In the late Qing Dynasty, Cixi was definitely a "luxury queen mother", and the most prominent thing was her pursuit of the ultimate luxury diet.

Empress Dowager Cixi has 100 bowls of different dishes for dinner twice a day, and also has about 20 bowls of "snacks" twice. The raw materials of these ingredients are all first-class materials purchased from all over the country, including "Bazhen Bird", "Bazhen Sea" and "Bazhen Grass". Cooking is also very particular. Take bean sprouts as an example. You need to manually pull out all the roots of bean sprouts one by one, and at the same time, you can't break the bean sprouts themselves.

The Shoushan Room, which makes Cixi's diet, is located on the east side of the Summer Palace Grand Theatre. It consists of 108 rooms, occupying eight courtyards, and only the chef has 128 people. And such a large-scale cookhouse squad only provides food for one person.

It is said that one year, Empress Dowager Cixi wanted to get rid of the train addiction, so she put a huge imperial meal class on her special train. The kitchen alone occupied 4 carriages, and 1 carriage contained 50 cookers, each of which was responsible for cooking two kinds of dishes, and * * * used 100 chefs. On this bumpy road, Cixi needs to prepare 100 kinds of dishes and 100 kinds of cakes, fruits, sweets and dried fruits for dinner.

In the face of these dishes, in fact, Cixi only eats the nearest dishes, and other foods are just for ostentation and extravagance. Most of her leftovers are poured into swill buckets to feed pigs, or distributed to female officials, maids and senior eunuchs.

In poor and backward China at that time, such a meal should be enough to feed 100 people, but Cixi had enough to eat and drink, so she didn't have the luxury to care!