Wenchang chicken rice Period BOrigin theory CVerified

What it is, and where it came from

Wenchang chicken rice pairs poached chicken (bai qie, the "white-cut" style) with rice cooked in the fat and stock left over from that chicken. Its two central ingredients, the local Wenchang breed of chicken and the rice, were both long-established foods on Hainan Island, on everyday tables from early on. No New World ingredient plays any part. The bird is poached, and the rice is then cooked in the reserved stock and chicken fat. This pairing of poaching and rice-cooking is what gives the dish its form: pale, glossy chicken alongside rice that has drunk up the flavour of the bird.

The setting is Wenchang, in Hainan province. The Wenchang chicken is a prized local breed raised in the area, and the dish grew out of the habit of cooking rice in the stock left from poaching one. Taking root as a hometown dish of Wenchang, it spread across the island to become one of Hainan's signature foods.

The heart of Wenchang chicken rice lies in what happened after it crossed the sea. The Wenchang chicken appears in the Qing-dynasty Lingnan zashi shichao, which describes it as the foremost of Hainan's four famous dishes — "in Wenchang county there is a breed of chicken … the most delicious of all" — and names the village of Tianci, in Tanniu town of Wenchang, as its home. What that passage records, though, is the bird as an ingredient, not the dish of rice cooked in chicken stock. In the wave of emigration during the early twentieth century, Hainanese migrants carried the dish out to Southeast Asia, where it was reworked in Singapore and Malaysia into the Hainanese chicken rice now known so widely. This line of descent from Wenchang is supported by sources of differing character that cross-check one another: the academic study by Fu Congcong, Hainan Chicken Rice from Southeast Asia; the account given by the Wenchang municipal government; reporting from China News Service; and Chinese-language encyclopaedias.

Pinning the dish's formation to a single year, on the other hand, is difficult. The clues fall into three stages. The bird as an ingredient reaches back to Qing-dynasty records; the idea of the dish itself — white-cut chicken with chicken-fat rice — is thought to take shape in the late nineteenth century. A named, shop-branded version appears only in the 1930s, when Wu Yukui, who opened the Yukui Chicken Rice Shop on Wennan Road in Wencheng town, established the pairing of white-cut chicken and stock-cooked rice and spread it across Hainan (the shop later passed through a cooperative business and continues today as the Yanjiang restaurant in Haikou). The accounts of the Wenchang municipal government and China News Service point, in near agreement, to these three moments: the breed, the idea of the dish, and its first named shop form.