Lychee Pork

01

Pork that looks like lychees

Lychee pork is named for what it looks like, not what is in it: there is no lychee in the dish.

Fuzhou is lychee country, and its cooks made a dish that imitates the fruit three ways. The color comes from red yeast rice, the same red mold-fermented rice used to brew Fujian’s red rice wine, which tints the pork a deep red. The shape comes from the knife: the pork is scored in a fine cross-hatch and wrapped around a nugget of water chestnut, and when it hits the oil it curls into a little ball whose scored surface looks like the rough skin of a lychee. The taste is meant to echo the fruit too, sweet with a sour edge, and the water chestnut inside is crisp and juicy like lychee flesh.

It is the best-known of Fuzhou’s many sweet-and-sour dishes, and the Fuzhou writer Chen Zhou calls it the classic of the style and unique to the city. Almost every Fuzhou household can make some version of it, and almost every Fuzhou restaurant has it on the menu.

Sources [1][4]

02

Banquet, home and market lychee pork

In Fuzhou, “lychee pork” covers a family of dishes, from the carved banquet version to a bag of fried pork from the market.

The banquet version takes the most work: each piece of scored pork is rolled around water chestnut so it fries into a ball, and some restaurants list it as 夹心荔枝肉, “stuffed lychee pork,” to show that it is done the old way. At Juchunyuan in 2026 the traditional version and a dearer one wrapped around water chestnut were both on the menu, the cheaper at 58 yuan. The home version is simpler: pork cubes and potato chunks in batter, fried and tossed in the sauce, with the potato soaking up the sweet-sour glaze. Popular restaurants serve big platters of it with potato and a sharp vinegar sauce, and many cheaper places now color the sauce with ketchup.

Morning markets sell it cold by the bag, 3.3 yuan of red pork pieces in 2024, next to 醉排骨, “drunken ribs,” the fried spare ribs in sweet-sour sauce sold at 41 yuan a jin. Many Fuzhou families mix the two up: only years later did Chen Zhou realize that the holiday “lychee pork” Chen’s mother made, spare-rib meat and potato fried and tossed in sauce, was really drunken ribs, a dish found all over China, while lychee pork is Fuzhou’s alone. Chen accepts the looser use: once a dish is a classic, home cooks need not carve it, and anything cooked the same way, round, crisp and sweet-sour, gets called lychee pork.

Sources [1][4][6][7][8][9]

03

A Qing recipe, a Tang legend and a Fuzhou dish

The name is old; the Fuzhou dish as people know it is younger.

A dish called lizhi rou appears in Yuan Mei’s cookbook Suiyuan Shidan of 1792, but it is nothing like Fuzhou’s: domino-sized slices of pork are boiled, fried in hot oil, plunged into cold water until the surface wrinkles, then simmered soft in wine, soy and water. Yuan Mei does not explain the name, and the recipe has no sugar, vinegar, red coloring or water chestnut. A legend from Putian, south of Fuzhou, pushes the dish back to the Tang: a chef named Jiang, who served Consort Mei, a Putian native at the emperor’s court, rolled pork into lychee shapes and stewed them sweet and sour, and brought the recipe home after the An Lushan rebellion. Scholars, Lu Xun among them, have argued that Consort Mei never existed.

Fuzhou cooks today call their version a famous dish of a hundred years or more. Its scoring, red coloring and sweet-sour sauce are all hallmarks of the Fuzhou cooking that took shape from the late Qing.

Sources [2][3][5]

04

The cut: scoring “like a lychee”

Fuzhou chefs list lychee pork among the tests of knife work: “scoring like a lychee.”

At Xuanheyuan, a Fuzhou restaurant known for traditional cooking, the pork is tenderloin cut into fairly thick slices, scored on one side in a cross-hatch of even depth and width, and cut on the diagonal into pieces. The depth matters: if it is even, the scored face shrinks in the oil faster than the back and the piece curls into a cone. One Fuzhou master prefers pork belly, rested for hours and blotted of some of its fat, for more tenderness and flavor, and Juchunyuan’s cooks use neck meat, half lean and half fat. The pieces are coated in sweet-potato starch mixed with red yeast powder, or with red lees, the red mash from brewing Fuzhou’s qinghong rice wine, which gives a softer, darker red. A cube of water chestnut the size of a chopstick tip is rolled inside each piece, and the Fuzhou master Yang Weihua insists there is no substitute for it: its crisp juiciness against the crisp-fried meat is the whole point.

Sources [1][5]

05

Frying and the sauce

Fuzhou cooks say even a clever cook struggles with sweet-and-sour, and lychee pork is where the test happens.

The pieces go into hot oil one by one and are left alone until they set, so they keep their shape; then they are fried through at a lower heat and fried again briefly in hotter oil to crisp. One home recipe gives 130°C for three minutes, then 195°C for fifteen seconds. The water chestnut goes in for the last minute or two. The fried pieces should be deep red, crisp-edged and curled.

The sauce is made in the wok at the last moment: garlic and scallion white fried for a few seconds, then soy, sugar, rice vinegar, a little stock and starch brought to a boil, the pork tossed through two or three times and out. Fuzhou cooks use a mild local yellow rice vinegar, add the sugar first and splash in the vinegar just before serving, so the dish reaches the table smelling sharp; the ideal is “sweet but not cloying, sour but not harsh.” Too much sauce makes it soggy; done well, the pieces stay crisp on the table for a long time.

Sources [1][4][5]

06

Lychee pork and China’s other sweet-and-sour pork

Every Chinese region has a fried pork in sweet-and-sour sauce; lychee pork is Fujian’s, and it is the most sculpted.

Fuzhou’s sweet-and-sour dishes all pair the sauce with crisp things, from fried pork and spare ribs to kidney, tripe, jellyfish and squid, because a soft dish in a sweet sauce would be cloying. Chen Zhou explains the taste by the city: hot, damp weather that dulls the appetite, seafood that needs something sour against its fishiness, sugar cane in the fields, and a belief that chili brings on internal heat. He also advises restraint: two or three sweet-and-sour dishes for a table of ten, one for six or fewer.

Sources [1][6]

07

Where to eat it in Fuzhou, and what it costs

You can spend three yuan or fifty-eight.

Juchunyuan, the old restaurant famous for Buddha Jumps Over the Wall, charged 58 yuan in 2026. A forty-year-old neighborhood eatery charged 30 yuan in 2024 for a ketchup-red plate, served alongside 南煎肝, pork liver fried twice in a sweet garlic sauce, and red-lees pork intestines, both Fuzhou favorites. In 2025 a crowded old restaurant served it with potato and a sour sauce strong enough to make diners cough, among six dishes for two at 338 yuan. Morning markets sell it cold by the bag for a few yuan.

Sources [6][7][8][9]

08

Lychee pork at home

Sources [3][4]

09

More Fuzhou food, and other sweet-and-sour pork