Writers, artists and a duck dinner

In 1950 the writer Ba Jin travelled from Shanghai to Beijing for a meeting. The novelist and playwright Lao She, with Li Boshao, Zhao Shuli and other literary figures, invited him to dinner at Quanjude and asked the Peking-opera master Mei Lanfang to keep them company. The invitation note Lao She wrote is still in the China Modern Literature Museum — which is why we can say it happened. The friendship of the three men is remembered as a happy chapter of modern Chinese letters, and we have no reason to add to that.

Another visitor left a picture rather than a note. In 1933 the German photographer Hedda Morrison ate at Quanjude and became so interested in its food culture that she photographed the kitchen. The image below is the photograph from that visit.