Of course, there are also many rural areas where "nine bowls" are served at wedding banquets. In fact, they are the same as "eight bowls", but they only have one more dish. Whether it is "eight" or "nine", there is a pun meaning. Eight and nine have very auspicious meanings. Eight is congratulations on making a fortune, and nine is a long time. Most of them are imaginary. There are not only eight or nine dishes served at rural wedding banquets, but these are representative.
Some people say that the "eight bowls" of rural people's wedding banquets were born out of the Manchu-Han banquet, but they are not. They have been around for a long time. In those days, Zhao Zilong rewarded soldiers with four meat dishes and four vegetarian dishes, but that was not called eight bowls. As for eight bowls, it was because people worshipped the number eight that they had the rhetoric of eight bowls. According to investigation, the Eight Bowls were shaped in the Tang Dynasty and accepted by the people.
Eight is very auspicious. In the past, rural people sat at the Eight Immortals table, with eight people sitting at a table and sixteen dishes on the table. These sixteen dishes included eight cold cuts and eight hot dishes, eight of which were eight big bowls. Four meats and four vegetables are all taken out of the steamer. Many people in the city have never seen a rural wedding reception for guests to hold a banquet. Steamed dishes are the kind of large earthen pot stoves that are temporarily built. A steamer is placed on a large pot, and it takes many times to stack all the steamed dishes.