This holiday was created by Wow Bao—a company that offers Asian street food such as steamed dumplings, pan-seared potstickers, noodle bowls, rice bowls, and bao. They created this holiday to raise the profile of bao restaurants in the U.S. and to encourage people to try them. They chose the 22nd of August for this holiday because it was when their first bao-centric restaurant was established in Chicago.
Bao is food that developed in Chinese culture around the 3rd century and comes from Mantou. According to legend, bao was created by the military strategist Zhuge Liang while he was returning from his Southern Campaign near the province now known as Sichuan. In this story, he was attempting to cross a river guarded by a deity but couldn’t do so because the deity wanted the heads of 50 of his soldiers as payment for passage. Not wanting to sacrifice his troops, he decided to instead order 50 buns that looked like human heads to appease the deity. The deity accepted the buns as payment, and safe passage was granted to him and his army. The buns were then labeled Mantou or “barbarian’s heads.” Of course, no one really knows who invented bao; every province in China seems to have its own origin story.