The earliest varieties of Chinese jiang were probably made with fish, shellfish, and game. Their flesh--and in some cases bones, blood, and entrails--was ground or crushed, pickled in a mixture of salt and rice wine, and fermented in sealed earthenware vats for 100 days or more. This jiang closely resembled contemporary Asian fermented fish sauces and pastes such as the strong smelling nuoc mam of Vietnam. But it was fundamentally different from modern miso (or shoyu) in that it contained no soybeans, grains, or koji. According to Shinoda (1974), Japan's most respected historian of Chinese foods, the earliest reference to koji appears in the Shih Ching ( Classic of Songs ), the first of the Chinese Five Classics, consisting of 305 songs dating from the tenth to the seventh centuries BC. Koji was added to pickled fish mixtures to speed the fermentation. Soybeans and grains were being used as ingredients in jiang by the first century BC. The consistency of early jiang was probably neither as firm as that of miso nor as liquid as shoyu; rather it more than likely resembled applesauce, porridge, or the mash known as moromi from which today's shoyu is pressed. The various types of seafood miso (crab, shrimp, and red-snapper miso) still very popular in Japan are thought to be its direct descendants.