What the imperial kitchen actually was
The Qing palace did not have a restaurant. It had a bureaucracy. Several kitchens under the imperial household department divided the work - one for the emperor's ordinary meals, others for ceremonial banquets, others for particular cuisines or dietary requirements - and each had its own budget, its own hierarchy and its own paperwork. The emperor ate two principal meals a day, breakfast in the morning and dinner in the early afternoon, with smaller offerings in between, and the whole apparatus was as much about rank as about food. This day spends its morning on that structure, because without it the dishes make no sense: almost every one of them is a decision about status.
Morning - the grammar of a court dish
We look at what the palace kitchen was trying to do. Ingredients were drawn from across the empire and from tribute, which is why one dish could contain a Cantonese preserve and a Manchurian pickle and a Yunnan fungus without any sense of inconsistency. Technique favoured patient work over display heat: stocks reduced for days, ingredients cut to shapes specified by rank, dishes assembled so that they could be carried through courtyards and still arrive correct. And the naming was part of the cooking - a dish was given an auspicious phrase, and the phrase is what the guest was served. Manchu and Han cooking traditions were deliberately merged in the court banquet, which produced the format known in the nineteenth century as the Manchu-Han banquet: a sequence rather than a single menu, and more a statement about a multi-ethnic empire than a recipe.
Lunch
A lunch of northern court-style dishes, served in sequence rather than all at once.
Afternoon - from the palace to the public
In 1925, cooked by men who had worked in the palace kitchens, imperial cooking was served to the public for the first time from a kitchen set up in one of Beijing's old imperial parks. That moment matters more than any single dish: it is the point at which a court cuisine became a restaurant cuisine, and it is why what you eat today in Beijing is a reconstruction rather than a survival. We trace what came through intact - techniques, dish names, the habit of serving in sequence - and what did not, including ingredients that were tribute goods and simply stopped arriving.
Evening - the banquet table
The day ends at a table set for a formal banquet, and the meal is eaten the way the format intends: cold dishes first, then the hot courses in order, then the substantial dishes and the soup, with sweet and savoury alternating rather than separated. Your host talks you through the order as it arrives, explains why seating and serving sequence carried as much information as the food, and shows you how a banquet reads to the people who grew up with it.
Meals
Lunch, Dinner
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
