Peng Chang-kuei

Did You Know?

• Peng was married twice and had a son born in 1953 from his first marriage.
• He died from pneumonia in Taipei in November 2016.
• His first wife and children remained in Hunan when he fled to Taiwan in 1949.

Early career

Peng was born in Shaping-xiang, Changsha County, in 1919. After the 1938 Changsha fire, Peng moved with his family to Guiyang and then to Chongqing, where his father and elder brother died en route. In Chongqing he worked at Xiaoxiang Jiudian and became personal chef to Zeng Guangshan, granddaughter of Zeng Guofan and mother of Lt. General Yu Ta-wei. He cofounded Banyating restaurant in Chongqing. After the war he returned to Changsha, married for the first time, and in 1949 left his family to follow the Kuomintang retreat to Taiwan.

Career in Taiwan and New York

In 1952 Peng opened Yuloudong in Taipei, but it burned down. He managed staff restaurants for the Overseas Community Affairs Council (1955) and the Central Bank (1959). He founded Tianchanglou and Peng Yuan in Taipei (1956), and cofounded Dung Wan Gok in Hong Kong in the 1960s, which was destroyed by fire five days before opening. Emigrating to New York in 1973, he opened Uncle Peng's Hunan Yuan near the UN, where General Tso's chicken was featured. He returned to Taiwan in the 1980s to expand the Peng Yuan chain, later opening a branch in Changsha. By 2017 four original branches operated, plus Xiang Ba Lao restaurants targeting younger customers, using local tuji chicken.

General Tso's Chicken

In a 2008 interview for the documentary The Search for General Tso, Peng stated he created the dish in 1952 for a state banquet during Admiral Arthur W. Radford's visit to Taiwan, though U.S. records place that visit in June 1953. An alternative account by food writer Zhu Zhenfan (2009) holds that Peng improvised the dish for a late visit by Chiang Ching-kuo when ingredients ran low. The earliest known news articles about Peng, from 1968–1969 in Economic Daily News, carried the heading '彭長貴的故事', but it is unclear whether they mentioned his invention of General Tso's chicken.