The Manchu-Han banquet (or Manhan quanxi) – a legendary grand feast dating back to the Qing dynasty (1644-1912) – was, depending on how you interpret it, either the pinnacle of imperial culinary extravagance or the origin of China’s reputation for eating everything.
It was not a single meal but a multi-day culinary marathon, traditionally consisting of 108 dishes served over three days in six separate banquets. The scale was almost unimaginable – some accounts list more than 300 different dishes.
The feast was notorious for ingredients that the modern palate would find distasteful: bear’s paw, orangutan lips, elephant’s trunk, leopard fetus and monkey brain, made infamous by films such as Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) and Tsui Hark’s The Chinese Feast (1995).
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