The folk etymology of 馒头(steamed bun) is an interesting illustration of cultural identity.

Mantou comes frm Turkic, just as the filled dumpling itself is probably from Central Asia. There are cognates of the word all over Asia.

But the folk etymology tells a different story.

In the folk etymology, 馒头 comes frm 蠻頭, which is to say "southern barbarian head" ("Man" is a historical derogatory term for non-Han ppls to the south).

诸葛亮 (Zhuge Liang) was needing to cross a river that demanded the a sacrifice of 50 barbarian heads.

But using his smarts, he made these huge meat filled buns that merely LOOKED like heads and thus tricked the river gods/ local barbarians/ superstitious soldiers.

Variants involve barbarian head buns being part of evil demon feasts or being a cure for mundane upset stomachs.

I suppose on some level the obfuscation of the Turkic roots of the word fascinates me? Because it reenforces a certain idea of Chinese-ness, conveniently explaining a word that doesn't "belong".

I stress that this is of course an not intentional misinformation thing.

But there are a lot of things that I grew up being told are quintessentially and wholly Chinese which just, well, they are Chinese, but they're also many other things.

Mulan being the example that always comes to mind. The oldest surviving ballad of Mulan is Turkic.

Even the name 木兰, meaning magnolia, is likely a phonetic borrowing from Turkic and has been speculated to originally mean cosmic deer of some kind.

And like, each of of these individually is a curiosity.

Taken together, they form a pattern.