Venison Banquet 鹿肉宴
Venison Banquet is featured among the local specialties of Jilin.
Venison Banquet (鹿肉宴) is a banquet of sika deer (梅花鹿) dishes served in Liaoyuan (辽源), Jilin, whose Dongfeng County (东丰县) calls itself the ‘hometown of the sika deer’. CCTV describes the whole-deer banquet (全鹿宴) of Liaoyuan as dishes and drinks made from every part of the deer that can be eaten or used as medicine.
Where it comes from
According to the county's sika-deer portal, Nurhaci (努尔哈赤) hunted in Dongfeng in the Later Jin period; in 1682, the 21st year of the Kangxi reign (康熙), the area became part of the Shengjing Hunting Ground (盛京围场), and in the Guangxu reign (光绪) it was made an official deer-keeping mountain. The county describes itself as the place where farmed sika deer began in China, and China's first state-owned deer farm opened there in February 1947.
CCTV links the banquet to this past: it calls the whole-deer banquet a former imperial dish and says Liaoyuan, once the Qing imperial hunting ground, launched it alongside hunting-ground tourism, so that ordinary people could eat what had been a royal feast.
How it is eaten
The banquet draws on the county’s farmed deer. In 2011 CCTV reported that Dongfeng had more than 100,000 farmed sika deer, which kept the banquet supplied with fresh meat, and that visitors could choose a deer themselves and have it cooked on the spot. CCTV also quotes Li Shizhen’s Compendium of Materia Medica (本草纲目), which says eating venison lifts the spirits and builds strength.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-24. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.