Peng Chang-kuei, the Taiwanese chef who invented General Tso’s chicken, a dish nearly universal in Chinese restaurants in the United States, died on Wednesday in Taipei. He was 98.

The death was reported by The Associated Press.

The British food scholar Fuchsia Dunlop has called General Tso’s chicken — lightly battered pieces of dark chicken fried in a chili-accented sweet-and-sour sauce — “the most famous Hunanese dish in the world.”

But like many Chinese dishes that have found favor with Americans, General Tso’s chicken was unknown in China until recently. Nor was it, in the version known to most Americans, Hunanese, a cuisine defined by salty, hot and sour flavors.

Mr. Peng, an official chef for the Nationalist government, which fled to Taiwan after the 1949 revolution in China, said he created the dish during a four-day visit by Adm. Arthur W. Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1955. On the spur of the moment, he assigned it the name of a Hunanese general, Zuo Zongtang, who had helped put down a series of rebellions in the 19th century.