The earliest clear record we can find about "the first in the world to eat crabs" is "Han Wudong Ming Ji" written by Guo Xian of the Eastern Han Dynasty. Volume 3 contains: "Shanyuan Kingdom tasted tribute to a crab, which was nine feet long, with one hundred legs and four claws, so it was named centipede crab. The boiled shell is better than yellow glue, and it is also called claw glue, which is better than the glue of phoenix beak." It can be seen from this that the crabs that the Chinese first ate were probably sea crabs.

"Mengxi Bi Tan" records that people in Guanzhong did not know crabs. After someone collected a dried crab, they hung it on the door as a "mascot" to prevent malaria.

The ancients were relatively superstitious and generally believed that the reason why the human body contracted malaria was because of a malaria ghost. Crabs are animals like the door god Yu Chigong, which can effectively scare away malaria ghosts. Therefore, as long as a crab is hung at the door, the disease will not dare to visit people's homes. "Mengxi Bi Tan" also mentioned that the crabs of the Guanzhong generation were "not only unknown to people, but also unknown to ghosts."

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This is enough to show that hanging crabs on doors to prevent malaria was common at the time, but the effect was not very good. It can be said that until the Song Dynasty, China's transportation was not very developed, so the people living in Guanzhong had basically never seen what crabs were. However, cities closer to the sea and villages and towns beside rivers and lakes have already had the custom of eating crabs.

Zheng Xuan, a Confucian scholar during the Eastern Han Dynasty, once conducted research on the history of Chinese people eating crabs and believed that Chinese people had already started eating crabs as early as the Western Zhou Dynasty. However, the way the ancients ate crabs was quite different from today. There were no "eight pieces of crab" at that time, so eating crabs was quite troublesome.

When people in Zhou Dynasty eat crabs, they only eat crab meat. The so-called "crab Xu" is a kind of crab sauce. During the Western Zhou Dynasty, the people of Qingzhou invented this delicious and easy-to-go sauce. It can be seen that as early as the two-week period, the ancients had become "crab eaters", and they also regarded it as a delicacy and ate it with pleasure.

During the Eastern Jin Dynasty, there was an official named Bi Zhuo, who was a drunkard. When he drinks, he always likes to eat a few crabs. Bi Zhuo often missed work due to drinking. Every time he smelled the neighbors brewing wine, he would jump into other people's yards at night to steal wine and drink. He was often caught by the neighbor's servants.

The servants didn’t know Bi Zhuo, so they just regarded him as an ordinary thief. After catching him, they beat him and threw him into the woodshed. It was not until the next morning that the neighbors discovered that the captured thief was actually Lang Bi Zhuo, an official, so they quickly released him and offered him some freshly brewed wine as an apology. Bi Zhuo once said: "It's enough to fill hundreds of dendrobium boats with wine, and put the sweetness of the four seasons at both ends. Holding the wine glass in your right hand and crab claws in your left hand, you can spend a lifetime swimming in the floating wine boat." Holding the wine glass in one hand, and grabbing it with the other Catching crabs is the lifelong pursuit of Bi Zhuo, a native of the Eastern Jin Dynasty.

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In the "Book of Jin", a guy like Bi Zhuo, who has a low official position and no outstanding achievements, can be biographed by the historian. Most of the reason is because of his relationship with Different food preferences.

As eating crabs becomes more popular in the South,