Bozi Tabletop Pot Dishes 钵子菜
Bozi Tabletop Pot Dishes is featured among the local specialties of Hunan.
Image notes
Resized for the web; the photo itself has not been edited.
Bozi Tabletop Pot Dishes (钵子菜) are dishes from Changde (常德) in Hunan that are stewed in a bozi (钵子), a pot that Xinhunan, the news site of the Hunan Daily group, equates with the ancient ding (鼎) vessel. Xinhunan describes them as stewed from the most authentic ingredients and calls them a typical dish of Changde cooking (德菜).
Where it comes from
In Xinhunan's account, Changde's bozi dishes carry on the ding-food culture of the ancient inhabitants, in which one vessel served for both cooking and eating: food was "烹于斯、食于斯" (cooked here and eaten here). A local rhyme quoted in the same feature has a speaker who would rather not be the emperor's son-in-law as long as he has his stew pot bubbling on its stove ("不愿朝中为附马，只要炖钵炉子咕咕嘎").
In Taoyuan (桃源), the Yidingju (颐鼎居) restaurant traces its own bozi dishes to people fleeing the Qin who, in the Peach Blossom Spring (桃花源) story, settled in the area. It says they brought the ding, both a cooking and eating vessel and a symbol of state, together with the habit of eating from it, and that this habit later became bozi cooking.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and fact-checked against them on 2026-09-25. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.