General Tso's chicken (; ) is a sweet and spicy deep-fried chicken dish that is served in North American Chinese restaurants. The dish is named after Zuo Zongtang, formerly romanized "Tso Tsung-t'ang", a Qing dynasty statesman and military leader, although the dish has no recorded connection to Zuo nor is the dish known in Zuo's home province, Hunan. Name and origins The dish has been associated with Zuo Zongtang (Tso Tsung-t'ang) (1812–1885), a Qing dynasty statesman and military leader from Hunan Province, but Zuo could not have eaten the dish or known of it. The dish is found neither in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, nor in Xiangyin County, where Zuo was born. Moreover, Zuo's descendants, who are still living in Xiangyin County, when interviewed, said that they had never heard of such a dish. There are several stories concerning the origin of the dish. Eileen Yin-Fei Lo states in her book The Chinese Kitchen that the dish originates from a simple Hunan chicken dish and that the reference to "Zongtang" was not a reference to Zuo Zongtang's given name, but rather a reference to the homonym "zongtang (宗堂)", meaning "ancestral meeting hall". Consistent with this interpretation, the dish name is sometimes (but considerably less commonly) found in Chinese as 左宗棠雞 (Chung tong gai is transliterated from Jyutping; Zuǒ Zōngtáng jī is transliterated from Hanyu Pinyin). The dish or its variants are known by a number of variant names, including: Peng Chang-kuei claim Fuchsia Dunlop argues that the recipe was invented by Taiwan-based Hunan cuisine chef Peng Chang-kuei, who had been an apprentice of Cao Jingchen (), a leading early 20th-century Chinese chef. Peng was the Nationalist government's banquet chef and fled with Kuomintang forces to Taiwan during the Chinese Civil War. There he continued his career as official chef until 1973, when he moved to New York to open a restaurant. One new dish, General Tso's chicken, was originally prepared without sugar and subsequently altered to suit the tastes of "non-Hunanese people". The popularity of the dish has led to it being adopted by local Hunanese chefs and food writers. When Peng opened a restaurant in Hunan in the 1990s introducing General Tso's chicken, the restaurant closed without success, as the locals found the dish too sweet. Peng's Restaurant on East 44th Street in New York City claims that it was the first restaurant in the city to