Reading Notes: Gu Gong Yan by Hongqi Yuan, Yuliang Gu and Zhenglou Su

The book introduces the food culture of the emperors and others who
lived in the Forbidden City during the Qing dynasty. Foods and
ingredients are organized by season into twelve chapters. Before each
chapter, there is a brief introduction providing some interesting
"insider" knowledge about palace life and food.

Many foods we eat today can be traced back to that time: sachima,
mandarin fish, milk tea, dumplings, wontons, tangyuan, siumai, fruit
preserves, dried persimmons, Chinese rose pastries, and many others.

As a Chinese person, I am not very familiar with Chinese history.
Reading this book helped me learn a little more about where our food and
traditions came from.

- Sachima was originally a traditional Manchu pastry.
- Mandarin fish is considered one of China's four famous freshwater
  fish.
- The Qianlong Emperor once had sweet-and-sour squirrel fish at Songhe
  Lou in Suzhou. The restaurant is still there today, which I find
  unbelievable.
- The Qianlong Emperor was a famous foodie. The book describes how much
  he enjoyed eating during his inspection tours of southern China.
- What we now call "managing up" was apparently nothing new. If you
  cooked for the emperor, knowing how to please him—and even giving a
  dish an imaginative, auspicious name—could earn you not only a
  financial reward but sometimes even a promotion.
- The emperors loved eating tofu. So do I.
- The Kangxi Emperor regarded bracken as a food associated with
  longevity. I sometimes have the opportunity to eat this vegetable when
  I return to the countryside. Next time, I can share this piece of
  history with my relatives.
- Reading these stories made me realize just how extravagant emperors
  could be. Du Mu's poem Passing Huaqing Palace tells the famous
  Tang-dynasty story of lychees being rushed over great distances for
  Yang Guifei, an imperial consort: "A rider gallops through the red
  dust, and the imperial consort smiles. No one knows that he is
  bringing lychees." The Qing court used a different method. Local
  administrations transported entire lychee trees by ship. The journey
  took around three months, and by the time the trees arrived in the
  capital, the fruit was just reaching maturity.
- Children born in the palace could suffer from malnutrition. At the
  time, there was a widely held rule: if you wanted children to remain
  safe and healthy, you should keep them slightly hungry and cool. The
  Tongzhi Emperor, for example, was mostly given soups and porridges
  during his childhood, while much of the elaborate food placed before
  him was for display rather than for him to actually eat. This
  inadequate diet left him physically weak and less able to fight off
  disease as he grew up. He eventually died of illness at only nineteen.
- People living in 2026 have access to a far greater variety and
  abundance of food than even emperors did back then. It made me
  appreciate how extraordinarily abundant food has become in our time.