Kung pao chicken Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Gong bao chicken (kung pao chicken) is a Sichuan dish of diced chicken flash-fried over high heat with dried chilies and Sichuan pepper, tossed with peanuts. Chicken is a long-established ingredient of the region, but the chilies the stir-fry cannot do without are native to the Americas and reached China in the Ming and Qing periods. The chili-heat food culture of Sichuan took root only after the chili had established itself, and the peanut too was a crop that spread inland during the Qing. The ingredients that give the dish its present form were not all in place before the middle of the Qing dynasty at the earliest.

Gong bao is the abbreviated form of Taizi Shaobao, an honorary title conferred on Ding Baozhen. Ding was born in Guizhou, served as governor of Shandong, and in 1876, the second year of the Guangxu reign, became governor-general of Sichuan. His surname, Ding, echoes the ding ('diced') in the dish's name, and that pun helped attach his title to it. Because Ding's career spanned the three provinces of Guizhou, Shandong, and Sichuan, each of these places claims the dish as its own local treasure, giving rise to variations such as the fermented-chili paste of Guizhou or the bean-paste-and-sugar version of Sichuan. With the technique of high-heat stir-frying and a setting that carried it from the official's table out into the city's Sichuan cooking, gong bao chicken took shape as a dish emblematic of Sichuan.

Gong bao chicken carries several origin tales built around Ding Baozhen's character. There is the story of gratitude, in which he served the dish to thank a household that had helped him, and the story in which, walking incognito among ordinary people, he came upon the taste at a street stall. Around six such folk legends have been handed down in Chengdu. Yet the plot in which Ding himself or his household cook created today's gong bao chicken never appears in the records of his own time.

In 1909, some three decades after Ding became governor-general of Sichuan, Fu Chongju's Chengdu Tonglan, a record of life in the city, lists dozens of chicken dishes in its section on food. Spicy chicken, chicken with Sichuan pepper, and diced chicken with bamboo shoots are there, but the name gong bao chicken does not appear, at least not in that section. According to an essay by the historian Thomas DuBois, an earlier guide to Chengdu from 1902 likewise lists close to a hundred local specialties without anything resembling the dish. The same essay says that the dish name first appears in cookbooks in the 1950s, that the method in a 1956 cookbook, which dices a whole chicken, deep-fries it in lard, and uses the liquid of fermented bean curd, differs considerably from today's, and that the standard method settled only in the 1990s. The year a name is first written down is not the year the dish was born. On this account, gong bao chicken as a standardized dish bearing Ding's title was shaped over the course of the 20th century.

At the same time, articles on the websites of the Chengdu Museum and of a Sichuan provincial information portal record that the dish's name comes from Ding Baozhen's official title. That Ding was granted the title Taizi Shaobao and became governor-general of Sichuan in 1876 appears in his biography in the Draft History of Qing, the official history of the dynasty, though the biography says nothing about food. Who first made the dish, and when, is still unsettled; but once the dramatic invention anecdote is set aside, what remains is the picture of a dish that took shape in 20th-century Sichuan under the borrowed name of a famous statesman.