Xiaolongbao

01

A small basket, and soup inside

A xiaolongbao is a bun in name, a dumpling in shape and a bowl of soup in the middle.

The name means “small-basket bun”: 小 small, 笼 the bamboo steamer, 包 a filled bun. Shanghai people still say xiaolong mantou, 小笼馒头, which confuses northerners, for whom a mantou is a plain bun with nothing inside. In the old Shanghai usage mantou meant any steamed bun, filled or not. The Shanghai food writer Shen Jialu explains how the words settled: today mantou means the big ones, two of which make a breakfast, and xiaolong means pocket-sized pork buns, six or more to one liang (50 grams) of flour. In English they are called soup dumplings, and the city’s own English-language guide uses the same phrase.

A good one is pale and slightly translucent, gathered at the top into fine pleats, and slumps a little in the basket under the weight of its soup. Lift it and the bottom sags; through the skin you can see the pinkish filling move. The national intangible-heritage entry for the Nanxiang version gives its measurements: a wrapper 1.5 millimeters thick weighing 8 grams, 16 grams of filling, a finished diameter of 2.5 centimeters and 18 pleats. The classic filling is plain pork. Crab is the famous luxury, and shops also sell shrimp, dried scallop and pickled mustard-stem fillings.

Sources [1][4][5]

02

Where the soup comes from

Nobody injects the soup. It goes in solid.

The soup starts as pork-skin jelly, chopped and mixed into the raw filling. Pork skin is simmered for hours, often with chicken, until the liquid is rich in gelatin; it is strained, chilled until it sets, then cut into fine crumbs and folded into the minced pork. In the steamer the jelly melts back into stock and the meat juices join it. The proportions are larger than most people expect: one restaurant kitchen mixes 200 grams of jelly into 250 grams of pork. The heritage entry for Nanxiang specifies pork from the front leg, lean and fat in a ratio of seven to three, with ten other seasonings in a recipe kept secret. Shen Jialu adds that Nanxiang Mantou Dian, the best-known shop, uses black-haired pigs and adjusts the fat and the amount of jelly with the seasons.

The wrapper is what holds it all in. It is made from refined wheat flour and water with no yeast, a dough the trade calls 呆面, “dead dough,” as opposed to the leavened dough of ordinary buns. Shen describes the traditional sizing: 50 grams of flour cut into eight pieces, each rolled on an oiled board rather than a floured one, so that no loose flour toughens the skin. The edge is rolled thinner than the middle, because the middle carries the weight. A good wrapper is thin enough to see through but strong enough to lift with chopsticks; a bad one tears at the first touch and the soup is lost before it reaches your mouth.

Sources [1][5][8][12]

03

How many pleats?

Counting the pleats is a sport, and there is no single right number.

Pleating is done with the left thumb feeding the wrapper round and the right fingers pinching one fold after another until the top closes. Seen from the side the folds hang like a skirt; seen from above, Shen Jialu writes, the closed top looks like the mouth of a carp. Some cooks leave a small hole, a “fish eye,” and some twist it shut into a “goldfish mouth.” Hangzhou cooks say twelve pleats is a pass and more pleats show a defter hand. Eighteen is the figure most often quoted, because it is both the Nanxiang heritage standard and Din Tai Fung’s trademark. More pleats cost labor: the owner of one Shanghai dumpling chain once complained that if the shop’s cooks had to fold like Din Tai Fung’s, they would all quit the next day.

Sources [1][4][5][6][7][8][12]

04

From Nanxiang to the City God Temple

The dumpling has a birthplace, a founder and a date, which is rare for Chinese street food.

Shanghai’s own telling reaches back to the Northern Song capital Kaifeng, where a filled bun called taixue mantou was popular, and to the northerners who carried wheat cooking south in the 1120s. The documented story begins in Nanxiang, a market town northwest of Shanghai, now in Jiading District. In 1871 Huang Mingxian, who ran a pastry shop there called Ri Hua Xuan, reworked the big meat buns sold in the town, keeping the generous filling but making them smaller with a thinner skin; the heritage entry sums up his change as “heavy filling, thin skin, big made small.” Shen Jialu’s account fills in the steps. The shop had sold rice cakes; Huang, an adopted son who took over the business, switched to meat buns and wontons, and his buns were still big enough that two made a meal, with fourteen neat pleats and plenty of juice. A relative who came to the shop as an apprentice, Wu Xiangsheng, began selling them into the town’s teahouses, where customers wanted small things to nibble, so the buns shrank to one bite and went into little bamboo baskets.

In 1900 the Nanxiang bun moved into Shanghai’s old city. Wu took a cook named Zhao to the City God Temple and opened a shop called Changxing Lou in a pavilion by the Nine-Zigzag Bridge, surrounded by teahouses. Customers ignored its literary name and called it the Nanxiang bun shop, Nanxiang Mantou Dian, and that became its name. It still stands in the Yu Garden bazaar. When Queen Elizabeth II visited the temple in 1986, she stopped for three minutes outside the kitchen to watch the cooks fold dumplings. The shop’s method was written into a standard in 2000, and in 2014 the Nanxiang technique entered China’s fourth national list of intangible cultural heritage, under traditional wheat-food techniques.

Sources [1][4][5]

05

How to eat one without burning your mouth

Shanghai has a rhyme for it: 轻轻提，慢慢移，先开窗，后喝汤. Lift gently, move slowly, open a window, then drink the soup.

Pick the dumpling up by its pleated top, which is the thickest and strongest part, and set it on a spoon. Bite a small hole in the side, let the steam out for a moment, and sip the soup. Then dip the rest in vinegar with a few shreds of ginger and eat it in one or two bites. The usual accident is biting straight in: the soup is hotter than it looks and sprays across the table, or onto the person opposite.

Shops set out vinegar and finely shredded young ginger, often lightly pickled so it is slightly sweet. Guides disagree on the vinegar: the city government’s English guide says black vinegar, while the Shanghai food writer Huang Qifang insists on the pale Shanghai rice vinegar and says Zhenjiang black vinegar does not suit. Some crab-dumpling shops suggest tasting the first one with no vinegar at all. Eat them as soon as the basket lands. When the food writer Christopher St. Cavish measured dumplings for a year, he found that after ten minutes the wrapper had swollen by about a quarter and kept thickening as it soaked up the soup. Shanghai people also like a bowl of soup alongside, egg-skin soup, fish-ball soup or small wontons, a habit Huang calls pairing the dry with the wet.

Two baskets of xiaolongbao, October 2026

Our own photographs from two meals in October 2026: a basket of six pork dumplings with vinegar and ginger on the 19th, and a basket of two crab-roe and two pork dumplings on the 26th.

Sources [1][2][4][7][11]

06

Xiaolongbao, tangbao and the other “small buns”

The words overlap, so it helps to know what each one usually means.

Shen Jialu calls xiaolong and tangbao twin brothers. Until about twenty years before he wrote, an old Shanghai shop called Tianxiang Zhai sold xiaolong in the morning and tangbao in the afternoon, eight to a basket in both cases. The tangbao used a half-leavened dough, had its pleats folded underneath so the top was smooth and round, and came with a bowl of clear pork broth. The shop closed and, he writes, the tangbao vanished with it. Today the word tangbao, “soup bun,” is used loosely: Jia Jia Tang Bao, one of the most famous xiaolongbao shops in Shanghai, has tangbao in its name and sells xiaolongbao. In Nanjing and elsewhere in Jiangsu, tangbao shops sell soup dumplings of their own local style.

Outside the Shanghai region, “xiaolongbao” often means something else entirely. In Shengzhou in Zhejiang, small buns are made from leavened dough and left open at the top; their makers spread across China and sold them as “Hangzhou xiaolongbao.” In much of southern and northern China a breakfast-shop xiaolongbao is a small leavened pork bun with little or no soup. These are good food, but they are not what the English “soup dumpling” means.

Sources [1][2][8][11]

07

Shanghai, Wuxi, Hangzhou and Taipei

Across the Yangtze delta, the soup dumpling changes with the local taste for sugar.

The Shanghai style is savory with only a little sugar. Christopher St. Cavish, after measuring dumplings in more than fifty Shanghai shops, divided them into two schools: one prizing a very thin wrapper and a mild pork flavor, the other a stronger, porkier filling at the expense of everything else. Suzhou and Wuxi dumplings are a different branch of the family. They are bigger, sometimes twice the size, the meat is seasoned with soy sauce and they always contain sugar; St. Cavish describes the soup at one chain as a shade lighter than cola. In Wuxi the filling is a firm ball of meat with a sweet, soy-and-rice-wine taste, eight to a basket. Hangzhou cooks use the tighter meat of the hind leg and little or no sugar. Taiwan’s Din Tai Fung made the thin-skinned, eighteen-fold dumpling its signature and carried it abroad.

Sources [6][7][8][11]

08

How a Taipei oil shop made it famous abroad

Many people outside China first eat xiaolongbao at Din Tai Fung.

Din Tai Fung began in Taipei in 1958 as a cooking-oil shop run by Yang Bingyi, born in Shanxi in 1927, and his wife Lai Penmei. When the oil trade slumped in the early 1970s, a friend suggested they give half of the shop front to xiaolongbao, and the dumplings soon replaced the oil altogether. In January 1993 The New York Times named Din Tai Fung one of the top restaurants in the world, and in December 2009 its Silvercord branch in Hong Kong received a MICHELIN star. The chain later opened in Shanghai itself, in Xintiandi, Lujiazui and even beside Yu Garden, where its prices startled locals: in 2012 its plain pork dumplings cost 58 yuan for ten, at a time when Shanghai people thought of 20 yuan a head as a normal dumpling meal and 35 as the limit.

Sources [2][6]

09

The man who measured soup dumplings

In 2013 an American writer in Shanghai bought digital calipers and a kitchen scale online.

Christopher St. Cavish picked the 25 best-rated xiaolongbao shops on the review site Dianping and started cutting dumplings open at the table: he measured the wrapper’s thickness in millimeters and weighed the filling, the soup and the whole dumpling in grams. Twenty-five shops became 52, and by the time he finished, after about eighteen months, he had dissected more than seven kilograms of dumplings. In April 2015 he published the results as The Shanghai Soup Dumpling Index, a half-joking “pseudo-scientific” survey with real data. It made him briefly famous in the city. Nanxiang Mantou Dian, by then a large state-owned chain, asked him to help develop a new flavor; its president wanted cheese. He said no.

His measurements explain some local advice. At Nanxiang Mantou Dian he found the ground-floor takeaway dumplings, made in bulk for the queue, had the thickest skins and least soup in the city, while the upstairs dining rooms made them properly, thin and full of soup. In Nanxiang itself he found the dumplings at the original Guyi Garden restaurant small, thick-skinned and short on soup, worth visiting as a pilgrimage rather than for the best example.

Sources [3][7]

10

Where to eat them in Shanghai

Every neighborhood has a dumpling shop; these are the names that come up again and again.

Sources [2][4][7][9][10]

11

What a basket costs

The same dumpling can cost fifteen times as much depending on the filling and the room.

A plain pork basket at a small shop is one of the cheapest good meals in Shanghai. Crab changes the price completely, and so does the restaurant. Autumn is crab season and the best time for crab dumplings; shops also make seasonal fillings with wild greens in spring and winter bamboo shoot in winter.

Sources [4][9][10]

12

Making them at home

Sources [1][8][10][12]

13

More dumplings on the site