only wanted to buy one amazing peach so the price tag didn’t faze me.  My big peach cost $1.60.  Small price to pay for a peach that cannot be bought outside of eastern China (they ripen too quickly and are too thin skinned to survive the journey to America).

I rushed it back to my apartment where I got a knife and my camera and started eating.  Cutting into the flesh you see that it starts from blood red at the pit and moves out into almost translucent white flesh.  It was unlike any peach I’ve had before.  At first I thought that it was too subtly flavored to be considered the world’s greatest peach but then as I chewed the fruit opened itself to me with the most amazing flavor and fragerance.  Eating this peach elicited a strong sensory memory for me: it is like walking into a florists cooler as the multi-toned fragerances of the roses surround you and bring you to a happier place.  It also reminded me of walking into a humid greenhouse in the middle of winter and smelling the tropical flowers in all their earthly beauty or even the rose perfume shop my family and I visited in Giza Egypt.  I’ve been slowly savoring my peach as I’ve been writing this and there is now no doubt in my mind that the water honey peach is the world’s greatest.  I’m already making plans to buy some and make a batch of peach sorbet with the ice cream maker I lugged from America.  Is there anything better sounding for August in Shanghai?