The Comprehensive Manchu–Han Banquet: History, Myth, and Development

Abstract

In* terms of grandeur and extravagance, modern Chinese society tends to think of the Comprehensive Manchu–Han Banquet 滿漢全席 as the pinnacle of China’s culinary heritage. Its allure is best illustrated by what happened in 1977, when the Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS) commissioned a Hong Kong restaurant named Kwok Bun 國賓酒樓 to recreate the banquet according to its “original” recipes. The preparation took over three months, involved more than one hundred and sixty chefs, and resulted in a meal that featured more than one hundred dishes.1 Since then, there has been no shortage of efforts made by different individuals, restaurants, and organizations to follow suit and recreate the Comprehensive Manchu–Han Banquet in a contemporary setting. These different endeavours commonly claim that they follow the most authentic recipes. Little did they realise that there is no such thing as an authentic recipe. In fact, historians cannot even agree on which era saw the banquet begin, though the leading candidates all date to the Qing dynasty (1644–1911); these are the reign of the Emperor Kangxi (r. 1661–1722), the reign of the Emperor Qianlong (r. 1735–1796), and the dynasty’s last decades. This paper examines the accuracy of these claims by analyzing a sample menu for the Comprehensive Manchu–Han Banquet recorded during Qianlong’s reign. This menu contains crucial information about the feast’s formative stages, information that has not yet been properly addressed by academics researching this topic. By drawing attention to the traditional dietary customs of ethnic Manchus and Han Chinese, understood in the context of contemporaneous Chinese gastronomy (to supplement the menu’s lack of contextual information), this paper provides a better understanding of the Comprehensive Manchu–Han Banquet and of Chinese gastronomy in general, in terms of their history, development, and cultural significance.