Raw meat dishes, popular among peoples from different countries and regions throughout history, refer to a mixture of sliced raw meat and sauces. They have been the food culture of Yunnan since the Kingdom of Nanzhao. Past scholarship on raw meat dishes in Yunnan emphasized ethnic cultural differences and the lag in the cultural development of border areas, while the functions of such dishes in promoting interactions among ethnic groups, local knowledge production, and the cultural transformation of Yunnan received little attention. As mainstream culinary preference shifted from raw dishes to cooked ones, raw meat dishes in Yunnan not only was maintained, but they further evolved into a part of provincial culture. Such cultural transformation was the result of both the frequent daily interactions among different ethnic groups, and the joint effort by the elite to construct local knowledge, regardless of their ethnicity. Raw meat dishes was labeled, in textual representations and in practice, as being different from the mainstream food culture from Tang dynasty till Yuan dynasty, despite that Yunnan became a Chinese province in Yuan dynasty. However, the dishes became a shared food culture among Yunnan officials and commoners in Ming dynasty with the popularity of the Torch Festival, and the local elite of different ethnicity all emphasized that it was unique to Yunnan. The fact that the dishes was popular among Han commoners in Yunnan in Qing dynasty distinguished Yunnan from other provinces and thus mapped the borderline of raw meat dish consumption based on administrative unit. Moreover, while Han commoners invented new eating styles of the dishes, cultural elite in Qing dynasty created new cultural traditions for the local custom, which reinterpreted the historic and cultural interactions between Yunnan—the Southwestern borderland—and the Chinese imperial courts. Therefore, with massive Han immigration to Yunnan during the late imperial period, raw meat dishes became a shared and jointly-built food culture among people of different ethnicity, and the consumption of raw meat dishes was transformed from the culture of the other to the culture of a province in texts by the elite, as a way of incorporating the borderland into the cultural map of late imperial China.