Traditional fermented meat products have a long history and are still very popular in China. Based on recorded Chinese history, as early as 770-470 BC, the …rst fermented meat product was described in the Rites of the Zhou, one of four extant collections of ritual matters from the Zhou Dynasty. Legend has it that the processing technology used to produce Chinese dry-cured ham was introduced in Europe by Marco Polo during the thirteenth/fourteenth century and had an important impact on the development of dry-cured ham processing technology outside China.