"Ode to boiled cakes" (), written around 300 CE. He first called them mantou (). In this book, it was advised to eat this in a banquet during the approach of spring. The Mongols are thought to have taken the filled (baozi) style of mantou to many countries of Central and East Asia about the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty in the 13th century. The name mantou is cognate to manty and mantı; these are filled dumplings in Turkish, Uzbek, (mantu) cuisines. Folklore A popular Chinese legend relates that the name mantou actually originated from the homophonous word 蠻頭 mántóu, which literally means "barbarian's head". The legend was set in the Three Kingdoms Period (220–280 CE) when Zhuge Liang, the Chancellor of the state of Shu Han, led the Shu army on a campaign against Nanman forces in the southern lands of Shu, which correspond to roughly present-day Yunnan, China, and northern Myanmar. After subduing the Nanman king Meng Huo, Zhuge Liang led the army back to Shu, but met a swift-flowing river which defied all attempts to cross it. A barbarian lord informed him that in olden days, the barbarians would sacrifice 50 men and throw their heads into the river to appease the river deity and allow them to cross. As Zhuge Liang did not want to cause any more of his men to lose their lives, he ordered his men to slaughter the livestock the army brought along, and fill their meat into buns shaped roughly like human heads (round with a flat base). The buns were then thrown into the river. After a successful crossing, he named the bun "barbarian's head" (mántóu, 蠻頭, which evolved into the modern 饅頭). Another version of the story relates back to Zhuge Liang's southern campaign when he instructed that his soldiers who had fallen sick from diarrhea and other illnesses in the swampy region be fed with steamed buns with meat or sweet fillings. Variations in meaning outside northern China Prior to the Song dynasty (960–1279), the word mantou meant both filled and unfilled buns. The term baozi arose in the Song dynasty to indicate filled buns only. As a result, mantou gradually came to indicate only unfilled buns in Mandarin and some varieties of Chinese. In many areas, however, mantou still retains its meaning of filled buns. In the Jiangnan region where Wu Chinese is spoken, it usually means