I ate this at a restaurant (called Mao's, oddly enough) and liked it enough to try to recreate this at home. It was close, but not as oily and smoky as the restaurant, but that's the way.

Ingredients:
peanut oil
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
2 tablespoons chilli paste
1 tablespoon dark soy sauce
2 tablespoons light soy sauce
1 tablespoon rice wine vinegar
1 teaspoon sugar
a bit of salt
1 eggplant diced
1 tablespoon xiaoxing wine
1/4 a cup of water
1 teaspoon cornflour

Heat the oil until it's almost smoking.

Add the rice wine and eggplant and cook for 3-4 mins, until the eggplant is brownish and softening. Then add the water, cover and leave until the eggplant is quite soft.

At this point add the garlic, chilli, soy sauces, rice wine vinegar, sugar, cornflour and salt (you can mix these in a bowl beforehand to taste test) and simmer until the eggplant is quite soft and the sauce is thickened to your liking.

Serve with Jasmine rice. I also ate it with some slices of roast duck bought from my local takeaway.

Oh, and if you want to add meat (or a meat substitute) you can fry some pork mince off in the oil before adding the eggplant.

Delicious, sticky, dark goodness.

Good call on the corn starch! This is a pretty impressive reverse engineering job.

In variations of this I've had, about half a cup of ground beef seems to be the popular choice, although I imagine mixed pork does also work.

Damn that sounds tasty.