Chinese Food Trivia
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48 free Chinese Food trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Chinese food trivia quiz covers the real thing and the takeaway favourites: Peking duck and dim sum, mapo tofu and Kung Pao chicken, xiaolongbao, hot pot, dandan noodles, char siu, mooncakes and zongzi, plus the sauces and tools behind them — soy, hoisin, oyster sauce, Sichuan pepper, chopsticks and the wok. It also digs into the stories: which dishes were invented in New York rather than Hunan, where fortune cookies actually come from, why jiaozi look like ingots, who Su Dongpo and General Tso were, and how the Eight Cuisines of China came to be named. Expect a few surprises about congee, century eggs and a Chinese buffalo-milk cheese. Questions run from easy to expert with the difficulty shown on each one. Every answer has been checked against a primary reference and each question carries its citation. For the festival side of the table, try our Chinese New Year quiz too.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the classic filling of a traditional Cantonese mooncake?
Lotus seed paste and salted yolk
Lotus seed paste and salted yolk: the whole duck-egg yolk stands for the full moon, and the cake is so rich that it is cut into thin wedges and shared over tea.
Q 02When are mooncakes traditionally eaten?
The Mid-Autumn Festival
The Mid-Autumn Festival falls at the full moon of the 8th lunar month; a folk tale says rebels once hid messages in the gift cakes to plot the overthrow of China's Mongol rulers.
Q 03What are zongzi traditionally wrapped in?
Bamboo leaves
Bamboo leaves scent the sticky rice as it boils; in one telling, the first parcels were thrown into a river so the fish would leave a drowned poet's body alone.
Q 04Which poet's death is commemorated with zongzi and dragon boat races?
Qu Yuan
Qu Yuan drowned himself in the Miluo River in 278 BC; legend says villagers raced out in their boats to save him, which is how the festival's boat races are said to have begun.
Q 05Jiaozi dumplings are said to bring prosperity because they resemble which object?
Gold and silver ingots
Gold and silver ingots: sycee like these were money in imperial China, so households wrap the dumplings on New Year's Eve and eat them as midnight strikes to invite wealth.
Q 06Legend says the physician Zhang Zhongjing invented jiaozi one bitter winter as a cure for what?
Frostbitten ears
Frostbitten ears: in the tale he wrapped mutton and warming herbs in dough folded to look like ears, boiled them and handed them out to villagers suffering in the cold.
Q 07Which newspaper published the article credited with establishing China's 'Eight Great Cuisines' in the 1980s?
People's Daily
People's Daily: journalist Wang Shaoquan's article added four newer regional schools to the four older great traditions, and his list of eight became the standard way to divide Chinese cooking.
Q 08Which foods are the dietary staples of northern China's dry, temperate climate?
Noodles, porridge and bread
Noodles, porridge and bread: paddy rice needs the wetter south, so the north built its cooking on hardier dry-land grains, a split that shapes almost every regional menu.
Q 09Which part of a Peking duck is prized above all and traditionally served first, with sugar for dipping?
The crisp skin
The crisp skin: cooks pump air between skin and flesh and paint the bird with syrup before it goes in the oven, so the fat renders away and the skin turns thin and brittle.
Q 10Which US statesman was served a Peking duck lunch by Zhou Enlai during a secret 1971 trip to Beijing?
Henry Kissinger
Henry Kissinger: the lunch came in the middle of the secret talks, which ended with an agreed statement announcing that President Nixon would visit China.
Q 11Fortune cookies are not Chinese: they most likely descend from a cracker made in which country?
Japan
Japan: a similar folded cracker was being made in Kyoto in the 1800s, immigrants carried it to California, and Chinese restaurants there later made it their own.
Q 12In 2005, lucky numbers from fortune cookies made 110 players second-prize winners in which US lottery?
Powerball
Powerball: lottery officials suspected fraud until they traced the numbers to paper slips from one cookie maker, which had printed five of the six winning numbers.
Q 13Orange chicken is credited to Andy Kao, who created it in 1987 as executive chef of which restaurant chain?
Panda Express
Q 21What gives Sichuan pepper its tingling sensation on the tongue?
Hydroxy-alpha sanshool
Hydroxy-alpha sanshool acts on the nerves that sense touch and vibration, so the lips buzz as if vibrating at about 50 hertz, the frequency of mains electricity in much of the world.
Q 22What does the Sichuan flavour term 'mala' mean?
Numb-spiciness
Numb-spiciness: 'ma' is the tingle of Sichuan pepper and 'la' the burn of chilli, and the numbing half came first: chillies joined the region's traditional pepper only a few centuries ago.
Q 23Xiaolongbao soup dumplings are traditionally steamed in what?
A small bamboo basket
Panda Express: Kao reworked a bone-in chicken dish at one of the chain's Hawaii restaurants, frying boneless pieces and tossing them in a sweet orange-peel sauce.
Q 14General Tso's chicken is named after a general from which Chinese province?
Hunan
Hunan: Zuo Zongtang died in 1885 without ever tasting it; chef Peng Chang-kuei, who made the dish famous, came from the same province and named it after its war hero.
Q 15Where did chef Peng Chang-kuei open the restaurant that popularised General Tso's chicken?
New York City
New York City: Peng opened on East 44th Street in 1973, United Nations officials became regulars, and the dish he had first cooked in Taiwan in the 1950s became a takeaway staple across the US.
Q 16Chillies, the signature of Sichuan cooking, are native to which part of the world, reaching China only in the 1500s?
The Americas
The Americas: Columbus carried chillies back to Spain and Portuguese traders spread them along their Asian routes, so the fire in Sichuan food is only a few centuries old.
Q 17Chop suey's Cantonese name, tsap seui, roughly translates as what?
Odds and ends
Odds and ends: the dish likely began as a way to use up scraps of meat and vegetables, much like minestrone, and its name was already appearing in US newspapers by 1884.
Q 18Where does the 'Kung Pao' in Kung Pao chicken come from?
An official's court title
An official's court title: Ding Baozhen, a Qing governor of Sichuan, was styled Gongbao, 'palace guardian', a name judged so imperial that Cultural Revolution menus called the dish plain spicy chicken.
Q 19What does 'mapo' in mapo tofu literally describe?
A pockmarked old woman
A pockmarked old woman: 'ma' means pockmarked and 'po' an old woman, the nickname of the cook, Mrs Chen, so the dish that made her famous is named for her scars rather than her skill.
Q 20Which city is the birthplace of mapo tofu?
Chengdu
Chengdu: the dish began at a cook-shop feeding traders and peddlers passing through the city, which in 2010 became the first in Asia to be named a UNESCO City of Gastronomy.
A small bamboo basket: 'xiaolong' means little basket, and diners lift each dumpling onto a spoon and nibble a hole to sip the scalding soup before eating the rest.
Q 24How does the hot soup get inside a xiaolongbao dumpling?
Jellied stock melts in the steamer
Jellied stock melts in the steamer: cooks simmer pork skin and bones into a stock that sets when chilled, fold cubes of it into the filling, and the heat turns them back into soup.
Q 25What does 'dandan' in dandan noodles refer to?
A carrying pole
A carrying pole: street vendors walked the lanes with noodles in one basket and sauce in the other, slung from the ends of a pole across the shoulder, selling bowls to passers-by.
Q 26What does the Cantonese word 'hoisin' literally mean?
Seafood
Seafood: yet the dark, sweet sauce contains none at all, being built on soybeans, garlic, chilli and sugar.
Q 27What does 'char siu' literally mean in Cantonese?
Fork roasted
Fork roasted: 'char' is a fork and 'siu' to roast; the pork is steeped in soy sauce, sugar and rice wine, then roasted under a glaze of honey or maltose.
Q 28What kind of dough is used for the fried Chinese breakfast stick youtiao?
Wheat flour
Wheat flour: the Cantonese name means 'oil-fried devil', from a folk tale that the paired strips stand for a hated Song minister and his wife, fried for plotting the death of the hero Yue Fei.
Q 29Guangzhou's dan tat pastry of the 1920s was modelled on which foreign dessert?
The English custard tart
The English custard tart: Guangzhou's Western-style department stores were competing fiercely for customers, so their pastry chefs adapted it; Macau's egg tart instead follows the Portuguese pastel de nata.
Q 30Which Song dynasty poet gave his name to a red-braised pork belly dish from Hangzhou?
Su Dongpo
Su Dongpo, as the poet Su Shi styled himself, gives his name to pork belly braised for hours in rice wine; legend says he worked out the slow method while exiled and short of money.