Not one cuisine but many: wheat noodles and buns in the dry north, rice and seafood in the wet south, chilli heat in the west and sweet, subtle braises by the eastern rivers, all cooked with the same wok, cleaver and bottle of soy.
China's regional kitchens start with the land. The cold, dry north grows wheat and millet and eats noodles, dumplings and steamed buns; the warm, wet south grows rice and cooks with fish, greens and whatever the coast brings in. The humid, mountainous west came to love heat and preserving, and the lakes and canals of the east made a gentler, sweeter kitchen. Far to the south-west and north-west, Yunnan and Xinjiang cook alongside their neighbours in South-East and Central Asia as much as with the rest of China.
Trade, migration and the court did the rest. Overland routes to Central Asia brought lamb, cumin and flatbreads to the north-west, and chillies, from the Americas, arrived only a few centuries ago before becoming central to Sichuan and Hunan cooking. People moved south in waves over the centuries, carrying northern habits with them, and later emigrants from Guangdong and Fujian took Cantonese, Teochew and Hokkien cooking around the world. The imperial kitchens in Beijing drew cooks and dishes from across the empire, and Shandong cooking is often said to have shaped them most.
The idea of the 'Eight Great Cuisines' — Shandong, Sichuan, Cantonese, Fujian, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Hunan and Anhui — is best read as a later codification rather than an ancient list; it is usually said to have grown out of an older, shorter grouping of four. It is a handy map, but it leaves out much of the country, and each of the eight is itself many kitchens.