MUZIChinese Matrix
Family and Village Banquets · FFET10430
Ten bowls form a banquet, with dishes varying by place, served for festivals and family occasions.
The family meal at home, and the banquet held for the neighbours of a village.
Ten bowls is a village or family banquet built around ten bowls of food, with distinct versions in Gaoping, Shanxi; Pengyang, Ningxia; Dangtu, Anhui; and Tujia areas. Gaoping emphasizes pork dishes, Pengyang serves a steamed set, and Dangtu most often serves its ten bowls at the New Year's Eve reunion meal. Serving order, bowl counts and hospitality customs vary, and Tujia versions may include more than ten dishes.
Ten bowls names a banquet centered on ten bowls of food, with different combinations in different places. Gaoping's version emphasizes pork dishes. Pengyang's steamed banquet is also called shizan, shiquanxi and shiyangjing.1,2
Gaoping serves the banquet at festivals and weddings. Pengyang serves it at festivals, weddings, funerals and New Year; for elderly people's birthdays and babies' first-month celebrations, the meatball soup is omitted, leaving nine bowls. Dangtu's version is most often served at the New Year's Eve reunion meal. The available accounts provide no primary text establishing when the custom began.1,2,3
Banquets bearing this name appear in Gaoping, Shanxi; Pengyang, Ningxia; Dangtu, Anhui; and Tujia areas. Other places also name banquets by their bowl counts, including Zunyi's eight bowls and Sichuan's jiudouwan, or nine bowls. These names refer to different bowl counts from ten bowls.1,2,3,4,5,6
In Gaoping, tea, dried fruit, cold meats, hot dishes and large dishes precede ten soup bowls served after the third round of wine; intestine soup closes the meal. Pengyang's four main dishes are pork knuckle, chicken, mutton and sweet rice, accompanied by five vegetable side dishes and meatball soup. Dangtu's dishes include meatballs, egg dumplings in soup, smoked fish, whole chicken soup and a fish bowl with the head pointing upward. In the Tujia version, vegetables line the bowls beneath meat, and a caller announces each dish.1,2,3,4
Dangtu's account reads ten as a number of completeness. At Tujia banquets, the host visits the tables to toast guests, and seats are assigned by age and generation.3,4
The banquet also carries customs of hospitality: Tujia ten-bowl banquets end with a closing tune. According to a 2025 local government account, Gaoping ten bowls entered Shanxi's provincial intangible cultural heritage list in 2011.1,4
A Gaoping folk tale says the first ten bowls were offerings to Shennong, also called Yandi, at Mount Yangtou. This unverified tale does not establish the banquet's origin.
Told in: Gaoping, Shanxi; the local account presents it as a folk explanation and states that it is unverified.
Another Gaoping folk tale says that after the Battle of Changping, villagers offered ten bowls of pork soup to commemorate the dead. Rain soaked the offerings, giving rise to the soup banquet. The account acknowledges that the details are difficult to establish, so this is presented only as a tale.
Told in: Gaoping, Shanxi; the local account presents it as a folk explanation and acknowledges uncertainty about its details.
