Ding Baozhen () (1820–1886),

courtesy name A courtesy name (), also known as a style name, is a name bestowed upon one at adulthood in addition to one's given name. This practice is a tradition in the East Asian cultural sphere, including China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.Ulrich Theob ...

Weihuang (), was a Chinese official who lived in the late

Qing dynasty The Qing dynasty ( ), officially the Great Qing,, was a Manchu-led imperial dynasty of China and the last orthodox dynasty in Chinese history. It emerged from the Later Jin dynasty founded by the Jianzhou Jurchens, a Tungusic-spea ...

and served as the governor of

Sichuan Province Sichuan (; zh, c=, labels=no, ; zh, p=Sìchuān; alternatively romanized as Szechuan or Szechwan; formerly also referred to as "West China" or "Western China" by Protestant missions) is a province in Southwest China occupying most of the ...

. The Sichuan dish Kung Pao chicken (or Gongbao chicken) was named after his nickname, "Ding Gongbao" (). "Gongbao" was the short form of an appointment he held, "Taizi Shaobao" (太子少保; roughly translates to "Crown Prince's Tutor"), while "Ding" was his family name.

Life

Born in Pingyuan,

Guizhou Province Guizhou (; formerly Kweichow) is a landlocked province in the southwest region of the People's Republic of China. Its capital and largest city is Guiyang, in the center of the province. Guizhou borders the autonomous region of Guangxi to ...

in 1820, Ding was appointed a government official in 1854 after an outstanding performance in the annual

imperial examination The imperial examination (; lit. "subject recommendation") refers to a civil-service examination system in Imperial China, administered for the purpose of selecting candidates for the state bureaucracy. The concept of choosing bureaucrats by ...

. He served as head of Shandong Province and later as governor of Sichuan province. In the second year of the Guangxu period in the Qing dynasty, he supervised the reconstruction of the Dujiangyan Irrigation Project. A statue of him is displayed at Erwang Temple in

Dujiangyan City Dujiangyan () is a county-level city of Sichuan Province, Southwest China, it is under the administration of the prefecture-level city of Chengdu. Its north-west region forms a border with southern Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture. ...

Life

References

Further reading