Fuqi feipian Period COrigin theory DVerified

Fuqi feipian is a Chengdu cold dish of beef offal (niuza), boiled and sliced thin, then dressed in a mala sauce of chili oil (hongyou) and Sichuan pepper. It is one of the liangban dishes, the dressed plates that Chinese cooking serves cold. Beef offal, the main ingredient, had long been available locally.

Something like it is said to have been sold in Chengdu before the couple's name was attached to it. A 2021 piece on Changshun Street in Chengdu, published by the Sichuan provincial office that compiles local gazetteers (official local histories), says the early feipian grew out of bobo niurou and was at first also called liangtouwang. The Chinese-language Wikipedia writes that by the end of the Qing dynasty, many peddlers in the Hui Muslim quarters of Chengdu were selling dressed feipian, carrying it on shoulder poles or in baskets.

In the 1930s, the story goes, the mala feipian that Guo Chaohua and Zhang Tianzheng sold from a roadside stall on Changshun Upper Street tasted so good that people began calling it Fuqi feipian, 'the couple's lung slices'. It was after the founding of the People's Republic that the couple opened a small shop on Banbianqiao Street; later they moved to Tidu West Street and opened a larger restaurant.

'Fuqi feipian was invented in the 1930s by a married couple, Guo Chaohua and Zhang Tianzheng': this is the widely told origin story. The Guos, it goes, sold cheap scraps of beef from a street stall, and changed feipian (廢片), 'discarded scraps', to its homophone feipian (肺片), 'lung slices'. And so Fuqi feipian was born. A further tale has customers presenting them with a gilt-lettered plaque, which settled the name of the shop.

The 2021 piece from the Sichuan gazetteer office that carries this story, reprinted by the news outlet The Paper (Pengpai Xinwen), opens the couple's part with xiangchuan, 'it is said'. The same piece says the early feipian grew out of bobo niurou. That earlier history does not sit well with a couple conjuring the dish out of nothing. The piece also places the opening of their shop on Banbianqiao Street not in the 1930s but after the founding of the People's Republic.

There are hints of an older form as well. The same piece notes that Xin Chengdu (New Chengdu), a book published in 1943, lists 'beef lung slices', with 'panpan niurou' given as another name in brackets. The account of Hui Muslim peddlers selling feipian at the end of the Qing comes from the Chinese-language Wikipedia; the gazetteer office's piece does not mention it.

Taken together, the couple seem not to have invented feipian but to have sold a dish the city already knew, and to have stamped their own image on its name. Yet both the late-Qing prehistory and the naming in the 1930s are told by later writing and an encyclopedia; no record written at the time has yet been put forward. Whose hands gave the dish its present form remains unclear, and its date has not been narrowed to a single year.