Chocolate sauce over meaty rolls. Sounds obscene, doesn't it?

At the end of January pictures and videos of Beijing's chocolate theme-park, Chocolate Wonderland, were beamed around the world by international broadcasters and bloggers. The theme-park itself is an enormously extravagant statement which belies a culture waking up to the delights of chocolate's textures and flavours - and re-interpreting them with flamboyant creativity.

But the mouth-watering and eye-dazzling displays at Chocolate Wonderland (composed, by the way, of more than 80,000 tons of the stuff) are grandly symbolic expressions of China's burgeoning love-affair with chocolate. SHN has been taking a closer look in an effort to gauge the real significance of the trend.

The manifestation of chocolate in China (and everywhere else in the world) can roughly be split into two very different categories: haute cuisine applications of cocoa in restaurants; and everyday chocolate consumption courtesy of well-known brands like Hershey's or Cadbury's. The latter, chocolate as confectionary, is where big business is to be made, but traditionally the Chinese have rejected Western conceptions of chocolate, preferring fruit or bean-based 'sweets' and failing to really get all of the ceremonial indulgence and chocolate-spoilery that we're familiar with. One native Chinese blogger I contacted responded with the party-popping one-liner, "Chocolate isn't my favourite as it pleases my mouth and not my health." But it's a fair point that in a nation whose cuisine has traditionally been extremely health-conscious, chocolate will unsurprisingly be seen by some as a contaminating innovation.

Reports and comments from interviewees suggest that chocolate is holding its own in China's big, cosmopolitan cities, however. Beijing, Hong Kong and, in particular, the ultra-fashionable districts of Shanghai have all played host to Western chocolate producers' launch campaigns and PR gimmicks in the last year or two. Maybe the most outrageous is 'Hershey's Shanghai' - billed as "the sweetest place on earth," its website promises us that the "giant Hershey's kiss-shaped entry is to become a Shanghai landmark" and coldly forebodes: "you will be greeted by giant Hershey's and Kiss product characters." Quips aside, Hershey's Shanghai has, actually, become a bit of a landmark, and succeeds in appealing to that metropolitan Chinese curiosity for Western pop-culture while simultaneously explaining the intricacies of chocolate production - introducing visitors to the taste and identity of Hershey's brands. A clever ploy. Another hugely global chocolate firm, Godiva, last month announced their plans to open more stores in the country, in the wake of their inaugural outlet which is based, like their rival Hershey's, in Shanghai.

The title of this article - a "chocolate revolution" is perhaps a little misleading. Chocolate isn't flooding into China all at once. Its introduction has been a steady development, though the trend has certainly been picking up speed this year and last. Pippa Lamb, a student at university in England, told me, "Chinese people still tend to prefer savoury snacks to sweet ones - nuts, crackers, dumplings - and the trend of chocolate consumption in mainland China still seems to be pretty low. I've come across Cadbury and Nestle bars out there, but they seem to be of a lower quality."

But Lamb, whose up-bringing frequently brought her into contact with Western food culture, finds some die-hard Chinese delicacies a little too hard to swallow: "In many top Chinese restaurants the dessert menu still only rarely features chocolate, given the traditional preference for fruit, red bean based desserts or sweet meats. I remember one time I was at a restaurant launch party and popped what looked like a small foil-wrapped chocolate into my mouth only to discover it was meat."

But some of the most forward-thinking Chinese restaurants and chefs are just now starting to climb on the cocoa-bean bandwagon, ditching the gritty red beans of yesteryear. Robert Harrison is the gourmet business manager at Barry Callebaut, officially the world's largest chocolate company. Callebaut have their sights set on China, like many other big manufacturers, but Harrison's company-backed role as organiser of the World Chocolate Masters championships for chocolatiers (that was a mouthful) has given him insight into the most artistic and extravagant applications of chocolate from all four corners of the globe. He says that in the past three years there has been a noticeable increase and improvement in the chocolatiering talent spewing out of Asian countries. 2009's winner, indeed, was Japanese.

"There's been a huge transformation," commented Harrison, "The Japanese have always been extraordinarily different. They have an approach that merges culinary skills with a fantastic awareness of how something can be converted into a piece of art. China and the rest of Asia are adopting some of those principles too, now. These countries are all showing a trend for aping European styles in different ways - one of those ways is the consumption of chocolate."

Harrison added that Barry Callebaut actively sought inspiration from its dialogue with chocolatiers around the world, and that the company had learned a lot recently about Asian markets. "We're the biggest chocolate producer in the world and I suppose you could say that we're effectively proselytising chocolate in all of these countries. The more people around the world who see these fantastic craftsmen, the more people want to eat chocolate. It's a virtuous circle for us."

A clear example of Chinese fascination with finely-tuned Western traditions in action is the success of 'Pralinor,' a five-year-old ex-pat business in Shanghai which sells hand-crafted chocolates and markets itself on having Belgian roots and heaps of "family tradition." El Idrissi Mehdi, the owner Pralinor's owner, was keen to point out the difficulties of breaking into a new market: "high-end chocolate from Belgium is growing more slowly than store-bought confectionary and mainstream products. A lot of people are talking about chocolate booming in China, but it's not that simple."

Mehdi explained that he has been tasked with becoming one of chocolate's evangelists: "You have to really introduce the product. They're not familiar with it so effectively you have to sell an item and do a miniature presentation at the same time, explaining what it is, why this type of chocolate is more expensive and so on. We knew it would be like that because it's a new market. At the end of the day, you either wait until the market is full of brands and try and fight with them or you go in now and be prepared to do a lot of teaching."

In what other ways might you come across the fruits of all this creativity on a night out in Shanghai or Beijing? Sandy Ley, who maintains the excellent 'Phat in Shanghai' blog on local cuisine, said, "A lot of local Chinese are eating at international restaurants and indulging in desserts like chocolate lava cakes - a staple on the Western dessert menu. So you really see how the Chinese palate is adapting to include foreign flavours like chocolate." On chocolate fusion experiments, Ley added, "I have heard of a dish at Whampoa Club that involves chocolate and ribs! Sounds delicious."

Chocolate and ribs.

We found a picture of the dish, and also one of 'meat floss' rolls coated in egg and drizzled with chocolate sauce (see image at top right) which was somewhat less appealing, but nonetheless evidence that colloquial experimentation is taking hold.

As you can see, China is revelling in all kinds of exposure to chocolate. Surveying the multitudinous incarnations of it like we've just done shows a culture intrigued by what other cultures have to offer it - a nation developing a real sweet tooth and ravenous for creativity and ideas. But more than anything you see a culture which is prepared, commercially and ideologically, to experiment and innovate with its own identity in an attempt to be original and traditional at once. China's excitement over chocolate represents its society at its most curious and most inspired - and it tells us a lot about how people interact and share new experiences in our globalised age. Life has certainly become rather like a box of chocolates.