Tiger testicles and mythical banquets: What China’s emperors inside Beijing’s secretive Forbidden City really ate

(CNN) — The Forbidden City was once one of the most powerful places on the planet. In 1420, while Europe was in the midst of the Hundred Years’ War and yet to discover America, China’s Ming Dynasty ruler was moving into his new home in the center of Beijing and beginning to strengthen his grip on an expanding empire.

Inside their vast palace, China’s emperors were unassailable, protected not just by the miles of walls surrounding them, but by the extreme secrecy that governed the lives of the royalty within them. It was called the ‘Forbidden City’ because few Chinese subjects were allowed to enter.

The last emperor was evicted in 1924. In the years that followed, as the world’s largest palace complex began to open its doors to the outside world, the enigmas of even the darkest corners of the Forbidden City were exposed to daylight.

But one topic remains murky, even today: Food.

Decades after the fall of imperial China, even as historians continue to collaborate to examine China’s past, very little is known about what was eaten in one the world’s richest and most powerful households – especially in the early days, as most of the ancient documents that might offer insights into the topic have been sealed off because of their fragile state.

Zhao Rongguang, a food historian from the northern Chinese province of Heilongjiang, is one of the last few people – and quite possibly the only person – to have accessed and thoroughly studied all of them before they were locked away. This puts him in the rare position of being able to debunk many of the myths about palace cuisine that have persisted for decades.

Zhao began delving into the Forbidden City’s culinary mysteries more than four decades ago.

Beijing back in the 1980s was still a city of bicycles and backstreets – a far cry from the metropolis of skyscrapers and highways it is today.

But it was also an exciting decade, as the country re-opened to the world – and Western culture – after leader Deng Xiaoping announced his “open door policy” in late 1978. It was the decade when Wham! became the first Western pop band to perform in China since 1949, and Paris’ iconic Maxim’s restaurant opened an outpost in Beijing.

Zhao, now 76, wasn’t distracted by these new trends. He had saved up money from his teaching job to travel to Beijing to pursue his mission to find out what China’s ancient emperors and their families really ate.

It wasn’t an easy task. In his path were two main obstacles. Firstly, the enduring secrecies of the palace – so little had been revealed to those outside its towering red walls during the five centuries it was occupied. Secondly, he says, food wasn’t considered a serious topic worthy of study in China, meaning documents focusing on what was eaten during the early days of palace life were scattered and scarce.

Zhao persisted, returning summer after summer to what was then called the First Historical Archives of China, in the old palace’s Xihuamen, or West Prosperity Gate, where he pored over centuries-old imperial documents, which he believes were locked away in the 1990s.

Slowly, he began to build up a picture of how dining in the Forbidden City evolved, zeroing in on three historical figures who were key to shaping royal eating habits. And now, nearly 40 years after he began his research, he has a pretty good idea.

It all starts, Zhao tells CNN, with Kangxi, an emperor of the Manchu-led Qing Dynasty that seized full control of China after 1644 when the Ming imperial family, aligned with China’s majority Han ethnic group, was ousted.

Under his rule, between 1661 and 1722, the country entered into a relatively peaceful era following decades of dynastic fighting – and that led to some interesting menu changes inside the Forbidden City.

At first, after the Qing Dynasty initially moved in, traditional foods from the nomadic Manchu heartlands of northeastern China were on the table, according to documents from the era studied by Zhao.

In the mid-Kangxi reign, royal diets began to evolve.

“There was still a lot of roast game and unusual foods on Kangxi’s table, like tiger testicles,” says Zhao.

Tiger testicles?

“Yes, you heard me right, tiger testicles. Ancient people thought that they had a libido-boosting effect. I believe Kangxi had eaten plenty of them as it was recorded officially that Kangxi had hunted more than 60 tigers in his life.”

Rooster combs were another ingredient eaten as an aphrodisiac, says Zhao.

But eventually, as society stabilized further during Kangxi’s rule, more ethnic Han dishes began to appear in the mix of palace offerings, like duck gizzard stew.

The Forbidden City’s golden influencer

The opaque world of Forbidden City dining gets a little clearer when we skip forward to Kangxi’s grandson, an imposing figure known as Qianlong Emperor.

During his nearly 61 years on the throne (1735-1796) – a time Zhao considers the second important phase of the Forbidden City’s culinary evolution – Qianlong had his daily menus meticulously recorded, a paper trail that means historians can now reconstruct a more accurate view of the lifestyle in the palace at that time.

Inside the Hong Kong Palace Museum, for instance, an ongoing exhibition titled “From dawn to dusk: Life in the Forbidden City” is heavily based on Qianlong Emperor’s daily rituals – meals included.

“So what is the Forbidden City? It’s a city. It is an institution. Just like any community, food culture was an indispensable part of the entire culture inside the Forbidden City,” says Daisy Yiyou Wang, deputy director of the Hong Kong Palace Museum, a sister museum of Beijing’s Palace Museum at the Forbidden City.

“The food culture itself reflects so much of the identity of the people. Their status and power and authority, and their taste, and relationships as well.”

Among the exhibition’s displays is a bulky silver milk teapot that dates to the 18th or 19th century, sitting between a gleaming gold wine ewer with cloud and dragon reliefs and a glass bowl bearing exquisite gold threads.

The elaborately painted teapot, with its gilded golden dragons, suggests that milk tea, a Manchu meal staple, was an essential part of the royal court’s diet during the Qing Dynasty.

“Tea bricks would be broken into boiling water. Milk, butter and a pinch of salt were added. They then filtered the tea leaves out and then served the tea in this type of silver teapot,” says Nicole Chiang, the Hong Kong Palace Museum’s art historian and curator.

The salted milk tea reflects the royal court’s Manchurian roots.

“Even when Qianlong traveled to the Jiangnan region (south of the Yangtze River where modern-day Hangzhou and Shanghai are), he hired a milk tea master from Mongolia to prepare milk tea for the court every day.”

Chiang, who says she enjoys studying the Qing Dynasty due to the sheer number of historical artifacts preserved from that era, from texts to paintings, says the court also dined on hot pot - the traditional Chinese dish in which ingredients are cooked in a simmering bowl of soup stock right on the table.

“One of the palace maids said that (the royal family) would have a hot pot dish almost every day for three months during wintertime. It was a popular dish,” says the historian, pointing to an enamel hot pot from the Forbidden City on display at the Hong Kong Palace Museum.

Chiang, currently preparing for a future exhibition on food and travel in the Forbidden City, notes that though Emperor Qianlong had his menus recorded, it’s still challenging to study palace food history as most of the sealed-off documents have not been released to researchers and the public. (Her own exhibition is based on documents that have already been published by the Palace Museum.)

As one of the few who have ever laid eyes on the archived documents, Zhao has had some of his research published in the last few decades. He continues to work and says he is now compiling a book based on all of his findings, which will further demystify the topic of palace cuisine.

Through this wealth of knowledge, Zhao has been able to view the long-held beliefs about what was eaten inside the Forbidden City through a wider lens and add some much-needed context. And that includes the emperor’s supposed love for hot pot.

“Menus were often presented to the emperor the night before for approval,” he says.

“They reflected the personal tastes of the emperor – but were not solely based on his preferences. So we know Qianlong Emperor had hot pots – which were mostly written as ‘warm pots’ in the records. It could be because of the weather and tradition but it might not mean Qianlong loved them.”

He says that in Qianlong Emperor’s time, imperial cuisine was much more refined and diverse – with both traditional Manchu dishes like roasted Asian roe deers and pheasants – as well as southern dishes, especially from the Jiangnan region.

“The game on his menus showcases his northern roots,” says Zhao. “One of the dishes that appeared very often in his record was the Sika deer tail platter. The tail was quite a small part – but a wonderfully fat and fragrant part of a deer.”

Smoked red-braised duck, fried spring bamboo shoots with pork and bird’s nest soup with rock sugar were some of the other regulars from the Jiangnan region that were frequently eaten in the Forbidden City.

Qianlong Emperor, alongside other Qing Dynasty nobility, believed that bird’s nest soup – made with the solidified saliva of swallows – was extraordinarily nutritious. So much so that researchers believe he downed a bowl of it every morning before breakfast.

“There are many myths and legends about bird’s nest. It was a relatively new ingredient at that time,” Zhao explains, noting that it didn’t appear in a major encyclopedia on traditional Chinese medicines published in the late 1500s.

Based on the historical documents, Qianlong had two main meals per day. His breakfast was at around 6 a.m. and dinner at 2 p.m. But right after he woke up at 4 a.m., he would usually have a snack – such as bird’s nest soup – before his morning meal and work.

At night, as he went through reports and requests from all over the country, he’d have another bite to eat at 8 p.m. or 9 p.m. – often consisting of eight to 10 small dishes.

“He usually dined alone except for the snack time at night, when he might be dining with a consort he was going to sleep with,” says Zhao.

“To dine and sleep well – so he could produce offspring – were also two main tasks for the emperor.”

Although being the ruler of the country did mean that he could enjoy the finest ingredients, he didn’t always indulge. And both Zhao and the experts at Hong Kong Palace Museum agree that dining inside the Forbidden City wasn’t as lavish as most people might assume.

“The majority of (the emperors) grew up in a highly disciplined environment,” says Wang of the Hong Kong Palace Museum. “Their diet was supposed to be healthy and to be studied by a lot of people already and tested by history.”

One of the biggest misunderstandings about dining in the Forbidden City, she says, is the assumption “that the emperors must eat like a million dishes, especially when you have that Manchu-Han Banquet rumor.”

The mythical Manchu-Han Banquet

The myth of the extravagant Manchu-Han Banquet – often cited as an example of how the imperial family ate – was closely connected to Empress Dowager Cixi – a former royal concubine who controlled China ruthlessly for almost 50 years until she died in 1908.

Cixi is largely responsible for the third and final stage of Zhao’s Forbidden City culinary research, but to understand how she accidentally contributed to one of the biggest misunderstandings about Chinese foods in modern days, it’s worth exploring the unique social and political situation in the decades leading up to China’s re-opening in the late 1970s.

It was a period of political and economic isolation for mainland China following the Communists’ victorious emergence from a civil war in 1949.

By accident, however, national culinary pride swelled toward one legendary banquet called the “Manchu-Han Feast” (or Man Han Quan Xi), which first appeared outside of the Forbidden City in the late Qing Dynasty and was popularized at an expo in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou in the 1950s.

“In 1957, at the first China Import and Export Fair in Guangzhou, one vendor had a sumptuous banquet spread for display,” says Zhao.

“Out of the few foreign countries who sent their representatives, Japanese businessmen were intrigued. Japan’s economy happened to be recovering rapidly after World War II. They wanted to learn about this lavish feast and asked a staff member about what kind of feast it was.

“The clueless helper then consulted the boss, also clueless, who asked the chef. The chef wasn’t sure either – but he had to give some answers, so he said ‘This is called the Manchu-Han Banquet and it was started by the emperor.’”

The Japanese businessmen were said to have been fascinated.

From then on, the Manchu-Han Feast became synonymous with emperors and their meals, and Zhao says it became one of the hottest food trends in Japan.

Dozens of gourmets and research teams traveled to communist China to find out more about this mysterious imperial diet that technically didn’t actually exist.

“While mainland China didn’t want to export such capitalistic ideals internationally originally, Hong Kong restaurateurs saw it as a great business opportunity,” says Zhao. (In those days, Hong Kong was under British rule.)

In 1978, a Japanese TV station worked with a Hong Kong restaurant to recreate and live-broadcast a massive Manchu-Han feast. The epic banquet was separated into four meals over two days.

That only served to deepen the myth, leading people to mistakenly believe the emperor’s feasts had to have 108 dishes spread across two days.

After the country’s re-opening, proud chefs in mainland China soon began declaring they could do an even more opulent version of the feast – one of them featured 1,080 dishes in one banquet, says Zhao.

The fascination with this mystified imperial Chinese cuisine spread across East Asia like wildfire. Not even Zhao was immune from it.

“That’s why I decided to go find the truth myself,” says Zhao, noting the banquets are what got him curious about Forbidden City cuisine in the first place.

Empress Dowager Cixi’s lavish meals

So where does Empress Dowager Cixi fit into all this?

Being the real holder of power behind the last few emperors of imperial China before her death, she was known for her extravagant lifestyle and appetite for exquisite Han Chinese foods.

“It was the most lavish era during the Qing Dynasty. Their daily meals had increased from 18 to 23 courses to 25 to 28 courses,” says Zhao.

She was also a keen entertainer, hosting regular ceremonial feasts. While there were no official Manchu-Han Banquets, there were other types of imperial feasts held in the Forbidden City throughout the centuries. None of them had as many dishes as the rumors claimed.

The most iconic format of them all was “Tian An Yan” (translated as Increase Peacefulness Banquet), combining two main types of banquets of the past – the roast meat-heavy Manchu-style feasts and the Han style with bird’s nest soup and seafood.

“Bird’s nest-style feasts featured many kinds of rare seafood products like shark fins, sea cucumbers, dried scallops and fish lips. Roast meat usually meant roast pork and roast duck,” says Zhao.

“It was an invention during her time with strict guidelines. Each of these banquets consisted of two hot pot dishes, four big bowls (main dishes with auspicious words written on them), four small bowls of items, six food plates, two platters – like sliced Peking duck or suckling pig, four types of pastries and bao, one type of noodles, one type of soup and one fruit platter.

“Hence, even the highest form of Tian An Yan during that time had around 28 dishes at best – a far cry from the 108 dishes modern media like to portray,” says Zhao.

In a society with an increasing reputation for debauchery under Cixi’s corrupt government towards the end of imperial China, wealthy patrons began creating their own “imperial banquets” inspired by Tian An Yan, and called them “Manchu-Han Banquets.” This helps explain some of the confusion surrounding their connection to China’s emperors.

How hunger led Zhao to food history

Despite having studied food for decades, Zhao is far from being a foodie. Quite the opposite, in fact – he says his obsession with food history stems from horrors he witnessed during his childhood in the three years of famine that followed the Communist leadership’s Great Leap Forward economic policy in the late 1950s.

“The memory of long-term gastrointestinal cramps due to hunger and the shock of the millions of deaths due to hunger in the 1960s are a nightmare that comes back and haunts me from time to time,” says Zhao.

“I’m lucky that I survived and it deeply affected my perspective on food.”

Because of this, he says he believes understanding the past will improve the world’s future food security.

“Studying food history is a part of understanding our food culture in a truthful way,” Zhao says.

“It doesn’t only help a country promote its culinary arts but helps us reflect on food and the policies we have today. Who doesn’t enjoy good food? But I didn’t become a food historian to indulge but out of consciousness and responsibility, I want to firmly grasp the truth about it. Today is a continuation of yesterday so studying history is an important part of who we are today and in the future.”

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