Thin flat breads are rolled in sesame and baked to a crisp fragrant wafer. Zhoucun shaobing is now one of Shandong's most popular souvenirs. Photos by Ju Chuanjiang / China Daily

It may no longer be the center of commerce it used to be, but Zhoucun in Shandong has a lasting legacy from its glory days. Wang Qian discovers the origins of shaobing.

Thousands of years ago, Zhoucun was a buoyant commercial hub in Shandong. It buzzed with merchants from many countries, and some of them brought along recipes of their favorite snacks.

One of them is the shaobing, or roasted bread. It is a thin round wafer crusted with sesame and so fragile that it shatters into shards if you don't handle it with care.

The old art of making shaobing can be traced back to hubing, a type of thick baked bread from the Han Dynasty (206 BCAD 220).

Its name reflected its origins, as "hu" was a term used to describe Westerners. Traders who came in through the Silk Route from Western Asia introduced hubing into China.

This kind of hand-made bread soon became a best seller among the merchants in Zhoucun and many local chefs learned to make this.

Among the bakeries were Juhezhai.

"The original shaobing is about 2-cm thick and tastes no different from the common baked bread. People used to buy it as staple. It was my grandfather who improved its flavor," Guo Fanglin, the 77-year-old current owner of Juhezhai says with pride.

Inspired by a thin pancake popular locally, his grand-father Guo Yunlong, rolled out the dough as thin as possible to improve its texture and made it much crispier.

He stacked them in 10s and wrapped them in paper. The thin flatbreads became the city's most popular snack, and was chosen as a tribute to the Imperial court.

"The recipe and cooking methods are passed down from generation to generation and I only started to learn it from my father in my teens," he says.