Crustacean Sensation : Following an international delicacy to its source, in tranquil waters near Shanghai : Finally the crabs appeared, a pile simply steamed, accompanied by a dipping sauce of black vinegar, sugar and ginger.

“In heaven there is paradise, on earth Suzhou and Hangzhou,” according to a Chinese Yuan dynasty poet. Suzhou, in centuries past a haven for scholars, painters and poets, with its quiet walled gardens and jade-green (but don’t look too closely) canals, still retains much of the old city’s loveliness. And its citizens still love to eat the food that has made the city justly famous. Particularly when the weather begins to cool, they begin to think of crabs.

Shanghai crabs, hairy crabs, river crabs--they are known in English by a variety of names (and in Chinese as da jia xie “crabs of the large locks” or water gates)--but all refer to the freshwater crabs from the lakes and streams near the city of Suzhou that are eaten with gusto not only in Suzhou and nearby Shanghai, but in Hong Kong, Tokyo and New York.

“Hairy crab” is perhaps the most descriptive name for the creature, which ranges from about four to eight inches across, with odd, furry patches--thicker on the male than the female--on the largest segment of the crab’s front claws.

It was chance rather than design that took me to Suzhou--a town cradled between two prime spots for harvesting crabs, Lake Tai Hu to the west and Lake Yangcheng to the northeast--at the height of crab season the first week of November. Arriving in the city in late afternoon, I was taken to the Suzhou Painting Academy, a complex of Ming-period buildings around a courtyard. The courtyard contained a small, dark pond in which goldfish lurked and a persimmon tree hung with hundreds of golden fruits. The tree, I learned, had been planted years before by Cai Ting-hui, the academy’s master painter and seal carver and unofficial tender of the garden. It was because of Cai that I had been taken to the academy. Not only was he a painter and carver of considerable renown (on visits to Japan he carved seals on official request for former prime ministers Yasuhiro Nakasone and Sosuke Uno), but he was a friend of a friend and, importantly, knew all the best restaurants in Suzhou and kept a tab at each.

On the back of Cai’s motorcycle I was whisked away to the Green Bamboo Pavilion on a street lined with trees hung with colored lights. The restaurant’s intimate, if unprepossessing, two small rooms were softened by the green shade of the trees outside. A round table draped with a spotless but unironed white damask cloth had been laid for us in the back room, where a ceiling fan circled slowly overhead. Proprietor and chef Wu Lung Geng, whose distinctions included having served high-ranking Communist officials as well as having written a cookbook on Suzhou specialties, came in to greet us and to oversee the preparation of lunch.

The leisurely meal followed a pattern that was to become familiar during my visits to China. We began with an assortment of cold dishes, including crunchy jellyfish spiked with chilies, cubes of celery and bean curd, dried ducks’ stomachs and a dish of mushrooms with a crisp green vegetable. A mixture of rich and delicate dishes followed as we waited for the crabs: an intensely flavored dish of pig’s stomach and chilies; “fish rice,” or finely minced whitefish from a nearby lake, and tiny, freshwater shrimp richly sauced with crab “oil”--the delicate shrimp providing a vehicle for the special flavor of the crab roe and milt, the most satisfying method of enjoying the best part of the hairy crab.

“You can’t eat like this in Hong Kong--in a small restaurant where the chef cooks especially for you and everything comes to the table still very hot,” my host and guide said. Consuming the won ton in rich broth, the most tender I’ve ever had, was indeed “swallowing clouds”--a literal translation of the term.

Finally the crabs appeared, like long-awaited guests, a pile simply steamed, accompanied by a simple dipping sauce of black vinegar, sugar and ginger. They are steamed alive and must be very fresh--not just barely alive, or, according to my guide, the flesh will be watery. The meat was sweet and tender, worth the trouble of extracting it, and the roe and milt luscious. The meal was a relative bargain at about $30 for us both.

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Hairy crabs live in rivers, returning to small streams and lakes for breeding. “The crabs have been increasing in number the past few years,” Cai explained. “Until then, there were too many dams on the small rivers and the crabs couldn’t return to the lakes to lay their eggs.” Now, he said, crabs are bred and the baby crabs protected until they are an inch or so in length, then they are scattered across the lake by plane.

The season for hairy crabs is determined by the presence of roe in the female crab (identified by the founded flange of the under-carapace) and the milt (sperm) of the male (identified by a sword-shaped pointed flange) and its generally greater size. Although the flesh is sweet and tender, it is the richness and quantity of the roe and milt (both called, rather inappropriately, “oil” in Chinese) that accord hairy crabs their special status as a great, internationally known delicacy.

Neither is the least bit oily: The roe is firm but without the delicate crunch of individual egg casings typical of some types of caviar--more like Japanese salted cod roe (tarako) in texture. The milt is richer in flavor and more delicate in consistency, smooth and custard-like.

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There is a definite ritual to dismembering a crab to get the most out of it. The main points are: Remove the flange or apron from the underside of the crab, taking care not to break the intestine, which is not eaten. Holding the crab upside down so that all the juices drain into the top shell. This is pulled off and the spongy lungs discarded. All accessible roe or milt is savored, whatever remains in the top shell is sipped, then the body broken in half and again the roe or milt picked out before removing the meat. Each leg and claw is broken off and the meat sucked out with great relish.

We ate that night at Gong De Lin Cai Guan, a Buddhist vegetarian restaurant but with crab courses brought in from Wong Si, one of Suzhou’s more famous establishments. Dinner included another crab “oil” dish of a soupy consistency--meant to be eaten over noodles or rice and characteristic of Suzhou cuisine--this one made with bean curd as the vehicle for the abundant sauce.

My favorite non-crab dish was dessert: purple glutinous rice, steamed and then cooked briefly in lard, sweetened with sugar, scented with osmanthus flowers and sprinkled with pine nuts. During dinner I mentioned to Cai that I would like to see where hairy crabs were caught. Much of what I could learn about them seemed no more than hearsay, and I wondered if the art of catching hairy crabs was part of a secret transmission. I had only one more day in the Suzhou area (already scheduled to include a visit to a tea plantation and to the home of another local artist), but he said he would try to arrange it.

We set out to the southwest the following morning for Dongshan, a village on a peninsula jutting into the waters of Tai Hu. The taxi we had hired in Shanghai broke down. What might have wiped out an entire day’s plans was salvaged by friends following us in a van, which accompanied our entire party. After picking up a gift of a few chickens in Dongshan, whose streets were crowded with sellers of oranges and pomegranates and people threshing sheaves of newly harvested rice, our first stop was at the home of Yah-ming (orphaned, he uses only his given name).

The recipient of the chickens, Yah-ming is an unorthodox painter of landscapes who has realized a classical literatus dream and made art his life. Walking under fruit-laden orange trees we reached the high white walls of his Ming period villa and entered his airy, open rooms. Yah-ming bought the villa a few years ago (“only a shell was left,” he said), and since then has gradually renovated it room by room, resurfacing the whitewashed walls to receive his mountains, plains and rivers painted floor to ceiling in ink and soft blue and brown pigments. Portly and not in the best of health, he climbed an unsteady wooden ladder, firmly held by his assistant, wielding an immense calligraphy brush to demonstrate his painting technique. Afterward, sitting in one of the sparsely furnished halls, we drank tea, talked about painting, the local tea (a green tea produced in insufficient quantity for commercial use, and Bilouchun, another rare green tea for which Suzhou and the Tai Hu area are famous) and Yixing teapots.

After an extended lunch at Dongshan Binguan, another old villa that has been turned into a hotel and restaurant, we emerged into the autumn sunshine, piled back into the van and headed for the lake. Arriving at Houshan, a small fishing village on its shore, we waited for the boat Cai had arranged for us. I bought a couple of small, yellow-skinned pomegranates from a black-trousered woman carrying a basket of them. The pale blue porcelain sky and the gray silk of the water faded together into misty white at the horizon. A boy hanging around the terminal told me that in some vaguely identified past, fisherman set out lamps with their nets; the lamps would attract the crabs into the net and the fishermen would then draw them in. Now, he said, crabs were farmed all around the lake, a story that supported what I had heard in Suzhou.

Before long we were led out along a pier and onto a small, varnished wooden fishing boat: Cai and Yah-ming, my friend from Hong Kong, Ip Wing-chi and his wife, another painter friend of Cai’s, the fisherman, his wife and myself. A few of us stretched out on top of the cabin. The only discordant note was the put-put of the boat’s motor. As we headed for Xishan, a scenic spot on the island of Xidongtingshan, the shores receded into the white mist and the gray-green water lapping at the sides of the boat was dappled with yellow pollen. Below us on the deck, the fishermen’s wife fed bamboo sticks into a stove to boil water, and Ip prepared Bilouchun, a rare local green tea. Translucent green in our glasses, an idealized lake of liquid green jade, it was the best tea of the entire trip.

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Suddenly the engine was cut and we drifted in the direction of a stand of fishnets. The fisherman, standing on the prow, poled the boat over to them with a long, flexible bamboo pole (the average depth of Tai Hu is a mere seven feet). We moved in near silence, the weak autumnal sun glaring white on the water. The fisherman and his wife pulled in their nets, which contained a few crabs and some fish. Another boat pulled up to us, then another, offering nets full of crabs.

While Cai squatted on the deck, holding each crab in turn by its large front pincers and vigorously scrubbing it, the fisherman told us about catching crabs.

Sometimes thick ropes are strung from shore to water. The crabs, attracted to lights set at the shore end of the line, climb up the rope and are plucked off, one-by-one, with a metal clamp. Or nets and floats are set out in shallow water. When crabs or fish enter the nets, the floats move and the net is pulled in. “A big catch for us is about 300 crabs, occasionally more,” he said. “It depends on the weather--we catch the most at full moon.” His wife set a wok on the bamboo-burning stove, ladling in lake water to steam the crabs.

We chugged toward Xishan, watching as vertical rock faces topped with trees and a multitude of pavilions gradually drifted into focus--the evening’s misty atmosphere obscuring anything else on the island. Docking briefly, we followed a dirt path past a teahouse to a “single stroke of heaven”: a thread-thin crevice carved into one of the cliffs with narrow steps never meant to be used, through which a slip of sky could be seen. (This abstraction--which I had always thought to be an artist’s conceit--is often seen in landscape paintings of the Ming and earlier eras.) We ate our crabs on the boat, dipping the sweet meat into the dark vinegar and sugar Cai had brought from home.

As dusk settled over the lake, water and sky glowed rose red above and below the hazy brown hills around us, a new moon piercing white in the dark water.

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GUIDEBOOK

Crab Meet

in China

In China:

Cui Jie Lou (Green Bamboo Pavilion), 215 Xiquan St., Suzhou; telephone locally 213339.

Wong Si, 23 Tai Jian Lane, Suzhou; tel. 227277.

Dongshan Binguan, Dongshan, Jiangsu 215107; tel. (0512) 562973 (in Dongshan, 981001 981358).

In Hong Kong:

Lao Ching Hing, Century Hong Kong Hotel, 1st Basement, 238 Jaffee Road, Wanchai, Hong Kong; tel. 598-7080.

Tien Heung Lau Restaurant, G/F, 18C Austin Ave., Tsimshatsui, Hong Kong; open daily; tel. 368-9660.

Great Shanghai Restaurant, 1/F, 26 Prat Ave., Tsimshatsui, Hong Kong; open daily; tel. 366-8158.