The Yucheng county gazetteer says the chicken began in the Ming period at Yucheng and was completed in the Qing. The earliest maker it names is Wang Mingkui of Yueyawan village, north of Yucheng city, whose ancestors had all boiled chickens for a living. He crossed the bird's two legs into the body and pushed the wings through the slit in the neck, so that the wing tips came out beside the beak; the seasoned bird was called pa ji. He used five spices only, clove, cassia bark, Sichuan pepper, star anise and fennel, which is why it is also called five-spice pa chicken. Another account makes it a canal trade, vendors with baskets along the wharves, and the Jia family genealogy dates the perfected recipe to 1692.
From the journal
The Chicken on the Road
Dezhou's braised chicken was made for people in a hurry: a canal wharf stall first, then a railway commodity, and now a technique written into the national heritage list.
In the same city · Dezhou ↗A village north of the city, and a wharf
Seven processes, and what the word means
The old method has seven processes, known as the seven wonders of the old way. Slaying, choosing a mature hen. Eviscerating. Shaping, where the bird is soaked in cold water, drained and posed to lie down with its wings in its beak, its legs coiled and its claws crossed into the cavity. Frying in vegetable oil. Cooking and simmering with several spices. Lifting out whole. And wrapping, in lotus leaf inside and calamus outside. In Dezhou the word pa means to prise something apart with a tool, to cook over a fierce flame and then simmer low until the flesh is tender, and to separate meat from bone. The rule of the fire is plain: fierce heat for toughness, slow heat for tenderness.
How it became a railway food
In the twentieth century, when the Jinpu and Shide railways opened, Dezhou braised chicken began to travel to every part of China. Dezhou was a major railway junction with heavy passenger traffic, the journeys were long, and hungry travellers bought from the vendors. The trade was regulated in August 1949, gathered into a joint venture in February 1952 and folded into the state food company in March 1956. Vacuum soft packing developed in 1985 stretched the shelf life to eight months and solved long-distance transport; the trademark was registered in 1982. In 1992, the three-hundredth year of its production, sixty state and departmental leaders met at the Great Hall of the People. By 2020 most of it was still eaten in Dezhou itself.
