Cixi had a dream one night that she was caught by two guards and knelt on the ground, while another man with a large knife in his hand slashed at her head...
Cixi suddenly woke up from the dream, and a cold sweat broke out of her body, and she sat up and touched a large wet patch on the bed. The eunuch Li Lianying heard a movement and hurried over, and the doctor said that the empress dowager was suffering from palpitations and needed to slowly recuperate her body. The empress dowager thought for a while and suddenly said that she still remembered the requiem soup made by Sun Side, which was really unforgettable, so she asked Li Lianying to send someone to look for this person. This has to start with the invasion of China by the Eight-Nation Alliance, when the enemy invaded the city of Beijing, Cixi and Guangxu fled all the way to the west, and the eunuchs on the way could only find some rough food to feed Cixi.
One night, they fled to a village in Hebei Province, and Cixi, who was already hungry and intolerable, smelled a fragrance that was so fragrant that it almost drew out Cixi's soul. So let Li Lianying to inquire about the origin of this fragrance, Li Lianying came to a room looking for the fragrance, only to see an iron pot and four people on the stove, two adults, two children, it was obvious that the fragrance came from the iron pot.
Li Lianying went forward to identify himself and asked the man's name, it turned out that his name was Sun Side, and he also fled west all the way to this place because of the invasion of China by the Eight-Nation Alliance, and in order to fill the hunger, he dug yam in the field and stewed a pot of soup. Li Lianying then ordered the two eunuchs to take the pot away.
Maybe Cixi had been on the run for too long and had not eaten a meal, so she drank several bowls of yam soup at once, and after the meal was full, she took off the jade wrench in her hand and rewarded it to that Sun Side, and Cixi slept a particularly solid sleep. The next day, Li Lianying went to find Sun Side and wanted to make him the empress dowager's imperial cook, but when he looked for him, he was no longer seen.
Cixi's dream, just like herself on the way to escape, Li Lianying ordered people to look for Sun Side and post a notice in Beijing City, but unexpectedly, half an hour later, the guards brought someone over, this person was called Kuang Ziye, according to his account, Sun Side was a cousin of his distant house, and lived in the same village, and also said that Sun Side was a full-fledged foodie, a little money would be fed, so that the whole village could smell the fragrance, is a rich man's life.
Li Lianying led a team of people to follow Kuang Ziye to Sun Side's home, and sure enough, he found Sun Side, and Kuang Ziye told Sun Side the truth of the matter, and Sun Side only said: You can hurt Uncle Bitter! Li Lianying found Sun Side and only wanted to let him follow him back to the Forbidden City quickly, Sun Side said: Go to the palace, you will not be able to come back for a while and a half, let me take two balls with me, so that I can have a thought.
Li Lianying agreed, so Sun Side said that the two balls played by the children stayed by his side, and Kuang Ziye was a miscellaneous worker in the imperial dining room and wanted to be a chef, so on the way back, he kept asking Sun Side about the recipe for the requiem soup. Sun Side knew Kuang Ziye's thoughts, and he said to Kuang Ziye: Companion Jun is like a companion tiger, and any mistake in the pool is to lose his head, you better not know. Kuang Ziye repeatedly requested, and Sun Side just sighed.
After entering the palace, Li Lianying instructed Sun Side to make a requiem soup, but Sun Side made two requests: first, a separate kitchen, and second, a person needed to buy ingredients separately. Li Lianying immediately agreed, and arranged for Kuang Ziye to help choose ingredients, and Sun Side asked The Frame Leaf to buy ingredients: guizhi, parsnip, chrysanthemum, cassia seeds, red dates, raw land and other Traditional Chinese medicines, as well as iron stick yam produced by Henan Jiaozuo and lamb from Inner Mongolia.
A long time later, Sun Side came out, told Li Lianying about the requiem soup, and instructed that it must be eaten while it was hot, the effect was good, according to the custom, Sun Side had to give the empress dowager a taste of dishes, but when the certificate was ready to try, Kuang Ziye volunteered and said: I will come. He tasted all kinds of herbs and mutton, but there was a piece of something that looked like meat and not meat, and he couldn't taste what it was.
Cixi drank the requiem soup, sighed that it was this taste, that day can eat and sleep, the next day to reward Sun Side gold five hundred two, this time KuangZiye is even more red-eyed, he went to his uncle again, to inform the secret recipe, but Sun Side still shook his head and said: Tell you, it is harmful to you. In the blink of an eye, ten years have passed, Kuang Ziye knows that Sun Side is iron-hearted and will not teach, so he thinks of other ways, he pays attention to Sun Side is a habit, careful observation, and finally found a detail, that is, the two balls that Sun Side took with him were missing.
So Kuang Ziye took the opportunity to try the most important ingredient in this soup, and when he put the finished sugar in front of Sun Side, Sun Side said: It seems that you all know? Kuang Ziye said: Your secret is on those two balls. Sun Side asked helplessly: What do you want? Kuang Ziye said: You went to General Manager Li and said that there was something going on in the family and that you had passed on your skills to me, so that you could leave, and I would replace you. When Sun Side heard this, he was so happy that Li Lianying asked Kuang Ziye to make soup himself and present it to Cixi, and when he saw that the empress dowager did not notice anything different, he allowed Sun Side to leave the Forbidden City.
Kuang Ziye was a restless person, and after becoming a chef, he had no one to cover his mouth, and finally one day provoked a small eunuch with a combed hair next to Cixi. On this day, the little eunuch brushed the empress dowager's hair as usual, and took the opportunity to say to Cixi: The slave heard that Kuang Ziye privately slandered Lafayette, saying that the empress dowager was not a divine fetus at all, and he added unclean things to the soup he made for the empress. Because Cixi has always flaunted herself as a natural phoenix in order to make her position stable, and folklore has it that the phoenix is very clean, eating only the flesh of animals, but not the internal organs of animals.
After Cixi learned of this, she was furious and arrested Kuang Ziye, and an investigation learned that the original requiem soup was added to the "pig's bladder", which is what we now call the pig's bladder, and in the past, the countryside blew the pig's breath and dried it into a round ball, and then wrapped a layer of gauze on the outside, which was the children's toy. Cixi was furious and ordered Kuang Ziye to be executed, and also ordered someone to arrest Sun Side, but Sun Side knew that there would be such a day, so when he left the palace, he found a way back for himself, left the village, and disappeared.