Chinese Character Yan

It marks food being salted, seasoned, or preserved.

Salting kept food edible before refrigeration: 菹 was the early word for preserved vegetables before the Zhou period, and a Western Han tomb at Mawangdui held fermented soybean and ginger. 醃 later named pickled meat and salted fish, the same curing idea 腌 carries today.

Simplified Chinese writes this curing verb as 腌; traditional Chinese uses 醃. Paired as 腌臜, seen in Yuan drama through Ming and Qing novels, it leaves the kitchen entirely for dirty, unpleasant, or vexing.