Cha Guo Stories, Part VI: Artisanal (and Sometimes Experimental) Soy Sauce

This is the sixth in a series of stories looking at the protagonists in Cha Guo, an upcoming documentary by Daphné Mandel and Guy Bertrand that focuses on the people of Kwu Tung North. Read the previous stories here.

Just off Castle Peak Road, where it reaches Kwu Tung, is what used to be a covered vegetable market, now empty. An old train station used to be nearby too, so if you come from Sheung Shui MTR by taxi, you can tell the driver to go to the “old cave vegetable station” (gu2 dung6 coi3 zaam6 古洞菜站). From this spot, you’ll see three little alleys – the one on the right of the former market is called Kwu Tung Shek Tsai Leng (gu2 dung6 sek6 zai2 ling5 古洞石仔嶺). It is a typical northern New Territories lane full of intriguing spots. 

A few steps in is a charming old brick structure, a single-storey yellow building with a large wooden door and a slanted roof covered in round tiles, which used to be the local school. It closed when, in the early 1980s, Hong Kong factories started to move across the border to Shenzhen; the city’s skyscrapers are now easily spotted from here. With workers moving elsewhere, there were hardly any children left in need of schooling. 

Further down the alley, someone has placed a vintage toy on top of a garbage collection point – a small replica of a Volkswagen minivan from the 1960s. Just in front of it, someone has decorated their gate with old dolls, made a bit spooky by soot, the passing of time and Hong Kong’s uncharitable weather. They are kept company by a stuffed dinosaur and an old McDonald’s advertisement. 

At the end of the alley — a five minute walk from the beginning — is the gate of Yuet Wo Food Factory (jyu6 wo6 sik6 ban2 chong2 悅和食品廠), which has been here since the early 1960s. When you enter the grounds of a natural soy sauce manufacturer, the air smells sweet and full. The ceramic vats where the inoculated soybeans are fermenting in the brine are on the rooftop, like round-bellied sentinels soaking up the heat of the sun. 

But Yuet Wo does not only produce soy sauce. Third-generation manager Jack Pong proudly notes that the factory is also the only one in Hong Kong that still distills rice wine. And as is always the case with artisanal soy sauce manufacturers, there is no waste, and many more packaged condiments come out of this metal gate: the by-products of artisanal soy sauce, devoid of chemical additives, are used in creating other traditional sauces, like sweet soy sauce, black bean sauce, soy bean paste and hoisin sauce. 

To diversify even further, Yuet Wo produces also rice vinegar (derived from their rice wine), sweet rice vinegar, plum sauce, peanut butter, shrimp paste – and a few more innovative foodstuffs: “I started making soy sauce ice cream!” says Pong proudly, explaining that since soy sauce is his passion, he also visits soy sauce manufacturers whenever he is in mainland China, Taiwan or Japan. The latter is where he first tasted soy sauce ice cream and decided he would have to give it a go as well. Now, it is being sold in many 7-Eleven shops around town. 

The factory was founded by Jack Pong’s grandfather, Pong Yiu, who arrived in Hong Kong in his teens from Foshan, which at the time was well known for small-batch soy sauce manufacturing. Pong Yiu jut carried on the trade he was already familiar with, setting up a shop in Tsuen Wan, where the company still has a location, in 1945. “Then we started our move to Sheung Shui gradually, as Tsuen Wan was getting more urbanised,” explains Jack Pong. “In 1973, this factory was enlarged, and all production was moved here.”

As he shows visitors around the factory, he explains the company used to have more space. It became more hemmed in as new buildings and other factories have risen around it over the years. The factory spans various levels and it can feel a little labyrinthine. There are two entrances on the ground floor, one leading to the company’s offices, the packaging area and the factory itself, and another one leading to the distillery and the space where vinegar is fermented. 

In the factory itself, you can see the huge vats where the soy sauces and sweet vinegar are being prepared, shrouded in steam and providing yet more olfactory stimulation. Is that star anise? Cinnamon, too? The company’s dark soy sauce, used in Cantonese cuisine mainly to impart a deeper colour to braised dishes, is made with light soy sauce, Korean sugar, water, and a few other ingredients particular to Yuet Wo’s own recipe. The sweet vinegar, used for cooking traditional dishes such as pork knuckles boiled in ginger and vinegar, is cooked for up to two hours, spreading a sour sweet perfume in the air, due to it being prepared “with spices, lots of sugar, and herbs,” says Pong. To demonstrate, he lifts a metal strainer from the 1,500-litre vat, revealing the spices and herbs that are being infused in the liquid. 

In the factory’s basement is a room where large straw trays of boiled and inoculated soybeans are left to ferment, sitting on special metal racks that allow full aeration. They will later be transported to the rooftop, where they will be mixed with brine and left to ferment in the sun in ceramic vats. Depending on the type of soy sauce, they will remain in the vats for anywhere from one month to half a year. 

“Our price range is a bit above the average, but our customers are willing to pay more because they appreciate the different taste of our product,” says Pong. “However, I have also started working with high schools, in order to provide young people with a better knowledge of what soy sauce is, how it is made, and what it is supposed to taste like,” he says, while walking through a lab. “Here, we do R&D for new products.”

In order to reach the rooftop, you need to first go up a staircase along which little jars with handwritten labels half-filled with a dark sauce are strategically placed to catch the sun. “These are new experiments,” says Pong. “We have been adapting to changing market demands, so for example now we make gluten-free soy sauce, sugar free soy sauce, organic soy sauce, and so on. We test first with these very small batches, but they need to be sitting in the sun as well.”

The large ceramic vats on the roof are covered with a sheet of plexiglass kept down by a few aptly arranged bricks to prevent everything from flying away during windy days and typhoons. They are old types of vats that have been with the company for more than 80 years, which is why, if one of them has a crack, Yuet Wo will repair it with red silicone to prevent any leakage. It is not only for the sake of nostalgia: ceramic vats, with their decades of usage, have absorbed the briny sauce for so long, that they produce a more complex flavour – a bit like the old unglazed ceramic teapots treasured by tea connoisseurs. If one breaks completely, there’s no replacing it. “You can still find similar ones but they do not impart the same flavour as one that has been used for decades, so we also use modern ones, made out of stainless steel,” says Pong, pointing towards a row of metallic vats. In still other vats, after filtering out the beans, Yuet Wo’s soy sauce is further condensed by letting it sit out under the sun for two more weeks. 

Pong didn’t grow up knowing that he would one day be running his grandfather’s and father’s factory: he studied hotel and food catering management in Canada, and when he came back he started working in the food industry. “I have been here for eight years now, but I had never planned it,” he says. “At some point after my graduation, I thought, maybe I should see if I can come back to the factory and how I can help,” he says. Since taking over the company, he has been very active on social media, posting memes and funny cartoons on Instagram and Facebook with the goal of reaching younger customers.

Soon, as the Northern Metropolis is built to further integrate Hong Kong with Shenzhen, Yuet Wo will need to move somewhere else. “I am not too sure where we are going to go yet,” says Pong. “We have applied with the government to have our distillery listed as Intangible Cultural Heritage, and we are waiting for their reply,” he says, hoping that this may also save the old red still that has been producing rice wine here since the 1960s. In spite of this uncertainty, Pong and Yuet Wo keep making soy sauce, rice wine, condiments and social media posts everyday, keeping one of Hong Kong’s culinary traditions alive.

All photos are stills from Cha Guo, courtesy of Guy Bertrand and Daphne Mandel

Public Screening of Cha Guo Stories at the Hong Kong Arts Centre – 3 December 2024. For more information visit here