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Mantou for sale in Shanghai

Deep-fried mantou - a popular dessert served with sweetened condensed milk.

Mantou (Traditional Chinese: 饅頭; Simplified Chinese: 馒头; pinyin: mántou), sometimes known as Chinese steamed bun, is a kind of steamed bun originating from China. It is typically served in Chinese cuisine. Made with milled wheat flour, water and leavening agents, they are similar in nutrition and eating qualities to the white bread of the West. In size and texture, they range from 4 cm, soft and fluffy in the most elegant restaurants, to over 15 cm, firm and dense for the working man's lunch. (As white flour, being more heavily processed, was once more expensive, white mantou were somewhat of a luxury in pre-industrial China.)

Traditionally, mantou, bing, and wheat noodles were the staple carbohydrates of the Northern Chinese diet, analogous to the rice which forms the mainstay of the Southern Chinese diet. Mantou are also known in the south, but are often served as street food or a restaurant dish, rather than as a staple or home cooking. Restaurant mantou are often smaller and more delicate and can be further manipulated, for example by deep-frying and dipping in sweetened condensed milk.

They are often sold pre-cooked in the frozen section of Asian supermarkets, ready for preparation by steaming or heating in the microwave oven.

A similar food, but with a filling inside, is baozi. In some regions, mainly in Southern China, mantou can be used to indicate both the filled and unfilled buns.

Mantou or mandou are also found in Japanese, Philippine, Hmong, and Vietnamese cuisines. It is called manju in Japanese and "siopao" in Tagalog(Filipino).

The name is cognate with mandu/manty/mantı, which are filled dumplings in Korean, Turkish, Persian, Central Asian, Mongolian, and Pakhtan cuisines.

There is a popular story in China that the name Mantou (饅頭 Mántóu) actually originated from the identically-pronounced word 蠻頭 (lit. barbarian's head).

This story originates from the Three Kingdoms Period, when the strategist Zhuge Liang led the Shu Army in an invasion of the southern lands (roughly modern-day Yunnan and northern Burma). After subduing the barbarian king Meng Huo, Zhuge Liang led the army back to Shu, but met a swift-flowing river which defied all attempts to cross it. A barbarian lord informed him that, in olden days, the barbarians would sacrifice 50 men and throw their heads into the river to appease the river spirit and allow them to cross; Zhuge Liang, however, did not want to cause any more bloodshed, and instead ordered buns shaped roughly like human heads - round with a flat base - to be made and then thrown into the river. After a successful crossing he named the buns "barbarian's head", or "蠻頭", which evolved into the present day "饅頭".

In Japan, 饅頭 (manjū) is more like baozi (包子) than plain bun and traditionally contains bean paste or minced meat-vegetable mixture (nikuman 肉まん, 肉饅頭). In Korea, 饅頭 (mandu) means jiaozi (餃子).

• Baozi