Guilin Rice Noodles

01

Fresh noodles, a ladle of brine and no soup

What most of China calls Guilin rice noodles is, to an older Guilin person, lucai fen: noodles with braised meats and brine, eaten without soup.

The noodles are fresh round rice noodles, made the same morning, white and slightly translucent, soft but with a bounce. A server grabs a portion, dips it in a basket into hot water for a few seconds, shakes it dry and drops it in a bowl. On top go the meats: 锅烧 (guōshāo), deep-fried pork with a skin that shatters like crackling, sliced braised beef and, at better shops, braised tripe, beef spleen or pork snout. Then a ladle of 卤水 (lǔshuǐ), the dark spiced brine that is the whole point, and a spoon of fried soybeans. There is no broth in the bowl.

You carry it to a counter of free toppings: sour bamboo shoots, pickled long beans, pickled radish, mustard greens, chopped green and red chili, garlic and scallions. Then you toss everything until each noodle is coated and eat it dry. Bone stock sits in a pot to help yourself, and the custom is to add it at the end. Locals also distinguish 米粉, the round noodle, from 切粉, flat “cut noodles” sliced from a steamed sheet; the toppings and brine are the same, and the round one is the classic.

Sources [1][2][3]

02

The brine: every shop’s secret

Guilin people judge a noodle shop by its brine, and no two shops make it the same way.

Lushui starts as a stock of pork leg bones and beef bones, blanched with ginger and then simmered gently for about five hours. A set of spices built around cloves, Sichuan pepper, star anise, cassia bark, fennel, dried tangerine peel and licorice is fried in oil over low heat, tied in muslin and simmered in the stock for two hours or more; some makers fry each spice separately at its own temperature. Finally the spiced oil is used to fry fermented tofu, and salt, rock sugar and soy sauce go in before the stock is stirred back. The heritage listing names the brine and the noodles as the two crucial parts of the craft, and says every family’s brine is its own secret, often sweetened with luohan guo, a Guilin fruit. Old-style brine was also left to ferment before seasoning.

Good brine is salty, sweet and fragrant, and there should be just enough of it. Huixianzhai, a famous old shop, was known for 碗底见白, “white at the bottom of the bowl”: each portion of brine was exactly enough to coat the noodles, with not a drop left over, and its brine was flavored with luohan guo for a lingering sweetness. In 2015 the brine recipe of the Minggui chain was listed as municipal intangible heritage in its own right.

Sources [1][2][3]

03

The noodles: aged rice, fermentation and “tiny holes”

Old noodle makers say the noodles matter as much as the brine, and that good ones are alive.

Traditional Guilin noodles are made from a mix of three rices: early-season indica aged for three years, which gives stickiness, new early indica for spring, and late indica for fragrance. The rice is soaked, ground into a slurry, pressed dry, kneaded into a dough and fermented in a jar for at least 24 hours. The dough is then steamed until about a third of it is cooked, pounded in a mortar (now beaten in a mixer), pressed through a perforated press straight into boiling water, boiled for about ten minutes until the noodles sink, and cooled in running water. A regional master of the craft says the old test was to whirl a long noodle round eight times without it breaking. Finally the noodles are wound into single portions.

Fermented noodles are full of tiny holes, which drink up the brine so that the bowl is nearly dry at the end. Many master makers say the best bowl is made with noodles less than two hours old. Most noodles sold today come from factories that skip the fermentation to work faster, and master noodle makers say the bowl has lost springiness and flavor as a result. Because the noodles are already cooked, they are only warmed: locals call it 冒粉, “dipping the noodles,” in water of about 80°C, not boiling, for 20 to 30 seconds at most. At a busy shop it takes seven seconds.

Sources [1][5]

04

The old four: brined meats, original soup, horse meat and brisket

Traditional Guilin noodle shops served four bowls, and only one of them is what travelers now order.

The richest version of the brined-meat bowl is called 七星拱月, “seven stars around the moon”: crisp guoshao, braised beef, braised beef liver, beef spleen, braised tripe, pork snout and a roasted sausage, with soybeans and brine. Each takes time to make, so most shops offer two or three. The other three of the “old four” are harder to find. 原汤粉, “original-soup noodles,” are cooked in the water in which the fresh noodles were first boiled, with fresh pork, liver and intestine; the dish needed a shop that made its own noodles, so as factories took over noodle-making it nearly vanished. In 2024 one of the few places serving it charged 14 yuan for a bowl with wide sheet noodles and pork offal.

马肉粉, horse-meat noodles, began as a street-carrier noodle in the Republican years, served in teacup-sized bowls so that people could buy as few as they could afford, and sold only from the tenth to the third lunar month. The noodles are dipped in horse-bone broth, not water, and topped with slices of rose-red cured horse meat and horse sausage, green garlic, coriander, peanuts and sesame oil, with no brine. The dish had its heyday during the war against Japan, when refugees and writers crowded into Guilin. Youyixuan on Taiping Road, in business since 1932 and now run by its fourth generation, still serves it in a clear broth with braised fresh horse meat. 牛腩粉, brisket noodles, came from Hui Muslim shops: the brisket is simmered with beef bones and soybeans and served in soup.

Sources [1][6]

05

From a Qin legend to a 1341 record

Guilin likes to say its noodles are 2,200 years old. The written record is younger, but still old.

The favorite story goes back to the Qin dynasty. When the First Emperor sent an army south and dug the Lingqu Canal north of Guilin, his northern soldiers could not get used to rice, so the cooks ground it, pressed it into noodles like the wheat noodles of home, and an army doctor brewed a herbal soup against the southern damp, which became the brine. The Guangxi noodle book that tells it calls it folklore, without firm evidence and at odds with the history of grain processing.

The earliest record is a village name: the place-name gazetteer of Lingchuan County says that in 1341 a family named Qin moved to a spot outside the town and opened a small rice noodle shop, and the settlement that grew around it is still called Mifendian, “Noodle Shop.” So rice noodles were already a trade around Guilin in the Yuan dynasty. In the last years of the Qing, under the Xuantong emperor, a shop called Xuanchazhai was famous across the city for 炒片, beef dried on bamboo racks, braised and then sliced and fried; another, Huixianzhai, for its luohan-guo brine. The making of Guilin rice noodles was listed as municipal and regional heritage in 2010 and added to the national list in 2021, together with luosifen. By the early 2020s Guilin had more than 6,000 noodle businesses, over a hundred noodle makers and some thirty packaging firms, five of them able to keep fresh noodles fresh in a vacuum pack, with an output of nearly 10 billion yuan a year.

The legend is still the version most readers meet first. A 2018 China Daily article, drawing on Zhang Di’s book Guilin Rice Noodles, tells it as the start of rice noodles, and describes a method that has changed little: rice soaked for hours, ground wet to a paste like clotted cream, then left for several days to settle before the solids are filtered out.

Sources [1][2][4]

06

How to order and eat it like a local

Ordering takes one sentence, and eating has an order of its own.

Purists add only soybeans, never peanuts, which they say are too strong, and many older Guilin people take a crushed clove of raw garlic and a few bird’s-eye chilies instead of pickles.

Sources [1][5][6]

07

Five yuan a bowl, and two-price menus

Guilin rice noodles are one of the cheapest good meals in China, as long as you pay the local price.

In Guilin city in 2024 and 2026, an everyday two-liang bowl of brined-meat noodles cost about 5 to 8 yuan, and locals said it should not cost more than 10. A busy old shop charged 11 yuan for its loaded house bowl or beef noodles. Shops near scenic spots charge more, and some offer bowls with milk tea at well over ten yuan, which locals avoid. Two shops have been caught charging tourists more than locals for the same bowl: in January 2024 a Guilin shop sold a noodle listed at 10 yuan to residents for 6, and in May 2026 a shop in Yangshuo charged visitors 13 yuan and locals 7. In both cases the market regulator opened an investigation; the Guilin shop was closed for correction and Yangshuo promised the heaviest penalty the law allows. Check the price board before you order, and pay what it says.

Sources [5][6][7][8]

08

Where to eat it in Guilin

Locals say to walk into any lane shop full of people in slippers, but a few names come up again and again.

The old advice in the Guilin noodle book is simple: for a traditional shop, go into the lanes and pick the busiest; for a brand, go to the main streets. Recommendations from residents in 2024 to 2026 keep returning to the same places. Avoid shops at stations, scenic-spot gates and walking streets if you want the everyday version.

Sources [1][6]

09

Guilin noodles, luosifen and laoyou noodles

Guangxi’s three famous noodles share a province and a grain, and almost nothing else.

Guilin rice noodles are the oldest of the three and were the first Guangxi noodle to become famous across China, long before luosifen overtook them. They are also the mildest: the heat and sourness come from the counter, not from the bowl.

Sources [1]

10

A simple brine at home

Sources [1]

11

More Guangxi rice noodles