Peking duck

Based on Wikipedia: Peking duck

In July 1971, Henry Kissinger sat down to lunch in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing after a frustrating morning of getting nowhere with Premier Zhou Enlai. The talks had been inconclusive, the atmosphere tense. Then they brought out the Peking duck. By the next day, the Americans and Chinese had agreed that Richard Nixon would visit China—a diplomatic breakthrough that would reshape the Cold War. Kissinger became so devoted to the dish that when Zhou died five years later, he flew back to Beijing specifically to eat it again.

This is the power of Peking duck. It is not merely food. It is statecraft on a plate.

A Dish Born in Empire

The story of Peking duck stretches back nearly seven hundred years, to the Mongol-ruled Yuan dynasty, when an inspector of the imperial kitchen named Hu Sihui recorded a recipe for roast duck in his manual of court cuisine. The dish he described was called "shāo yāzi"—simply, roasted duck. But the preparation that would later become synonymous with Beijing itself took shape during the Ming dynasty, when the capital moved north and the dish evolved into something far more refined.

By 1416, a restaurant called Bianyifang had opened near what is now Tiananmen Square, becoming the first establishment dedicated entirely to roasting ducks. It still operates today, more than six centuries later, making it one of the oldest continuously operating restaurants in the world.

The dish grew alongside Chinese imperial power. During the Qianlong period of the Qing dynasty, roughly the same era as the American Revolution, Peking duck had become so fashionable among Beijing's elite that poets composed verses about it. One local poem declared: "Fill your plates with roast duck and suckling pig." This was comfort food for emperors.

The Art of the Skin

Here is what most people get wrong about Peking duck: they think it is about the meat.

It is not. The authentic dish is about the skin—paper-thin, lacquered to a mahogany shine, so crispy it shatters between your teeth. Traditional preparations serve mostly skin with only modest amounts of meat attached. The flesh is almost secondary, a vehicle for that extraordinary exterior.

Creating this skin requires a process that borders on alchemy. After the duck is killed and cleaned, air is pumped beneath the skin through the neck cavity, separating it from the fat underneath like inflating a balloon. The bird is then blanched in boiling water to tighten the skin, glazed with a syrup containing honey and maltose, and left to dry for a full day. A second coating of soy sauce, five-spice powder, and more maltose follows. Only then does the duck enter the oven.

The result is a skin with the texture of a potato chip and the depth of caramelized sugar, lacquered meat, and rendered fat.

Two Ways to Roast a Duck

The great restaurants of Beijing have waged a quiet centuries-long argument over how best to cook these birds. The debate centers on a single question: open flame or closed heat?

Bianyifang, that six-hundred-year-old establishment, champions the closed oven method. Their brick ovens are preheated by burning sorghum straw at the base. Once the fire dies, the duck goes in to cook slowly through convection, the residual heat doing all the work. The technique produces meat that remains succulent, the fat melting into the flesh rather than dripping away.

Quanjude, a younger rival established in 1864, pioneered the hung oven approach. Their ducks dangle from hooks over an open fire fueled by fruitwood—traditionally peach or pear trees. Twenty birds can roast simultaneously at nearly three hundred degrees Celsius, the flames licking at their skins for thirty to forty minutes while a chef dangles each duck closer to the fire in thirty-second intervals. This method renders out more fat, producing crispier skin but drier meat.

Both restaurants are now "Lao zihao"—old brand names that have become household words throughout China, each fiercely defending their technique as the authentic tradition.

The Darker Side of Duck

The ducks that become Peking duck are not ordinary birds. They are purpose-bred for this single culinary destiny, descendants of black-feathered ducks that once swam the canals of Nanjing. When the capital moved north, these ducks followed the barge traffic, and over centuries, Chinese farmers developed new breeds optimized for the table.

Traditionally, this meant force-feeding. After forty-five days of free-range living, young ducks would be fed four times daily for another fifteen to twenty days, gorging them until they reached five to seven kilograms—two to three times what a duck might weigh naturally. The Chinese even developed an alternate name for the animal: Beijing "stuffed duck."

The practice was brutal and inefficient. Force-fed ducks died at rates around twenty percent, and many more became unusable. Expecting a duck to swallow six hundred grams of food daily when it would naturally eat two hundred is, as one source delicately puts it, "unrealistic."

The good news is that this is largely history. Modern broiler breeds mature to the proper size and fat content without force-feeding, reaching market weight in just forty days. As of 2021, at least ninety-five percent of ducks served in Beijing restaurants have never been force-fed. This is a case where industrial farming actually improved animal welfare—each worker who once tended five hundred force-fed ducks can now raise five thousand birds humanely.

The Ritual of Eating

Peking duck is not simply served. It is performed.

A properly prepared duck arrives at the table whole, where a chef carves it in front of the diners with theatrical precision. The meal unfolds in stages. First comes the skin, served with sugar and sweet bean sauce for dipping—an appetizer of pure crackling indulgence meant to be eaten while still piping hot.

Then the meat arrives alongside steamed pancakes, thin as crêpes and soft as silk. These are called "chūn bǐng"—spring pancakes. The diner takes a pancake, adds a smear of sweet bean sauce, lays in julienned cucumber and spring onion, places slices of duck on top, and rolls the whole assembly into a cylinder to be eaten by hand. The combination of textures—the crispy skin, tender meat, cool crunch of vegetables, and yielding wrapper—creates something greater than any single element.

But the meal does not end there. What remains of the duck after carving—the bones, the less photogenic bits—becomes a third course. Traditionally, this carcass is simmered into a broth with Chinese cabbage and soft tofu, a light soup to cleanse the palate after so much richness. Some restaurants instead chop it for stir-frying with sweet bean sauce, or sauté it rapidly with salt and pepper. Others simply pack it up for the diner to take home.

Nothing is wasted. A single duck becomes an entire meal in three acts.

Duck Diplomacy

Peking duck has served as China's culinary ambassador for more than half a century. After that lunch with Kissinger in 1971, the dish became standard fare for visiting dignitaries. Fidel Castro ate it at Quanjude. So did Helmut Kohl, the German chancellor who oversaw reunification. The restaurant chain has framed photos of world leaders on its walls the way American diners display pictures of minor celebrities.

This was deliberate soft power. By the mid-twentieth century, China had consciously elevated Peking duck into a national symbol, something uniquely Chinese to offer guests from abroad. The dish encoded messages about Chinese civilization: ancient traditions maintained over centuries, technical mastery in the kitchen, the graciousness of sharing food carved tableside.

For tourists today, eating Peking duck in Beijing has become one of those obligatory experiences, like seeing the Great Wall or the Forbidden City. The dish is a monument you can taste.

Variations on a Theme

Beyond China, the duck has evolved in unexpected ways. In Britain, "crispy aromatic duck" became popular in the latter half of the twentieth century—a dish clearly inspired by Peking duck but prepared differently. The British version is marinated with spices, steamed until tender, then deep-fried until crispy. The result is drier and crunchier than the original, with less fat. It is served in much the same way, with pancakes and hoisin sauce and cucumber, but purists consider it a distant cousin at best.

Germany developed its own adaptation, sometimes labeled "Peking-Ente" on menus despite being deep-fried rather than roasted, served over noodles or rice with stir-fried vegetables. These are fusion dishes, products of Chinese cuisine filtering through local tastes and available techniques.

In America, a restaurant called Duck Chang's made history in Virginia in 1975 by becoming the first Chinese restaurant to serve Peking duck without requiring twenty-four hours' advance notice—a breakthrough in convenience that seemed remarkable at the time. In 2018, the James Beard Foundation recognized Sun Wah BBQ in Chicago with an America's Classics award, specifically praising their three-course "Beijing Duck Feast."

The Perfect Expression

What makes Peking duck endure? It is not simply that the dish tastes good, though it does. It is that the dish is a complete aesthetic experience. The visual drama of the carved bird. The social ritual of assembling your own pancake rolls. The interplay of textures and temperatures. The way a single animal becomes multiple courses, each with its own character.

The dish also captures something essential about Chinese culinary philosophy: the transformation of humble ingredients through technique and patience. A duck is just a duck. But a duck that has been inflated, glazed, dried, roasted, and carved becomes art. The six-hundred-year-old tradition of Bianyifang, the nineteenth-century innovations of Quanjude, the modern breeds that eliminated the cruelty of force-feeding—all of this accumulated wisdom serves a single purpose.

When done right, Peking duck achieves what all great dishes aspire to. It makes you understand why humans bothered to invent cooking in the first place.