Huangyan brown sugar [Photo provided to ezhejiang.gov.cn]

A dash of sweet rejoice is your stolen memory of hometown.

It seems that sugar has the mysterious power of healing. Its charisma not only lies in the temptation of taste, but also the joice flowing into the bottom of your heart and the happiness spreading all over you. When a piece of sugar slowly melts in your mouth, all the bad vibes can be forgotten.

Among all kinds of sugar, some people only prefer the brown sugar from Huangyan. Napoleon once mentioned that even if his eyes were blindfolded, he could find the way back home by his olfaction because the wind from hometown has a particular scent of plants. It's the same in Huangyan. Each year when it comes to the harvest season of sugarcanes, the refreshing scent of ripe sugarcanes permeates the air. Looking around, you will be amazed that you're surrounded by the dark green.

Look! Sugarcane farmers are chopping canes, bundling them up, then shipping these fresh ingredients to the sugarhouse. It has been hundreds of years since people in Huangyan started to make brown sugar out of canes.

At the processing site, canes full to the brim, firewood piled up to the height of half wall, over ten cauldrons ready to go…If you enter into the sugarhouse during the whole process of brown sugar decoction, you can see sparkles flying and at the same time smell the sweetness in the air. Every bit of sweet requires time and energy. The brown sugar decoction process is the same.

Sugarcane growers put canes into squeezer, which can separate the bagasse and cane juice apart. Thick cane juice flow into the filter vessel and need to subside for some time. The cane juice will be scooped into cauldron for the next step-brown sugar decoction. Sugarcane growers will be waiting beside the cauldron for the cane juice to boil. Inside the mud-made hearth is the flaming fire lighted by the dried sugarcane tops, sizzling beneath the cauldron.

More than ten cauldron are lined in one row. The sizzling whisper from them seems to inform you of the approaching sweetness. After the cane juice boils, the sugar master keeps stirring the cane juice, then scoop the residue and pour the clean cane juice into the next cauldron. Usually the first cauldron has the most cane juice and residue and the last one has the thickest cane juice. Kneading sugar needs the perfect timing and optimal fire control. When it is the time, the sugar master will tell other coworkers to scoop the syrup into specially made wooden plates, in which the golden liquid keeps glittering.