For desert, we had homemade yogurt topped with the Royal's signature dried fruit: a strawberry, banana slices and cubed apple.

The dried strawberry was the intensely flavorful filling in a bite sized pastry called a kidney bean roll, really more like a cookie.

Mung bean was the main ingredient in two deserts: bite sized cubes of mung bean cake, a gluttonous and not too sweet treat, and a cold cup of mung bean soup, with the green outer skin removed leaving only the white inner kernels (it tasted similar to a split pea soup).

Their version of Empress Cixi's favorite treat was a sesame topped bun filled with finely diced meat and looking the entire world like a miniature, hamburger-edible in one bite if you’re feeling greedy.

Experience a culinary tradition that goes back hundreds of years in royal environs at MeiWeiZhen.

(China Daily August 10, 2008)