Hot-pot, one of Chongqing’s trademarks, is well known both at home and abroad. The fresh, fragrant, and spicy hot-pot of Chongqing provides many dining options. Today, despite its humble beginnings, Chongqing Hot-pot can be found all over China.

 Love it or loathe it, one can’t visit Chongqing without trying the local hot pot at least once!! What is it about this dish that you might view with disgust and disdain, yet is so revered by locals and even some visitors. How does a dish like Chongqing hot pot rise from such humble beginnings to now be regarded as a gastronomic delight and the ‘signature dish’ of the whole region?

 To find out how this happened let’s dive into the history of hot pot. The Chinese have been eating from ‘hot pots’ for more than a 1000 years and they most likely originated in Mongolia. There doesn’t seem to be a definitive history of hot pot in Chongqing until the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) Things began to change in the late 19th century, when live cattle from Sichuan, Guizhou and Yunnan provinces were transported by river, slaughtered, sold or preserved in the port of Chongqing. The best cuts of meat were shipped out or sold to the upper and middle classes while the internal organs, including stomach and kidney, were discarded or sold cheaply.

Little went to waste around the docks of Nanji Men in those days and the porters, water carriers, sailors, boat trackers, washer women, and the night soil porters were quick to pick up on the discarded offal, adding it to their little clay pots. Known as毛肚火锅Maodu Huoguo, after the tripe it contained, this soon became a popular, low cost dish amongst the poor. A pinch of salt, spice and numbing peppers gave an otherwise bland and mundane meal a lot of zing.

By the 1930s, when the war brought huge numbers fleeing the Japanese in the north and east of China, many small hotpot joints had popped up away from the docks. These were more elegant and intimate places with higher stools where the Qipao wearing ladies and their gentlemen friends could sit in ease and comfort around small porcelain tables just for four. The clay pots sitting in a hole in the centre of each table were heated from below. Even more recently, in the 1990s, people began to see the advantages of ‘sharing a pot’ with other Families or solo diners. So in went the “jiu gong ge” 九宫格 which effectively cuts a large dish into nine small portions, a separate dish or “ge” for each guest. Eating together in this way offered everyone more variety, time and atmosphere in which to enjoy their meal, and was and still is considered an ideal environment for match making.

Since then, the popularity of hotpot has soared! These days there are 7 distinct kinds of Chongqing Hotpot and in 2001 the ‘Chongqing Hotpot Association’ was founded.