I was a vegetarian back in Canada for a few years. When I decided to move to China, I was still a Vegetarian and I thought it would be even easier to keep that life style here. I was wrong. I didn't speak a word of Chinese before I came. But, in my defense after we had decided to come to China we left about 5 days later. I did have time to buy a travel book and a simple learn Chinese book and only started to read them on the plane to Beijing.
Some of the first Chinese words and characters I learned were about foods so I could order off a menu. Wow, my husband and I have quite a few stories from the first few months from ordering at restaurants and just pointing to a menu and being very surprised. We have eaten or ordered cockroaches, which tasted just like peanut butter, some type of maggot or worm that actually tasted like Cheetos, fish skin, which we were told is great for your skin, and the insides of fish, cows, chickens and pigs- hearts, livers, intestines, stomach linings, just to name a few and chicken feet, which you can even but at 7-11 and all other convenient stores. At one dinner I thought we had done really good and ordered a new dark tofu dish, but only to find out later that it was pigs blood. AH!
If your Chinese is good to okish, then you'll have no problem ordering a vegetarian dish. You can order a rice dish with streamed veggies at nearly every restaurant, but almost always you'll find some chicken or pork mixed in with either the veggies or buried in the rice and for sure you soup broth will have a lot of meat and meat flavor. If you tell the people at the restaurant that you are Buddhist they will try their best to make your meal meatless. And of course there are many vegetarian restaurants in every city and some of the most amazing in some of the temples.
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