Mandarin Restaurant Chopsticks
notes: label: Description
content: Original chopsticks from The Mandarin, in San Francisco, California, a restaurant owned by Cecilia Chiang. This ivory-colored, plastic chopstick resembles typical Taiwanese melamine chopsticks, 10 inches long, thicker, with squared and round ends and flat tips. Chiang also personalized her sets of chopsticks with her logo. This pair of chopsticks features red Chinese lettering.
label: Description
content: Chopsticks are a set of utensils used by billions of people around the world. Chinese people have been using chopsticks since 1200 B.C. and by A.D. 500 spread through Asia to Japan and Vietnam. Early chopsticks were used as cooking utensils, but people began to use them as eating utensils in A.D. 400 when China’s population boom forced them to develop cost-saving habits, such as chopping food into smaller pieces which required less cooking fuel. Knives became obsolete and even killed the mood at the dinner table. Today, there are many different kinds of chopsticks that vary across cultures.
label: Description
content: In Cecilia Chiang’s The Mandarin restaurant, chopsticks were part of the place setting for eating utensils. These chopsticks resemble typical Taiwanese melamine chopsticks, 10 inches long, thicker, with squared and round ends and flat tips. Chiang also personalized her sets of chopsticks with her logo. This contrasts from many Chinese restaurants today that use disposable chopsticks, such as the wooden kind a customer has to break apart.
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
setName: label: See more items in
content: Work and Industry: Asian Pacific American Business
label: See more items in
content: Food
creditLine: label: Credit Line
content: Cecilia Chiang
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: 2011.0115.08
label: catalog number
content: 2011.0115.08
label: accession number
content: 2011.0115
objectType: label: Object Name
content: Chopstick
label: Object Name
content: chopstick
physicalDescription: label: Measurements
content: overall: 1/2 in x 27 in x 1/2 in; 1.27 cm x 68.58 cm x 1.27 cm
label: Measurements
content: overall: .5 cm x 27 cm x .5 cm; 3/16 in x 10 5/8 in x 3/16 in