Zuo Zongtang
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Chinese farmers resettle for a better life
History likes to repeat itself, perhaps more so in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region than other parts of China. In 214 BC, China's first emperor Qinshihuang deployed military forces along the west bank of the Yellow River, including what became Ningxia. In the following dynasties, migrants continued to arrive to drive away barbarian tribes, farm and build. Migration continued through feudal societies to modern times. During 2011 to 2015, over 329,000 people in Ningxia left their ancestral homes to live in areas with better land, transportation and more water. Most were from Xihaigu, a region of six counties in the south of Ningxia, historically and even internationally known for its harsh environment. "Its bitterness and infertility is the worst under heaven," Zuo Zongtang, a Qing dynasty general said. "Live in places where there is water and grass." This is a popular saying among farmers eager to escape environmental degradation, climate change and the shackling life of mountains after mountains. Thus, relocation continues. According to a five-year plan for Ningxia (2016-2020), about 80,000 poverty-stricken people are expected to move. TREES DIE, BUT PEOPLE LIVE ON "If you move trees, they die. If you move people, they live on," An Yanlong, a Xihaigu farmer, cited the common saying. He just bought a new home in the suburbs of regional capital Yinchuan, five hours of drive away. An's old home in Xiangwafu village was spacious cave house. "The bad thing about it is inconvenience. To buy salt or soap, I had to walk five kilometers to the nearest shop," he said. An spent 12,800 yuan (1,969 US dollars) in 2014 on a 54-square-meter apartment in Binhejiayuan, now home to 16,800 migrants. "I had to build a kitchen and a room for my parents in the yard, It is crowded here," he said. An's new job keeps him from worrying over the troubles of a small house. Working a raspberry farm, his monthly salary of 3,600 yuan is more than he had hoped for. Raspberries is a trendy but costly topping for cake fans. One small box, containing 20 berries, can sell for 20 yuan at a Beijing fruit market. "My kids can go to play in the city on weekends and, it is convenient for my parents to go to hospitals, so it is not too bad," said An, 44 years old. Not all new migrants have desirable jobs, though. "Moving is the first step, to get out of the poor houses. The second step is to get rich," said Hao Xifen, director of poverty relief office in Yinchuan City. Hao is canvassing textile companies, dairies and flower growers. In Yinchuan, annual disposable income of these migrants grew from 2,300 yuan (353 US dollars) in 2012 to 6,086 yuan (1,217 US dollars) in 2015. LARGEST RESETTLEMENT IN CHINA Seventeen years ago, Hongsibao was a gigantic training ground for the military. Today, it is the largest resettlement area in China, housing 230,000 people from eight counties, of whom 62 percent are ethnic Hui. Ma Rong, 27-year-old Hui woman, came to live at Hongsibao in 2002. She left for college and came back to work at the Ningxia Immigration Museum in Hongsibao. "Migration goes back to Qin dynasty, and there are many types of it, but the moving never stopped," she told visitors. "There is organized resettlement by governments and there are voluntary relocations." Yan Shenglong was one of the voluntary migrants. His village was not listed for relocation. "Back at the old home, there was no road, no tap water, only one hill to climb after another. Who would want to stay there?" Yan asked. The farmer in his fifties considers himself visionary. In 2003, he spent all his savings -- 7,000 yuan -- on a parcel of land for farming. "There used to be 300 people in my village, now only 60 remain, mostly old men," he said. Uprooting is not easy. It took Yan four years to earn enough money to build a two-room house. "I had no money left. I had to earn brick by brick," he said. A new home brings new hardships, but Yan is undaunted. "At least there is hope and good life at the end of the road," he said. Yan made some money growing grapes five years earlier. Now there are too many vineyards, and grape prices have fallen. "I'm growing lily roots between the furrows," he said, while plowing. Yang Guowen, 67-year-old Communist Party chief of Zhongquantang village at Hongsibao, does not regret the decision to bring all his fellow villagers to Hongsibao in 2001. "Eight hundred and four families migrated here. In the first two years, there were many complaints. After three years I hardly heard any. People stopped complaining when they started to make money. Now they are growing grapes, goji berries and working as forest rangers," said Yang. "There is no wrong in the policy of resettlement. It is the right way," he said. LESS LAND TO LIVE ON Yan Shenglong thinks he was lucky to have made the decision to migrate 13 years earlier. "Farmers must have land, but there is less and less land," he said. Yan went to visit his relatives at Binhejiayuan, and saw hardship in their new life. "Their allotted land is much smaller than mine. The land has been leased to agriculture companies, and they don't even know which section is theirs," he said. "Eighty yuan for a day?! you can't get a man at such a low price here in our community," Yan said after being told their daily pay at part-time jobs. Zhang Yaowu, a researcher in migration in Ningxia Academy of Social Sciences, said local governments should foster and develop more land for the new migrants and create commercial opportunities to help people get rich. "Simply resettling them is not enough. It is important to help them develop," he said.
Peng Chang-kuei, Chef Behind General Tso’s Chicken, Dies at 98
By WILLIAM GRIMES Peng Chang-kuei, the Taiwanese chef who invented General Tso’s chicken, a dish nearly universal in Chinese restaurants in the United States, died on Wednesday in Taipei. He was 98. The death was reported by The Associated Press. The British food scholar Fuchsia Dunlop has called General Tso’s chicken — lightly battered pieces of dark chicken fried in a chili-accented sweet-and-sour sauce — “the most famous Hunanese dish in the world.” But like many Chinese dishes that have found favor with Americans, General Tso’s chicken was unknown in China until recently. Nor was it, in the version known to most Americans, Hunanese, a cuisine defined by salty, hot and sour flavors. Mr. Peng, an official chef for the Nationalist government, which fled to Taiwan after the 1949 revolution in China, said he created the dish during a four-day visit by Adm. Arthur W. Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1955. On the spur of the moment, he assigned it the name of a Hunanese general, Zuo Zongtang, who had helped put down a series of rebellions in the 19th century. Continue reading the main story “Originally the flavors of the dish were typically Hunanese — heavy, sour, hot and salty,” Mr. Peng told Ms. Dunlop, the author of “Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook” (2007), which is devoted to the cuisine of Hunan. “The original General Tso’s chicken was Hunanese in taste and made without sugar.” The dish made its way to New York in the early 1970s after Chinese chefs in New York, preparing to open the city’s first Hunanese restaurants — Uncle Tai’s Hunan Yuan and Hunam — visited a restaurant that Mr. Peng had opened in Taipei. They adapted the recipe to suit American tastes. “We didn’t want to copy chef Peng exactly,” Ed Schoenfeld, an assistant to the restaurant’s owner, David Keh, told the website Salon in 2010. “We added our own spin to dishes. And so our General Tso’s chicken was cut differently, into small dice, and we served it with water chestnuts, black mushrooms, hoisin sauce and vinegar.” The chef was Wen Dah Tai. At Hunam, the chef Tsung Ting Wang — who was also a partner with Michael Tong in another prominent Chinese restaurant in Manhattan, Shun Lee Palace — put a Sichuan spin on the dish. He crisped up the batter and sweetened the sauce, producing a taste combination that millions of Americans came to love. He called it General Ching’s chicken. But as the dish traveled, the General Tso name adhered. Both restaurants were awarded four stars, the highest rating, by Raymond Sokolov, the restaurant critic of The New York Times. In 1973, with Hunan fever raging, Mr. Peng came to New York and, with Mr. Keh, opened Uncle Peng’s Hunan Yuan on East 44th Street, near the United Nations. Mr. Peng discovered, to his consternation, that his creation had preceded him, and that the child was almost unrecognizable. “New Yorkers didn’t realize he was the real thing, and some treated him like he was copying,” Mr. Schoenfeld said. The tangled history of the dish was explored in 2014 in a documentary, “The Search for General Tso,” directed by Ian Cheney. Peng Chang-kuei was born in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, in 1918. His family was poor. At 13, after running away from home, he began serving an apprenticeship under the celebrated Hunanese chef Cao Jing-shen. Formerly a family chef to Tan Yan-kai, prime minister of the Nationalist government in the late 1920s, Mr. Cao had opened the restaurant Jianleyuan in Changsha. In the 1930s, after the Japanese invasion, Mr. Peng moved to Chungking, the temporary Nationalist capital, where he began to gain renown. After World War II, he was installed as the government’s head banquet chef. He emigrated to Taiwan in 1949, leaving his wife and two sons behind, and continued to cater official functions. He is survived by a son, Peng Tie-Cheng. Complete information on other survivors was not available. New York proved to be a fraught experiment, as Mr. Peng’s restaurant soon closed. “Doom trailed Uncle Peng,” the food critic Gael Greene wrote in New York magazine in 1973. “The pressures of Manhattan restaurant reality were too much for the brilliant teacher.” Undaunted, Mr. Peng borrowed money from friends and opened Yunnan Yuan on East 52nd Street, near Lexington Avenue, where Henry A. Kissinger, then the secretary of state, became a faithful customer. “Kissinger visited us every time he was in New York, and we became great friends,” Mr. Peng told Ms. Dunlop. “It was he who brought Hunanese food to public notice.” General Tso’s chicken began to assume celebrity status when Bob Lape, a restaurant critic, showed Mr. Peng making the dish in a segment for ABC News. The station received some 1,500 requests for the recipe. Encouraged, Mr. Peng reopened his old restaurant as Peng’s, bringing his signature dish with him. Reviewing the restaurant in the The Times in 1977, Mimi Sheraton wrote, “General Tso’s chicken was a stir-fried masterpiece, sizzling hot both in flavor and temperature.” He left the restaurant in 1981 and opened Peng’s Garden in Yonkers, then returned to Taiwan in the late ’80s and opened the first in a chain of Peng Yuan restaurants there. The menu featured General Tso’s chicken. It was listed on the menu in Mandarin as Zuo Zongtang’s farmyard chicken, and in English as chicken à la viceroy. In 1990 he opened a branch of his restaurant in the Great Wall Hotel in Changsha, but it was not a success. As Hunanese chefs adopted General Tso’s chicken, the dish entered a strange second career. In a sweeping act of historical revisionism, it came to be seen as a traditional Hunan dish. Several Hunanese chefs have described it in their cookbooks as a favorite of the 19th-century general’s.
‘If We Patented General Tso’s Chicken, We’d Be Extremely Rich’: Remembering Peng Chang-kuei
Chuck Peng speaks to TIME about his father, the creator of General Tso's chicken, who died on Nov. 30 In the mid-20th century, General Tso’s chicken was invented. Over ensuing decades, a series of serendipitous events made it among the most popular Chinese dishes in the U.S. Peng Chang-kuei, the inventor, died on Nov. 30 in Taipei. The chef, who had two children from a marriage in mainland China and five from a second marriage in Taiwan, was 97 years old by Western reckoning. He was born in September 1919 in Hunan province. As a teen, he apprenticed under revered chef Cao Jingchen before achieving prominence himself by World War II. In 1949, he left mainland China for Taiwan, traversing 800 miles across the South China Sea. In Taiwan, he prepared government banquets and other high-profile feasts. His background influenced his culinary risk taking. Sitting in one of the family’s restaurants in Taipei, Peng’s son Peng Tie-chen (a.k.a. Chuck), who is 63 years old but appears 15 years younger with a full head of jet black hair, says, “He personally saw a lot in China with World War II.” Consequently, he invented many dishes while in Taiwan. “Every dish incorporates his background story,” Chuck tells TIME. General Tso’s chicken has its own story. During the height of the Korean War in the early 1950s, Peng catered a three-day banquet for General Douglas MacArthur and his troops in Taiwan. It was an important event and Peng needed to alter the menu daily, so he experimented and created General Tso’s chicken — named after a Hunanese general whose name is also rendered as Zuo Zongtang. He lived from 1812 to 1885, quashed the Taiping Rebellion, and made contributions to agriculture, education and science. Peng brought the recipe with him when, uneasy at Taiwan’s ongoing tensions with mainland China, he emigrated to New York City in 1973. He opened a restaurant on 44th Street, between Second and Third Avenues. Owing to the restaurant’s proximity to the U.N. headquarters, Taiwanese diplomats often hosted events there. U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger became a regular at the restaurant. Writer Fuchsia Dunlop quoted the elder Peng as saying of Kissinger, “We became great friends.” “Kissinger left a deep impression,” Chuck says. “He really liked to eat General Tso’s chicken.” In 1977, Kissinger held his own high-profile banquet at Peng’s. It was a very unusual choice. “He should have held the event at a higher-end establishment, not a small Chinese restaurant,” says Chuck. Television and print journalists were curious and covered the event. This introduced Peng’s to America. In 1977, Mimi Sheraton of the New York Times wrote, “[Peng’s] is among the city’s better choices at which to sample this enticing and interesting branch of Chinese cookery … General Tso’s chicken was a stir‐fried masterpiece, sizzling hot both in flavor and temperature.” Peng opened restaurants in Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Celebrities and movers such as Patrick Swayze and I.M. Pei, the architect behind the Louvre Pyramid, frequented them. In Houston, Chuck waited on former President George H.W. Bush and many NBA players including greats like Ralph Sampson. Chinese restaurants popped up all around the U.S. and today, by one estimate, they outnumber McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC and Wendy’s combined. General Tso’s chicken became a menu staple, often with sugar added for American palates. Peng returned to Taiwan in 1983, when officials there encouraged celebrated citizens to repatriate, believing it would strengthen the island’s stature on the world stage. Although his health was deteriorating, Peng still cooked up until a few years ago. According to Chuck, his father would watch others cook and say, “You don’t know how to do it. I’ll do it myself.” Over six and half decades, Peng’s original recipe has changed little. It has less batter and is less sweet and crunchy than American versions, but more oily, salty, tart and spicy. The recipe calls for chicken legs to be marinated in cornstarch, egg and soy sauce. The chicken is then cooked at extremely high temperatures until the outside is crispy and the inside still juicy. Then a mixture of garlic, dried chili, white vinegar and sesame oil medley is added. The dish is served with white rice. At no point did Peng think of giving his own name to the dish that had become so famous. “We are commoners, so to use the family name would have been highfalutin,” Chuck says. There’s also the luck of the draw. His father created many dishes and did not realize that General Tso’s chicken would become the most popular the world over. “I feel very honored because it is popular in the U.S. and had such a big impact,” Chuck says. But yes, looking back, the family would do things differently. “If we patented General Tso’s chicken,” Chuck says with a smile, “we’d be extremely rich.”
Knowledge Graph
Examples
1 Zuo Zongtang, sometimes referred to as General Tso, was a Chinese statesman and military leader of the late Qing dynasty.
2 Born in Xiangyin County, Hunan Province, Zuo Zongtang sat for the imperial examination in his youth but obtained only a juren degree. He then spent his time studying agriculture, geography and military strategy.
3 In 1851, Zuo Zongtang started his career in the Qing military by participating in the campaign against the Taiping Rebellion. In 1862, he was recommended by Zeng Guofan to serve as the provincial governor of Zhejiang Province.