History of the Chinese Banquet: Interesting Facts Most People Don’t Know

Imagine for a minute that you’ve achieved a momentous occasion in your life: It is time for a  celebration! Your friends are expecting the best from you, you intrepid food trotter you, and you don’t want to disappoint. With virtually limitless choices, how do you decide to celebrate? Do you go with the traditional gold standard of fine dining, French cuisine? Do you opt for the hearty comfort dishes of your childhood? What about throwing a curve ball with the latest in fusion food? The choices, it seems, can be endless. However, If you were to ask me, the answer would be simple: a Chinese banquet meal.

Why a Chinese banquet meal? For starters, the Chinese banquet meal is a classic tried, tested, and true for hundreds (perhaps thousands) of years celebration. It is formulaic, yet not rigid, allowing for experimentation and creative expression. It is balanced in terms of pace, variety, and structure. It is formal but not pretentious to preclude everyone from enjoying. Most importantly, it is entirely about the food. It is the host’s way of saying “I care about you and want to show you a good time and I will do so through the food I am about to serve.” Still unconvinced?

Join me through this three part series as I explore the inner workings of the Chinese banquet meal. Part one is an overview, with an emphasis on the historic context of the meal. Part two delves into the details of the food and dishes commonly found in a modern banquet meal. Part three explores modern cultural traditions surrounding the banquet today.

Part 1: A Chinese Banquet Overview

A Chinese banquet meal is an elaborate affair typically reserved for celebratory occasions such as weddings, birthdays, and festivals. There is a rich tradition and history surrounding the meal, and today most banquets will feature twelve dishes (including soup and dessert) spread out over a few hours. Guests are seated around a large circular table (IMHO, the best setting for conversation) and each dish is brought out individually allowing the guests to savour and enjoy the tastes, smells, textures, temperatures, and overall experience of each dish before the next dish is brought out. This elaborate affair focuses entirely on the food. Much care and thought go into the details of the meal: the presentation, the pacing of the meal (not too fast nor too slow), the variety and structure of the food, the creative expressions of the chef, the freshness of ingredients, and of course the taste.

While there is no set formula for banquet meals, there are guidelines and standard dishes in modern banquets that will help you to eat your way through a Chinese banquet meal. For example the meal usually starts with a cold platter of various barbecued meats. A soup is usually presented near the beginning, while fried rice and e-fu noodle dishes indicate the final savoury dish before dessert.

Chinese people love to enjoy great food and company, and this is evident in how banquets used to last not merely several hours, but several days. In 1987, it was necessary for the Chinese government to reduce the time officials spent at banquets from four hours to a maximum of ninety minutes! Thus, without further ado, join me as I explore a very brief history and overview of the cultural and historic forces that helped shape the Chinese banquet meal into the experience we know today.

The Chinese Banquet Dinner History

Chinese banquets were historically based on imperial food served to the emperor. Each dish usually represented the best cuisine the emperors and his civic officials could gather from around the country. While the foods were inspired by the inventions of the peasants from across the country using simple techniques and local ingredients, they were often improved to make it more fitting for the Emperor.

Banquets and feasting have developed as a part of Chinese culture since slave society, relying on peasants, herders, fishermen, craftsmen, and cooks to provide for the emperor, generals, ministers, and other nobility. It wasn’t until the Zhou dynasty (11th century B.C. – 476 B.C.) that imperial cuisine was perfected to the form we know it as today. Food became much more structured and formalized, with fourteen imperial drinks, a hundred-and-thirty kinds of plants, and over a hundred animals available. It took the collected efforts of twenty-two departments and 2300 staff, many with official rank, to structure and coordinate each meal.

During the Zhou dynasty, standards of performance and quality for imperial meals were created, drawing upon the expertise of chefs, wine officers, nutritionists, and other officials, who worked together to improve and refine all aspects of the meal. Banquets during this period were sure to include six cereals (rice, millet, broomcorn, sorghum, wheat, and wild rice stem), six animals (horse, cow, sheep, pig, dog, and chicken), six drinks (water, thick liquid, li wine, chun wine, yi wine — a wine distilled from yeast and rice porridge, and ye wine — a wine made from thin porridge), a hundred-and-thirty “delicacies”, eight “treasures”, and a hundred-and-twenty urns of sauce. More details of the food will follow in the second installment of the Chinese Banquet Meal). Banquets were not limited to the emperor alone, as other officials such as princes/dukes, marquis, senior officials, and junior officials each had their own, respectively lower ranked, grade of banquet.

Over the next several centuries, as cultural exchanges between China and outside nations grew, so did the available foods, which gradually entered the daily lives of the Chinese people. These foods came from as far away as America (corn), as well as places such as Persia (spinach), India (mung beans and eggplant), South America (chili peppers and via South East Asia, and Europe (carrots). Regional cuisines and cooking styles using these new exotic ingredients gradually developed and are now incorporated into the banquet meal.

Fast forward again another several hundred years to the Qing dynasty (1644 to 1912), and the Manchus have now invaded and taken control of China. They quickly discovered a taste for the previous Han-style food of the past and the two styles gradually merged. A Manchu-Han style banquet was created, this time with six different grades. The number of dishes were reduced from more than two hundred to around one hundred (this still took around three days to eat one’s way through), and regional differences continued to appear (such as the dumpling banquet in the ancient capital of Xi’an). Traditional Chinese foods that we know today were established and since then, haven’t changed much.

The Modern Chinese Banquet Dinner

Chinese banquets today are even less elaborate as they used to be. While I think many people breathed a sigh of relief when the three day Manchu-Han style banquet went out of fashion, for the traditionalists out there, you can rest assured that the focus continues to remain on the food, with chefs continuing to experiment with a variety of local and imported foods. As the banquet continues to evolve, many restaurants have responded to the fast-paced, convenience-driven lifestyle of the 21st century with set menus that don’t need to be ordered in advance. However, if you’re looking for a banquet experience that for that momentous occasion in your life, may I suggest going to speak with the chef and/ or manager beforehand to arrange for a unique and personalized experience according to the type of foods you want to have in your banquet. With this individual request and an opportunity for some creative liberty with the food, I’m sure you and your friends will be in for an unforgettable experience.

Stay tuned for Part 2 (coming soon), where we explore the traditional foods found in modern Chinese banquets and what some of our personal favourites are.

Post Script:
As all students of Chinese history know, we’re just starting to scratch the surface in this overview of Chinese banquet meals. For more information we found these resources to be a great source of information for those of you wanting to learn more: http://www.china.org.cn/english/imperial/25995.htm and http://www.china.org.cn/english/imperial/26140.htm

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