Soy-sauce Brewing and Preserved Fruit

In the old days, soy sauce and preserved fruits were sold side by side. Many soy sauce shops had preserved prunes, apricot, gooseberry and sweet-cured plum for sale along with their home-brewed soy sauce and vinegar.

Traditional soy sauce-brewing is a time-consuming process which makes use of soybeans or black turtle beans as the natural ingredients. As for Chinese preserved fruits, salt and sugar are used in curing the fruits through wet or dry processing. A spacious outdoor drying yard is needed by both soy sauce brewery and preserved fruit manufacturers for sun-drying. In the first half of the 20th century, many empty spaces across the city were used as drying yards since Macao was less populated and not much industrial development had taken place. There were over 20 soy sauce shops by then. But with the change of time, these traditional shops had to discontinue their business in face of the rising cost of raw materials and that the drying yards have been turned into blocks of building. For the few surviving time-honored ones, some of them have moved their brewery to Mainland China and only engage in retail sales in Macao.