Lu Nan Lu Fu is a famous kind of pickles around Yunnan province, and you may hear about it when you have Chinese learning programs in China. It is made by tofu and tastes salty. It is a famous kind of foods you can eat with rice.
There is also a well known story about Lu Nan Lu Fu shared in your one-on-one Chinese learning programsin the city of Kunming. Many years ago, there was a beautiful Sani girl named Li Mei living near the Hei Long Tan in Lu Nan County. She was an industrious girl and she was skillful in making manual products, and many young men in Lu Nan wanted to marry her. Reading about the story while volunteer in China, foreign students may ask who the man that Li Mei loved was. She liked none of them, but the shepherd A Lu was the one she liked. A Lu was a kind and honest man who was good at grazing and he always won in grazing competitions.
If you keep reading the story while you learn Mandarin Chinese in Kunming, you would find the stepmother of Lei Mei was a cruel and bad woman. She had long been planning to marry Li Mei to a very rich man so that she could get a lot of money from the man. When you study Mandarin Chinese in the city of Kunming, you should know that many years ago, when a mother decided to marry her girl to a man, the man should give a sum of money to the girl’s mother. At the time that A Lu came to Li Mei’s family to propose the marriage, Li Mei’s mother asked for a lot of money.
However, as was known in volunteer program in China, A Lu was not a rich man and he lived on grazing. He could not afford the money that Li Mei’s step mother asked. Li Mei’s stepmother told A Lu that with the abundant water in Hei Long Tan, you could help me to make tofu to save money and then get married. Actually Li Mei’s mother did not want her daughter to nary A Lu, and what she said was just to send him away. A Lu believed her words and worked as hard as it was told in the story you knew from your HSK preparation program in China. He worked very hard every day in Li Mei’s house. He got up very early in the morning and worked late at night. He made many tofus, but Li Mei’s step mother had always said that was not enough.
Torch festival is introduced as the most interesting activity at that time when you study in China. When torch festival came, most of the young people went to the torch festival, but A Lu and Li Mei had to carry that tofu and sell tofu around the village. They were selling tofu all night long, but only a few of them were sold out, and the left tofu smelt strange. What they could do was the question that everyone wanted to ask while they came to study Chinese in the city of Kunming. A Lu and Li Mei had no choice but carried that left tofu home.
Seeing they carrying tofu back home, Li Mei’s stepmother was as angry as described in Chinese classes when you traveled to learn Chinese in China. A Lu was so bad because without the money, he could not marry Li Mei. Li Mei comforted A Lu and said’ “As the tofu had already changed into this, we need to figure out another way.”
She thought for many days, and finally she figured out a solution. She put star anise, fennel and chili into a jar with tofu, and then she spilled some liquor into the jar. She used vegetable leaves to wrap tofu into small pieces and soaped them into plant oil. She also put a piece of oiled paper on the jar and sealed it. This was the traditional way you know of making Lu Fu when you learn Mandarin in Yunnan province. Several weeks later, when she opened the jar, a nice smell came out of the jar, and every people passed by her house would buy some tofu and took it home. Their business became bigger and bigger, and finally A Lu saved a large sum of money. Seeing all these, Li Mei’s stepmother had no choice but married her daughter to A Lu. Both A Lu and Li Mei had lived a happy life since them.