Lack of bamboo makes one vulgar

Lack of pork makes one thin

In order to avoid vulgarity and slenderness

Have pork with bamboo shoots now and then.

Su Tun Po (12th-century)

The Chinese love eating. They embrace the pleasures of the table with glee not guilt. Food is celebration in Hong Kong, and everyone is invited. I saw an ancient couple, like a pair of wizened little dolls in traditional dress, tottering eagerly, arm in arm, into a typically enormous Hong Kong restaurant - the light of simple greed shining in their merry boot-button eyes.

Everywhere you go, you can eat. Even on an anonymous little island in the New Territories, there is an outdoor café that serves delicious smoky noodles, black pepper prawns, garlic broccoli, grouper and fried squid. Out there, it feels as remote as boating in the Shetland Islands, before you round a headland and find yourself in Manhattan.

That is the anomaly that is Hong Kong, tiny but towering, and crammed to the gills with teeming life from all over China and beyond. Chinese culture and cuisine are squeezed and modified as if through a funnel, on their way to the outside world.

Everyone I spoke to had an opinion, but disagreed, about which were the major Chinese mainland cuisines. It seemed to boil down to four main ones and a few major subsidiaries: Canton, Sichuan, Shanghai and Beijing (or Peking), with sub-sections of Chiu Chow and Fujian with Canton, and Hunan which is related to Sichuan.

China covers unimaginable distances, weather systems, time zones and morphologies. Rice as noodles, steamed, stir-fried, as congee or rice porridge is a staple is confined to the south. North of the Yangtze river is the wheat belt, and rice disappears off the menu, to be gradually replaced by noodles, steamed buns and dumplings.

'The Chinese will eat anything that flies except an aeroplane.' I was told happily. 'Anything that moves under water except a submarine. And anything that has four legs and turns its back to the sky except a table.' I even saw a man on the pavement stir-frying sand in a huge wok. Startled, but approaching in a spirit of exploration, I realised that there were chestnuts in the sand, roasting evenly to soft perfection.

The poem says two things: one, wide acceptance of protein sources, but, also, a liking for things that are living, preferable very recently: wriggling prawns, swimming fish, warm meat. Not all Chinese like all of it; one girl told me, 'I don’t like tripe, but I do like the next stomach along….' A winter soup of snake is regarded as very strengthening. Bear’s paws are a terrific luxury. The swiftlets' salivary nest lining provides the gelatinous texture of the eponymous soup.

There is simply a different attitude as well to texture, which in some dishes dominates taste as the important feature. The seethrough, black, silicon rubber, laced with ammonia, that is those alien's offspring, 1,000 year old eggs; the stringy jelly of shark's fin soup; all come into this category. “We like slimy stuff,” said local food critic Stephen Wong, with pleased satisfaction.

You cannot walk along a Hong Kong street without being accosted by food, food, food. Very Hong Kong (and nowhere else) are little chah chaan teng, or cafes. I asked for what most people ask for, and was served a Darn Ji, or egg sandwich – pulpy white slice interspersed with a kind of thin omelette - very British hangover. They also like Darn Ngau; the last popular bastion of wartime favourite corned beef. This they wash down with extremely weird yuan yang, coffee mixed with strong tea and evaporated milk, or iced lemon coffee (strictly Hong Kong this one, really gives you a blast of energy). I couldn’t understand why I was enjoying it so much, until I realised it reminded me of my favourite treat from my Italian youth: caffe limone gelate in a cone.

Dim-sum (variously translated at 'dot-hearts' or 'pieces from the heart' because people love them so much) or tiny snacks and dumplings both fried and steamed, originate in Canton, China’s closest province. Passed through Hong Kong sensibility and it acquires a pitch of refinement and some strange accretions. In the Peninsular Hotel, it is possible to have a swift and reassuring lesson in dim sum making which usually takes seven years. Starch is slaked with hot water to make dough. A heavy cleaver patted on an oily towel flattens marble-sized balls of this dough into rounds. Then I scooped in a little filling, say scallop with flat chives or prawn and bamboo shoot, and pleated the top.

It looked a bit like dim sum when I had finished, and when steamed was sublime. The chefs at the Peninsular go much further: they shape prawn dumplings into goldfish. All is washed down with tea, and you can only have dim sum in the daytime. Elsewhere, I came across a curiously 1950s sauce, served in Hong Kong with a fried prawn cake, made of salad cream laced with tinned macedoine of fruits (to give it an elegant name) a curiously attractive combo typical of local adaptation.

Cantonese food is very refined. At Sweet Dynasty, I was astonished to discover the huge variety of Cantonese puddings. Soon the table was covered with little bowls: black sesame soup with lotus seeds, walnut soup; slippery fresh warm tofu, like baked custard served in a bamboo barrel with clear sugar syrup; sugar frosted coconut dumplings; light syrup with bitter almonds, pawpaw and snow fungus (good for the complexion, transparent, crunchy and strange); eyeballs of hot sticky rice dough enclosing delicious sweet pastes of sesame, coconut and red bean; and my favourite, sago pudding with mango, a long way from prep school frog-spawn. Noisy and packed, the restaurant was host to dozens of families eagerly cramming the fat, white-clad legs of their littlests into high chairs.

Yung Kee is another must-see: the place to experience the most elevated Hong Kong refinement of Cantonese food, goose roasted to glossy perfection in charcoal ovens and served with golden sauce on the side: “fruity, pale, salty, transparent, sour and sweet” my notes read. I ventured gingerly into the kitchen (the floor was like a skating rink) to examine the geese, hanging in rows and rows, their plucked heads over one shoulder, their skin golden blown up taut with a bicycle pump and echoing the naked torsos of the chefs in this steaming, flaming, soaking inferno.

Mr Kam, the founding owner, now in his 80s, is still famous for the surgical precision and lightening speed of his chopping technique. If you fancy the common, thick lipped grunt cooked plainly, this is the place. The seafood is all very plain, to emphasise its exquisite coastal freshness: steamed shrimp, sauteed scallops, boiled abalone oyster sauce. crab meat deep fried with lemon sauce.

With typical Cantonese prejudice, I was told that chilli spoilt food, because the mouth cannot identify the kind of food under the heat. A favoured dish is stir-fried rice-field-worm with egg, which looked rather like tangled bricks of shredded wheat. Cantonese food has been a very successful export, but Cantonese food eaten in Hong Kong is a very different experience to your local takeaway.

China’s various weather systems dictate the local attitude to chilli: people need to keep warm and to sweat, or to be dried out in damp places. Or even to mask slightly stale food served in inland regions like Szichuan; or at least that is how the Cantonese on the coast, revelling in their fresh food supplies, libel the inlanders’ taste for heat. You won’t find much Sichuan food in Hong Kong because the local Cantonese don’t like it.

At the Sichuan Garden we ate sweetish white steamed buns, mopping up the chilli hot sauces like Indians do with chuppatis. Or noodles made of wheat flour. They do like their chillies: they believe the heat wards off the humidity of their hilly country. They use an abundance of Szichuan pepper (no relation to peppercorns) which conveys a numbness, a paralysing spiciness called ma. Sichuan heat creeps up on you; but Hunan heat smacks you round the mouth. When there are pictures of two chillies beside a dish on a Hunan menu, do not be tempted to try out your macho tastebuds honed on Vindaloo. Just bringing the bright red chunks of sizzling chicken near my lips caused blistering.

We tried turnip cakes, little flakey pastries like sea shells dotted with sesame seed barnacles. My determination to try everything no matter what it looked like paid off with Hunan white fish fillet, with a yellow bean sauce that looked like something deposited upon a pavement, but had a crunch and pleasing nuttiness, totally different to that which we call yellow bean sauce here. They serve their noodles, chilli hot of course, in a neat section of giant bamboo to make a natural beaker.

Peking cuisine is really a composite, affected by the grandeur of the Imperial palace and the local Muslim population. At the Peking Garden, we naturally sample the famous Peking duck, brought glossy and fragrant to our table, then whisked away for carving. The meat and skin are served with little steamed pancakes, spring onions, plum sauce and cucumber shreds. Originally, in Peking, only the crispy skin was served with pancakes. The meat went into a rice dish, and the rest made soup. Hong Kong has changed Peking duck, and they eat it now in Peking in the Hong Kong style.

Another typical dish is Begger’s Chicken, spiced, and wrapped, like our own gypsies are reputed to do to hedgehogs, in clay, before being slowly cooked for hours. It is served with a hammer, and inside the meat is dark and aromatic with star anise.

A chef demonstrates the art of the Peking noodle: spinning dough into a loop like a thick and baggy skipping rope, until it falls of its own volition into tender noodles, which we ate with shredded pork. Sautéed chicken came with caramelised walnuts. Mutton strips sizzling on a scorching iron plate, with fresh coriander and spring onions, (you tuck the meat into sesame pockets, like tiny halved pitted breads) demonstrate the Peking Muslim influence in this strictly winter dish.

I visited the City Chiu Chow Hong Kong Restaurant at lunchtime to find a barbaric buffet in progress: Chiu Chow is known as hearty food. Great steaming vats of ox guts or fish balls, bubbled with white carrot and salty cabbage, pigs belly, kidney and intestine with fungus, egg mushroom and dried sea moss; presided over by cosy ladies with ladles. No doubt to deal with all the heartiness, you are offered a tiny cup of special bitter iron tea before and after food to aid digestion.

I decided fish balls are too bouncy for most Western tastes, but a pudding off the buffet of purple veined taro root poached in syrup with flat Chinese chives, was oddly delicious. Chiu Chow is another coastal cuisine – where the idea of cold crab shells striped white and pink like Brighton rock, makes eyes light up. They adore spicy crab balls and spicy duck with a dipping sauce of vinegar, vegetables simmered with bones, and puddings. Chiu Chow wedding banquets start with sweet dishes for luck, so this element of their cuisine is very highly developed.

The chefs I spoke to both had unusually curly hair, which I assumed was characteristic of their region, until they told me it had been permed. After the 1967 riots, Shanghainese fled south to Hong Kong, and brought their cuisine, which is now the most popular here after Cantonese. They favour far more extreme sour, bitter and salt savours which have to be toned down for Cantonese tastes. A typical dish is fried yellow fish with sweet-sour sauce. The wheat flour used for their fried buns is yellow locally, but has to be white in Hong Kong for the same reason.

I fell into the trap of sinking my teeth into beche de mer commonly known as sea cucumber: a muffled jelly blanket, sliced and poached in a brown sauce. Horrid. The Shanghainese might hold a clue to the control of the hairy crab, currently causing an environmental panic as an alien invader in Britain, they adore it served in a wine sauce during April. We finished with a rice mould topped with fruit, a pudding of nursery simplicity and comforting sweetness. Nowhere in the world can you experience such a vast and varied selection of food in such a small area There are simply no limits to what the Hong Chinese, and their many visitors, are prepared to enjoy.