The Fangshan Restaurant in the Beihai Park in Beijing, which is famous for its traditional royal cuisine, welcomed its 80th birthday.

To celebrate the occasion, the restaurant has displayed its most well known extravagant banquet to the public.

In 1979, the restaurant organized a group of experts to go to the Forbidden City Museum to conduct a research of the royal cuisine and finally selected hundreds of dishes among the royal menus.

These dishes, originally dated back to the Qianlong Emperor and Guangxu Emperor in the Qing dynasty, have developed into the well-known extravagant banquet and last till present.

The whole extravagant banquet is said to contain a total of 134 courses, to be finished in three days. Now the restaurant cook more than 800 kinds of dishes and dim sums in traditional royal style.

Many of them have won high fame in the society and attract over 100,000 tourists to pay visits to the restaurant every year.

The restaurant now provides the extravagant banquets serving for different purposes, such as for celebrations, for commercial meetings, for weddings or for birthday parties.

The royal diner costs are graded as 500 yuan, 800 yuan, 1000 yuan and 1,500 yuan (US$63-188) for one diner.

(Chinanews.cn August 30, 2005)