According to legend, in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, there was a beggar in Yushan, Changshu, Jiangsu Province, begging for some leftovers to satisfy his hunger. At dusk, the snow is fluttering and it is very cold. The beggar didn't get anything to eat all day. He was cold and hungry, so he had to get into the haystack to keep warm. As soon as he got into the haystack, he saw an old hen lying inside. He was surprised and thought, God has pity on me and gave me this chicken. However, he has nothing but a beggar's broken bowl. How did he make this chicken? After thinking for a long time, he had a brainwave, picked up the chicken he had killed, carried some straw on his back, picked up some dead branches and dry wood, and set off in a ruined temple near the runway. He dug up the mud and mud, then pasted the hairy chicken with mud, then lit firewood in the pit and barbecued the chicken head wrapped in mud in the fire until the mud dried and turned yellow, sending out a fragrance through the cracks in the mud. Knock off the mud shell with a stick, and the chicken feathers will fall off with the mud, and suddenly the fragrance will overflow. The beggar was very happy and wolfed down the chicken. It happened that Qian Muzhai, a great scholar of the Ming Dynasty, passed by here and smelled the smell of chicken from a distance and saw beggars eating chicken. He asked the beggar how to make such delicious chicken, and the beggar didn't hide it, telling the story in detail. When Qian Muzhai came home, he told the chef to make it according to the beggar's method. The cook is an original person. When making chicken, he added natural Chinese herbal spices such as codonopsis pilosula, nutmeg and gastrodia elata and various condiments, wrapped them in lotus leaves, coated them with yellow mud and baked them in the fire. Because the craft is more exquisite and the taste is more delicious, Qian Muzhai praised it again and again after tasting it, named it "beggar chicken" and used this dish to entertain relatives and friends. One day, Liu, a famous Peking Opera actor in the south of the Yangtze River, came from Qianfu of Song Dynasty for a blind date. After she tasted "beggar chicken", she said with great emotion, "I would rather eat Yushan chicken all my life than Songjiang fish for one day". The legend of this sentence has been circulated among the people to this day.
The beggar chicken has a history of more than 300 years. Famous beggar chicken brands include Wang Si Restaurant beggar chicken, Yushan beggar chicken and Guzhen lotus beggar chicken, especially Guzhen lotus beggar chicken, which is refined on the basis of folk law and added with modern technology, making it gradually become one of the famous dishes in China and deeply loved by diners all over the world.