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 great 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 re-conquered Chinese Turkestan from Muslim rebels.
Tso emerges from several sources as a self-made man, born in Hunan province, a 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.
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.
According to the Taiwanese/Chinese word-of-mouth stories, the chicken was invented by General Zuo's wife, made for him after a victorious battle. He liked it so much that upon following victorious battles, he would have it made for all of his commanding officers as reward. It is however possible that this story was invented by the former family chef of the prominent Republican-era politician Tan Yankai, who simply put General Zuo’s name on it to honor him, and to associate the dish with the famous man.
According to several sources, the recipe was invented by Taiwan-bases, Hunan cuision chef Pen Chang-Kuei, Peng was the Nationalist govement banquets’ chef and fled with Chiang Kai-chek’s forces to Taiwan during the Chinese civil war There, he continued his career as official chef until 1973, when he moved to New York to open a restaurant. It is there that Peng started inventing new dishes and modifying traditional ones; one new dish, General Tso’s chicken, was originally prepared without sugar, and subsequently altered to suit the tastes of “ non-Hunanese people.” The popularity of the dish has now led to it being “adopted” by local Hunanese chefs and food writer, perhaps as an acknowledgement of the dish’s unique status, upon which the international reputation of Hunanses cuision was largely based. Ironically, when Peng opened a restaruant is Hunan is the 1990s introducing General Tso’s Chicken, the restaurant closed without success because the locals found the dish too sweet.
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