Peking duck
roast duck from Beijing (Peking)
Peking duck is a dish from Beijing that has been prepared since the Imperial era. The meat is characterized by its thin, crispy skin, with authentic versions of the dish serving mostly the skin and little meat, sliced in front of the diners by the cook. Ducks bred especially for the dish are slaughtered after 65 days and seasoned before being roasted in a closed or hung oven. The meat is often eaten with spring onion, cucumber, and sweet bean sauce, with pancakes rolled around the fillings. Aromatic duck is a similar dish to Peking duck and is popular in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
History
Ducks have been roasted in China since the Southern and Northern dynasties. A variation of roast duck was prepared by the emperor in the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty. The dish, originally named "shāo yāzi" (燒鴨子), was mentioned in the Complete Recipes for Dishes and Beverages (飲膳正要) manual in 1330 by Hu Sihui (忽思慧), an inspector of the imperial kitchen. The Peking roast duck that came to be associated with the term was fully developed during the later Ming dynasty, and by then, Peking duck was one of the main dishes on imperial court menus. The first restaurant specialising in Peking duck, Bianyifang, was established in the Xianyukou, close to Qianmen of Beijing in 1416.
“Peking duck” enters the record as roast duck from Beijing (Peking). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Peking, duck and roast can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q404973. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1330 and 1416.
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This entry incorporates text from “Peking duck” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.