Online Exhibition · Special Exhibition 4
1991
High in Skill, Higher Still in Character — On Chen Songru, Outstanding Communist Party Member
This tape sat in a cupboard for over thirty years.
In 1991 he was past seventy and still at the stove every day. The film holds one passage of what was on his mind.
First, who made it
In May 1991 the Party General Branch Committee of the Sichuan Restaurant, Beijing, produced a profile film about Chen Songru, made by the Beijing Hotel Audio-Visual Centre. Its title reads High in Skill, Higher Still in Character — On Chen Songru, Outstanding Communist Party Member, and it runs seven minutes thirty-three seconds1. It is not a television programme: it is an in-house “model worker” film, and its tone, structure and emphases all carry the marks of a work-unit publicity film of that period. That is precisely why it preserves things found nowhere else — a complete passage of Chen Songru speaking in his own voice, three appraisals given to camera by disciples and colleagues, and one book’s exact contents count.
The end credits also name the writers: Liu Yufeng, Wen Guiyu and Ma Jun (7:03). These three names appear in no other material held by this site.
One more thing to be clear about: this is an in-house model-worker film — the restaurant’s own Party branch filming its own staff — not outside reporting. What it dwells on is precisely that he was past seventy and still at the stove every day, that he turned down the car and the room, that at seventy he was “still giving off light and heat.” In 1991 those were filmed as things to be emulated. On the Wisdom page this site lists “work placed above health” among the limits he never examined; this film shows that narrative was not conferred after his death — it was built and broadcast by his own workplace while he was alive. Keep that relation in view when reading the film’s praise.
One line in the film corroborates the credits: Yang Jianmin, the restaurant’s general manager, says Chen “has already worked at the Sichuan Restaurant for thirty-two years”. He came to Beijing in 1959; thirty-two years later is 19912.
High in Skill, Higher Still in Character · complete film · 7 min 33 sec
The picture carries the limitations of a VHS transfer. This site has applied only de-interlacing and mild noise reduction — no AI upscaling, no frame interpolation — keeping the footage in its archival state.
Early morning in Xirongxian Hutong →: a short old man walks into the kitchen of the Sichuan Restaurant — “he is so very ordinary”. From there the narration tells his life: in 1959 he brought authentic Sichuan cooking to the capital as founding head chef of its first Sichuan restaurant; dishes such as Oil-Net Lantern Chicken → and Home-Style Minced Pork Sea Cucumber → won the praise of Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping among the central leadership; in 1987 he led a team to Singapore, where he was hailed as a national-treasure master of Sichuan cuisine; in 1989 he compiled The Sichuan Restaurant Beijing Cookbook, with 516 dishes. Past seventy he still worked the stoves every day, declined the car and the guest room, and picked vegetables and carried plates alongside his apprentices. The heart of the film is his own voice: “I feel deeply attached to this restaurant… to pass the craft of Sichuan cooking down, one generation to the next.” At the close, the disciples Yu Jianmin and Liu Zihua and general manager Yang Jianmin speak of him to camera, and the picture comes to rest on a photograph, a medal and an unaging pine.
Start anywhere
Click a timecode and the player above will jump there. Times are positions within the film; on the original tape this film begins at 28:08, the first half being the 1987 Singapore footage (see 21 Days in Singapore →).
“Pass the craft of Sichuan cooking down, one generation to the next”
At 4:16 (tape 32:24) the narrator says “the old man explains it to everyone in his heavy Sichuan accent”, and Chen Songru himself is heard. This is the most important passage in the film, and one of only two publicly available recordings in which his own voice can be heard (the other is Unit 07 of 21 Days in Singapore →)3:
I have worked at the Sichuan Restaurant for decades, and I feel deeply attached to this restaurant. What I keep hoping is that the Sichuan Restaurant will do better and better, that we will train a large body of young and middle-aged chefs, and so pass the craft of Sichuan cooking down, one generation to the next.
—— Chen Songru, May 1991 First-hand account原声原文：「我在四川饭店工作几十年，对饭店有深厚的感情。我总想四川饭店能够越办越好，培养一大批中青年厨师，就把川菜技术一代一代人地传下去。」
What is worth noting is where he lands. He does not stop at an abstraction like “passing on the craft”; he comes down to one concrete thing — “train a large body of young and middle-aged chefs”. This is consistent with the view of transmission he returned to repeatedly in later life; see the entries “Those who copy me die; those who resemble me live” and “Transmission is not entrusted in words, but in one object and one skill” on the Wisdom → page.
The film is in Chinese. The passage above is translated by this site; the Chinese original is on the Chinese edition of this page.
Three appraisals, given to camera
All three interviewees are identified by name captions in the film: the disciples Yu Jianmin and Liu Zihua, and Yang Jianmin, then general manager — he ran the Sichuan Restaurant from 1991 and after 1998 rose to general manager of the BTG International Hotels Group and vice-president of the BTG (Shoulü) Group, among other posts; his career is set out on the Lineage → page.
Master Yu, hello. You are one of Grandpa Chen’s more favoured disciples — would you talk about Grandpa Chen for us?
Editor’s note: recorded as spoken. The interviewer says “Grandpa Chen” rather than “Master Chen”, and the question itself is not a complete sentence; both are the reality of spoken language, not transcription errors.
Everyone says I am Master Chen’s favoured disciple, and Master Chen really is my master. Masters like Master Chen — you cannot say there are none in our trade, but there are very few — and at seventy he is still giving out light and heat. So I am proud of my master.
My assessment of my master is: high in skill, weighty in character. Not only is his technique high, his moral character is higher still.
Master Chen has already worked at the Sichuan Restaurant for thirty-two years. At his post he has given his cooking skill diligently and without seeking notice; this embodies the noble character a Communist should have, and is an example for us to learn from.
Four points of crossing with existing material
The value of this film lies not in advancing new claims but in being an institutional source independent of the family’s oral accounts, corroborating or supplementing several records already held on this site.
How much the 1989 book contained
The narration gives exact figures: The Sichuan Restaurant Beijing Cookbook → contains 516 Sichuan dishes he created, improved or settled into standard form, and 21 banquet menus. Until now this site held only a photograph of the CIP copyright page → (first edition, first printing, January 1989, copies 1–9,600) and no figure for its contents4.
This must be kept distinct from another set of numbers. Under Limits of honesty → this site records that the number of dishes he improved over his lifetime appears variously as 3,000 / 1,000 / 600 / 200. Those describe a lifetime total; 516 describes how much this one book contains. Different objects of counting; no conflict.
Also: the narration reads the title as Beijing Municipal Sichuan Restaurant Cookbook（北京市四川饭店菜谱）— one character (市 shì, “municipal”) more than the physical book, which bears The Sichuan Restaurant Beijing Cookbook（北京四川饭店菜谱）. Checked against the physical copyright page, it is the same book — a slip in the voice-over, not a different edition.
“Six-good employee” now has a second source
This site already recorded that his later honours included “advanced worker” and “six-good employee”. The narration lists both, and comes from a film produced by the work unit itself — independent of the existing record5.
Thirty years apart: a filmed source, for the first time
“More than thirty years in Beijing, more than thirty years living apart from his wife.” Until now, “Contradiction 5: the cost to the family” on the Wisdom → page (“Contradiction 5 · Family costs”) rested only on the biography and family material. This film supplies a filmed source from the work unit, independent of the family circle.
The framing is worth noting: the film places this within “never willing to trouble the organisation over it” and presents it as a virtue, not as a cost to be examined. That framing is itself characteristic of a work-unit publicity film of the period.
The list of successors
The narration names “special-grade-three technicians Zheng Shaowu, Yu Jianmin and Liu Zihua” as the restaurant’s technical mainstay after him. All three appear on this site’s Lineage → page; this provides institutional confirmation as of 1991.
Three points where the film does not match the other material
The film is not reliable throughout. Three points should be flagged:
First, describing the 1987 visit to Singapore, the narration says the local press and food trade were “in an uproar”. The family has checked this against the audio: it is what was said, not a transcription error. But the word carries a negative sense in modern Chinese, and does not fit a sentence that goes on to describe acclaim and job offers at high salaries. It is the scriptwriter’s poor word choice. This site records what was said and does not correct it6.
Second, the narration says he “led his disciples” to Singapore. By his own memoir the party of eight was “six from the Sichuan Restaurant and two from the Fragrant Hills Hotel” — not all of them his disciples7.
Third, the narration says he was elected a district people’s congress deputy. Another source says municipal — Beijing. The two come from different sources, neither corroborated by a third party; this site sets them side by side without reconciling them8.
The years around the film
This is not a list of the songs and prices of 1991 — that was someone else’s 1991.
It is set against his own life: where this film falls in it.
- 1986 Named a Grade One Special Chinese Chef at Beijing’s first special-grade technician conferral. In the same year he declined an invitation to lend his name to a venture for a fee, and stayed on as culinary director on a salary of some three hundred yuan a month.
- Aug 1987 Led a party of eight to Singapore for 21 days of demonstrations, where he was called a national-treasure master of Sichuan cuisine. This is the episode the narration describes; the full footage is in 21 Days in Singapore →.
- Jan 1989 The Sichuan Restaurant Beijing Cookbook →Copyright page → published, containing 516 Sichuan dishes he created, improved or standardised, and 21 banquet menus — these two figures come from this film.
- May 1991 This film was made. The restaurant’s general manager says he “has already worked at the Sichuan Restaurant for 32 years” — he came to Beijing in 1959, and 1959 plus 32 is this year.
- Dec 1991 160 Authentic Sichuan Dishes →Copyright page → published by Jindun Press. This site has inspected the CIP data on the cover directly.
- 1992 Received an annual honour for Eastern cuisine from the World Master Chefs Society; photographs of the ceremony are in the Digital Archive →.
- 16 Jan 1993 With a cold he had not shaken off, he worked as usual in the morning and died of a heart attack. Twenty months after this film was made.
Evidence tiers and sources for each entry are given in the notes on this page and on the Life & Era → and Craft & Dishes → pages.
Catalogue record: 1 videocassette (VHS, analogue); this film 7 min 33 s (00:07:33), at 28:08–35:41 on the tape; reference code AV-007. Digitised 2026: deinterlaced, light denoise, no AI enhancement or frame interpolation; original tape held by the family.
What became of the tape
When the film was made its purpose was clear enough: in-house screenings, a model worker to learn from. It was recorded onto a VHS cassette, sharing the tape with the 1987 Singapore footage — Singapore on the first half, Chen Songru on the second. For more than thirty years afterwards it was never made public.
In 2026 the tape was transferred to a digital file. What you see above is what came off it. This site has de-interlaced the picture and applied mild noise reduction; there is no AI upscaling and no frame interpolation. It is soft, and it is left soft — that softness is the age of the material.
Everything on the tape has aged with the years. The picture is soft, the wording carries the cadence of its period, even the way it praises a man belongs to that time.
One sentence has not aged — “to pass the craft of Sichuan cooking down, one generation to the next”. It was never about 1991. It was about what came after.
This site holds no present-day photograph of 51 Xirongxian Hutong, so no then-and-now image pairing is offered here. Finding some contemporary picture to set alongside would be easy; it would not be part of this archive.
Object-level rights statement
Work: this film is an institutional work, not a family creation. It was produced by the Party General Branch Committee of the Sichuan Restaurant, Beijing (CPC), made by the Beijing Hotel Audio-Visual Centre, and completed in May 1991. The ownership of the relevant rights has not been established; this site neither exercises nor sublicenses any rights on the holder’s behalf.
The physical videotape: owned by the family (who provided the original tape for digitisation).
Digitisation and metadata: produced by this site (the Baiwei Songru digital archive project), a non-profit personal project.
Standard rights statement: In Copyright (rightsstatements.org InC/1.0)
Scope of use: this site presents the material for non-profit commemoration and research. If a rights holder considers that it should not be public, please write to info@chensongru.com and this site will take it down immediately.
Sources
- Primary objectTwo screens of end credits on the original videotape kept by the family: “Produced by the Party General Branch Committee of the Sichuan Restaurant, Beijing (CPC)” and “Made by the Beijing Hotel Audio-Visual Centre, May 1991”.↩
- Independent sourceAt 34:16 Yang Jianmin, general manager of the Sichuan Restaurant, states that Master Chen “has already worked at the Sichuan Restaurant for thirty-two years”. He came to Beijing in 1959 to help found the restaurant; thirty-two years later is 1991, which matches the date in the end credits. The two corroborate each other.↩
- First-hand accountChen Songru is heard at 32:24. The full transcript was checked line by line against the audio by the family; this is the only complete passage in the film spoken by him. The other publicly available material in which his own voice can be heard is Unit 07 of the 1987 Singapore videotape.↩
- Independent sourceNarration at 29:59: “In January 1989 he compiled and published The Sichuan Restaurant Beijing Cookbook, containing 516 Sichuan dishes he had created, improved or settled into standard form, and 21 banquet menus.” This site separately holds a photograph of the book’s CIP copyright page recording the first edition, first printing of January 1989, copies 1–9,600.↩
- Independent sourceNarration at 31:02 lists “outstanding Communist Party member at bureau level, advanced worker, six-good employee”. The later honours “advanced worker” and “six-good employee” recorded previously on this site came from other material; this film constitutes an institutional source independent of the family’s oral accounts.↩
- DisputedThe family’s check against the audio confirms that the word rendered here as “in uproar” is what was said; it is not a transcription error. In modern Chinese the word is used mainly for negative reactions, which does not fit the acclaim and competing job offers described in the same sentence; we judge it a poor word choice by the scriptwriter. This site records what was said and does not correct it.↩
- First-hand accountChen Songru’s autobiography, in Authentic Exposition of the Craft of a Chinese Sichuan Master: Chen Songru, volume 1: “six from the Sichuan Restaurant and two from the Xiangshan Hotel, eight in all, went to the China Grand Restaurant in Singapore” — only six of the eight were his direct colleagues or disciples at the Sichuan Restaurant, so the narration’s “led his disciples” is not quite accurate.↩
- DisputedTwo accounts of the level of the people’s congress seat: this film says “district”; another, single-source account says “Beijing municipal”. The two come from different sources, neither has been cross-checked by a third party, and this site sets them side by side without reconciling them.↩
One cassette, one courtyard
This film does not stand alone. The courtyard it opens on is the former princely mansion of 1959; the Singapore trip its narration describes is recorded on the first half of the same tape; and the line about passing the craft down is what the 37 pages of manuscript set out to do. Follow any of these threads.