In February 1985 I had the good fortune to be a guest in Hong Kong at the Mandarin hotel’s 21st birthday celebration, a lavish three-day reconstruction of the sort of imperial banquet given during the Qing dynasty by the Kangxi emperor (1654-1722) and his grandson the Qianlong emperor (1711-1799). Kangxi started the custom of banqueting during his tours of southern China – he made six between 1684 and 1707. These provincial feasts were relatively informal affairs, often held in a tent, quite different to the stifling protocol of the imperial court at Beijing, and combined some aspects of the ruling Manchu ‘Man banquet’ with the native Han Chinese ‘Han banquet.’ The full three-day Manchu-Han feast was mostly restricted to Beijing.
It was from these imperial tours, and the burgeoning cookery book publishing industry, exemplified by Recipes from the Garden of Contentment, written in 1792 by the Hangzhou poet Yuan Mei (whom Thomas David DuBois calls ‘China’s rouge and roguish gourmet’), that a national, as opposed to strictly regional, Chinese cuisine developed. Chefs were then recruited and ingredients gathered from the whole of the Middle Kingdom. And they and their feasts were the means by which the ethnically different Manchus, who were people of the north, discovered the culinary superiority of the south, particularly of Cantonese chefs. DuBois tells us:
The traditional diet of the Manchus was heavy on meat, especially pork, but also fish and deer. Their annual feasts were orgies of meat, where it was considered impolite to do anything but gorge.
With the passing of time, ‘the Manchu-Han Feast changed from a precisely managed diplomatic event to a type of cuisine’.

Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in