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Yang Bing-Yi started the Din Tai Fung restaurant with his wife in Taipei in 1972. From there, the restaurant grew into a chain of more than 170 locations around the world, known for steamed soup dumplings. Courtesy of Yang family hide caption
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Yang Bing-Yi started the Din Tai Fung restaurant with his wife in Taipei in 1972. From there, the restaurant grew into a chain of more than 170 locations around the world, known for steamed soup dumplings.
Courtesy of Yang familyTAIPEI — Yang Bing-Yi, the co-founder of a famed Taiwan chain of soup dumpling restaurants, has died at the age of 96, the company announced in a statement on March 26.
Yang and his wife Lai Pen-mei started the Din Tai Fung restaurant in 1972, and grew their location in Taipei into a chain of more than 170 globally, popularizing piping-hot steamed soup dumplings in Taiwan and beyond.
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At the Din Tai Fung Dumpling House in Arcadia, California, supervisor and server Cindy Cheng delivers dumplings to a table at lunchtime. Annie Wells/LA Times via Getty Images hide caption
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At the Din Tai Fung Dumpling House in Arcadia, California, supervisor and server Cindy Cheng delivers dumplings to a table at lunchtime.
Annie Wells/LA Times via Getty ImagesIn 2013, Din Tai Fung sold 28 million signature soup dumplings in Taiwan alone — an average of 76,000 dumplings every day. The private company was reported to have revenues of $150 million in 2021.
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Yang's humble origins and rise to culinary fame closely track the turbulent history of post-World War II China and Taiwan. The restaurant he launched from Taipei paired Shanghai-style soup buns and Chinese regional cooking, epitomizing the expansive diversity of Taiwanese cuisine and its interplay with Chinese cuisine, even during periods of high political tension.
"Human beings are always drawing on tradition and integration, innovating and mixing, and Din Tai Fung has done that par excellence," says Fuchsia Dunlop, a food writer and cookbook author.
Yang started a new life in Taiwan at the end of China's civil war
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Born in 1927 in the city of Taiyuan, in China's central Shanxi province, Yang never lost his heavy provincial accent. During his early teenage years, Japanese troops occupied his hometown for three years. After Japan's defeat in the Second World War, China's civil war engulfed his city.
Yang went by boat to Taiwan at the age of 21 — as company legend has it, with only $20 in his pocket — to join his uncle, who was already on the island. They were part of a massive exodus of up to 2 million Chinese refugees who fled the mainland for Taiwan during the end of the Chinese civil war.
Few ever went back. Yang was forced to start life over.
"I came to Taiwan when I was 21. I didn't attend school. I don't understand [politics], and I'm not knowledgeable," Yang told guests at a gastronomy event in 2007.
