[BGB] *SPAM* just who was general tso?

[Stephen Maire]

One can never eat too much Chinese food.

A related article appeared in the NY Sunday Times magazine of several 
weeks ago as part of a review of Fuschia Dunlop's "The Revolutionary 
Chinese Cookbook". In addition to commentary on Tso, the article gave a 
slightly different history of General Tso's Chicken and a recipe as well.

For all the violence of the Taiping rebellion, little is known of it in 
the West. Tso was one of several leaders who rose to prominence during 
the Imperial attempts to quash the rebellion. Ch'ang Chih-tung, Ts'eng 
Kuo-fan and Li Hung-chang were important in this period also. Their 
prominence arose as leaders of regional armies mobilized at the 
initiative of local gentry to oppose the Taipings when the Imperial 
armies had failed in this task.

Most of these leaders had passed the Imperial civil service 
examinations, giving rise to a contradiction that successful civil 
servants were taking on military roles.

The regional armies eventually became rather destabilizing. It is not 
too difficult to see in the rise of the regional armies the beginnings 
of the warlordism that was to plague China in the 1920s and 1930s.

In the West, the most noted character of this period in Charles 
"Chinese" Gordon who led a spirited defense of Shanghai from the 
Taipings only later to die in the defense of Khartoum.

For a general history of this period see Franz Michael's "The Taiping 
Rebellion" (vol 1). See also Jonathan Spence, "God's Chinese Son".

Regards,

Stephen

michael.cartine at thomson.com wrote:
> I’ve been eating a bit too much Chinese lately…
> 
> * *
> 
> *Who Was General Tso And Why Are We Eating His Chicken?*
> 
> /By Michael Browning/
> 
> Special to The Washington Post
> Wednesday, April 17, 2002; Page F01
> 
> Each evening, thousands of Americans drift into Chinese restaurants or, 
> if they are too lazy to go out, pick up the phone and order one of the 
> most popular dishes on the menu: General Tso's Chicken, a sugary-spicy 
> melange of dark-meat tidbits, deep-fried then fired up with ginger, 
> garlic, sesame oil, scallions and hot chili peppers.
> 
> Not one in 10,000 knows who General Tso (most commonly pronounced "sow") 
> was, nor what terrible times he lived through, nor the dark massacres 
> that distinguished his baleful, belligerent career. Setting their 
> chopsticks aside, patting their stomachs, the satisfied diners spare 
> scarcely a thought for General Tso, except to imagine that he must have 
> been a great connoisseur of hot stir-fried chicken.
> 
> General Tso was a man ahead of his dish. (Steve McCracken)
> 
> 
> *^_____ **Where to Go for Tso^_____ *
> 
> • *Local Chinese Restaurants* 
> <http://eg.washingtonpost.com/search?type=grid&context=restaurants&flavor_id=2&cw1=17&neighborhoods=&x=17&y=9> 
> 
> 
>  
> 
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> 
> Who was he?
> 
> General Tso Tsungtang, or as his name is spelled in modern Pinyin, Zuo 
> Zongtang, was born on Nov. 10, 1812, and died on Sept. 5, 1885. He was a 
> frighteningly gifted military leader during the waning of the Qing 
> dynasty, a figure perhaps the Chinese equivalent of the American Civil 
> War commander William Tecumseh Sherman. He served with brilliant 
> distinction during China's greatest civil war, the 14-year-long Taiping 
> Rebellion, which claimed millions of lives.
> 
> Tso was utterly ruthless. He smashed the Taiping rebels in four 
> provinces, put down an unrelated revolt called the Nian Rebellion, then 
> marched west and reconquered Chinese Turkestan from Muslim rebels.
> 
> Arthur W. Hummel devotes five double-columned pages to the general in 
> the monumental 1944 "Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period (1644-1912)" 
> published by the Library of Congress.
> 
> Tso emerges from several sources as a self-made man, born in Hunan 
> province, a hilly hot-tempered heartland, whose cuisine rivals that of 
> Sichuan for sheer firepower. (While Sichuan food is hot right up front, 
> in the mouth, in your face; Hunanese cuisine tends to build up inside 
> you, like a slow charcoal fire, until you feel as though your belly is 
> filled with burning coals.)
> 
> As a young man Tso flunked the official court exams three times, a 
> terrible disgrace. He returned home, married and devoted himself to 
> practical studies, like agriculture and geography. He took up silkworm 
> farming and tea farming and chose a gentle sobriquet, calling himself 
> "The Husbandman of the River Hsiang." Like Sherman, stuck teaching at a 
> military academy in Louisiana on the eve of the Civil War, he seemed 
> washed up.
> 
> He was 38 when the Taiping Rebellion broke out in 1850. For the rest of 
> his life, Tso would wield the sword, becoming one of the most remarkably 
> successful military commanders in Chinese history.
> 
> The Taiping Rebellion -- a movement that in part advocated Christian 
> doctrine -- nearly toppled the Qing dynasty. It was founded by Hong 
> Xiuquan, a Chinese mystic who believed he was the younger brother of 
> Jesus. The whole astonishing episode has been described admirably by 
> Yale scholar Jonathan Spence in his "God's Chinese Son." (Norton, 1996).
> 
> Tso made war, and war made Tso. He began his military career as an 
> adjutant and secretary for the governor of Hunan province. He raised a 
> force of 5,000 volunteers and took the field in September 1860, driving 
> the Taiping rebels out of Hunan and Guangxi provinces, into coastal 
> Zhejiang. There he captured the big cities of Shaoxing, still famous for 
> its sherrylike rice wine. From there he pushed south into Fujian and 
> Guangdong provinces, where the revolt had first begun and spread, and 
> had crushed the Taipings by the time the rebellion ended in 1864.
> 
> The Taiping Rebellion was the greatest upheaval in 19th century China. 
> It caused massive displacements and shifts in population. Hundreds of 
> thousands of people fled or emigrated, many to America, where they 
> worked building the transcontinental railroad, which was completed in 1869.
> 
> It would be possible to leave the story here and say that General Tso's 
> Chicken simply honors a great personality, just as Arthur Wellesley, the 
> Duke of Wellington, is honored in Beef Wellington; Pavel Stroganoff, a 
> 19th-century Russian diplomat, in Beef Stroganoff; Count Charles de 
> Nesselrode (another 19th-century Russian diplomat) in Nesselrode 
> Pudding,; or Australian opera singer Nellie Melba in the dessert, Peach 
> Melba. Indeed some believe it quite likely that the dish was whipped up 
> for the general after some signal victory, just as Chicken Marengo was 
> whipped up for Napoleon after he defeated the Austrians at Marengo on 
> June 14, 1800.
> 
> Still, the recipe is not particularly original -- the ingredients are 
> used in many stir-fry Chinese dishes -- and the dark meat chicken argues 
> for a humbler origin. It's a poor man's dish, not a feast for a field 
> marshal.
> 
> Is it possible that, struggling to carve out a new life in America under 
> backbreaking adversities, and having heard of the sword skills of the 
> remorseless General Tso (who had the top leaders of the Nian Rebellion 
> executed with the proverbial "death of 10,000 cuts"), the overseas 
> exiles indulged in some gallows-humor about their old enemy? That the 
> chopped-up chicken dish may have gotten its name from the sliced and 
> diced victims of Tso's grim reprisals?
> 
> This might conceivably explain why General Tso's Chicken is very much an 
> overseas Chinese dish, filtering the hot, peppery taste of Hunan 
> cuisine, through the sweetening process of Cantonese cooking. Most of 
> the immigrants to America came from coastal regions: Shanghai and Canton.
> 
> *Tso Much For That
> *
> The details of Tso's life are easy to document. But how the chicken got 
> named for him is another matter. In "Chinese Kitchen" (Morrow, 1999), 
> author Eileen Yin-Fei Lo says that dish is a Hunan classic called "chung 
> ton gai," or "ancestor meeting place chicken."
> 
> But to others, General Tso's chicken recipe may be no more ancient than 
> 1972, and may have more in common with Manhattan than with mainland 
> China. On "The Definitive General Tso's Chicken Page" 
> (www.echonyc.com/~erich/tso.htm <http://www.echonyc.com/~erich/tso.htm>) 
> New Yorker Eric Hochman theorizes "It was invented in the mid-1970s, in 
> NYC, by one Chef Peng.
> 
> "Around 1974, Hunan and Szechuan food were introduced to the city, and 
> General Tso's Chicken was an exemplar of the new style. Peng's, on East 
> 44th Street, was the first restaurant in NYC to serve it, and since the 
> dish (and cuisine) were new, Chef Peng was able to make it a House 
> Specialty, in spite of its commonplace ingredients."
> 
> My own research led me to the same city, but a different Manhattan 
> restaurateur, who claims the dish is the brilliant invention of his 
> former partner, a gifted Chinese immigrant chef named T.T. Wang.
> 
> "He went into business with me in 1972," said Michael Tong, owner of New 
> York's Shun Lee Palaces, East (155 E. 55th St.) and West (43 W. 65th 
> St.). "We opened the first Hunanese restaurant in the whole country, and 
> the four dishes we offered you will see on the menu of practically every 
> Hunanese restaurant in America today. They all copied from us.
> 
> "First, Lake Tung Ting shrimp. Lake Tung Ting in northern Hunan province 
> is very famous for its shrimp.
> 
> "Second, crispy sea bass. We roll them in cornstarch and we fry them 
> crispy. Then we shower them with the sauce. A lot of restaurants will 
> use catfish, but they don't know how to cook them in the sauce, so they 
> put the sauce on the side. Sometimes they just give you plain soy sauce. 
> We know how to cook them in the sauce.
> 
> "Third, orange crispy beef. This is very, very popular with us. Any 
> Hunan or Sichuan restaurant, if you call them and ask for orange crispy 
> beef, they will know what you are talking about. We invented it.
> 
> "Fourth, General Tso's chicken, sometimes called General Tsung's chicken 
> or General Tsao's chicken."
> 
> If Tong's tale is true, General Tso never ate the dish named after him. 
> The great warrior, the prop of the Qing dynasty, the subduer of rebels 
> and uprisings who carved his name into Chinese history at the point of a 
> sword, had to wait more than 100 years for an inventive expatriate chef 
> to award him his American triumph and make his name famous in the West.
> 
> General Tso, most likely, was a man ahead of his dish.
> 
> /Michael Browning is a feature writer for the Palm Beach Post. He spent 
> nine years in China as a correspondent, based in Beijing, for 
> Knight-Ridder newspapers. /
> 
>  
> 
> 
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