The useful thing to know is that China has had a fully worked-out plant-based cuisine for well over a thousand years, and it is stricter than the label "vegetarian" suggests.
Buddhist vegetarian, and why it is safer than it sounds#
Chinese Buddhist cooking — 斋 (zhāi) — excludes meat, fish, eggs and dairy, which already makes it vegan in practice. It also excludes the 五辛 (wǔxīn), the five pungent roots: garlic, onion, Chinese chives, the Chinese onion 薤 (xiè) and asafoetida, held to agitate the mind and so unsuited to practice.
That is stricter than most Western vegans require, and it is exactly why these restaurants are dependable. The failure mode elsewhere in China is not that a kitchen lies to you — it is that lard, chicken stock, oyster sauce and dried shrimp are not thought of as meat. A Buddhist kitchen has already ruled all of that out.
The flip side is worth knowing before you sit down: no garlic and no onion changes the flavour considerably. If a dish tastes oddly clean, that is why.
Where to find them#
Near a working Buddhist temple, in almost any city. Many large monasteries run a public dining hall, and the neighbourhood around a major temple usually has several independent 素食 places.
In the big cities, alongside a modern vegan scene that has grown quickly. Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu, Shenzhen and Guangzhou all have restaurants in the Western sense of the word — no doctrine, just plant-based menus, plus vegan bakeries and coffee.
How to search#
Dianping (大众点评, Dàzhòng Diǎnpíng) is the app to use. Search the characters 素食 and it will return everything near you, sorted by rating, with photographs — which makes it navigable even without Chinese. HappyCow also covers the major cities and is in English, though its coverage thins outside them.
Both are worth having. Dianping finds the temple restaurants and the neighbourhood places; HappyCow is quicker if you want the Western-facing end.
Mock meat, which you will meet immediately#
Chinese Buddhist cooking has an old and serious tradition of imitation meat built from wheat gluten, tofu skin, taro and mushroom — mock duck, mock pork, mock fish, sometimes plated to resemble the original. This predates the modern plant-based industry by centuries and is a genuine culinary craft rather than a substitute. Some of it is remarkable. Approach it as its own thing.
The everyday fallback#
Outside a dedicated restaurant, the reliable options are the ones that were never going to contain animal products: dry-fried green beans, mapo tofu made without meat if you ask, hand-pulled noodles with vegetables, scallion pancakes, and the enormous range of steamed and stir-fried greens. Say what you cannot eat rather than naming a category — the category does not translate the way you expect.
For the phrase that actually works and the traps in a plain vegetable dish, see the guide to vegetarian and vegan travel in China and can vegetarians eat in China?