The sausages of this zone are not European imports. Chinese dried sausages are attested from the first centuries of our era, with a detailed description in the Qimin Yaoshu (around AD 544), a Chinese agricultural encyclopaedia contemporary with the compilation of the De re coquinaria in the late Roman world. The lactic fermentation of raw meat, practised in Thailand and Vietnam for generations, rests on a technical mastery whose principles are comparable to those of the independently developed Mediterranean cheese fermentations. The chapter ‘The origins’ illustrates this antiquity.

The zone is marked by the coexistence, within a continuous geographical space, of very different logics of charcuterie tradition. China developed preservation by desiccation and by using alcohol. Thailand and Vietnam have placed the lactic fermentation of raw meat at the heart of their traditions, producing preparations whose marked acidity has no parallel in European charcuterie. Indonesia folded the spices of its ceremonial cooking (galangal, turmeric, lemongrass) into sausages whose profile is recognisable as Balinese from the first mouthful. These traditions do not descend from one another; they were developed in parallel, with documented exchanges.

Contacts with Europe left traces, without constituting their principal origin. The French presence in Indochina in the nineteenth century may have refined certain techniques of Vietnamese charcuterie, but the chả lụa, a pounded pork emulsion cooked in steam, is an old preparation that does not derive directly from the Bolognese mortadella. The Spanish presence in the Philippines gave rise to a family of longanisas whose present regional diversity no longer resembles the Iberian model. In each case, the imported product was transformed in one or two generations.

Japan constitutes the most precisely dated case of transfer. In 1918, an official of the National Institute of Animal Industry, Yoshifusa Iida, was sent to the German prisoner-of-war camp at Narashino to learn charcuterie techniques from the master charcutier Karl Jahn and his companions, who had been interned since 1915. The addition of soy sauce, mirin, and dashi to the basic German technique gave the Japanese sausage its own seasoning, and awareness of its Germanic origin has almost entirely disappeared.

The documentation of this zone is more fragmentary than that of the European sections: written sources on the Asian charcuterie traditions are less accessible in Western languages, geographical protections of the PGI type are almost absent (except for China), and the traceability of orally transmitted preparations is difficult to establish. This imbalance does not reflect a lesser richness of the traditions concerned.