Fujian Food

01

Mountains, sea and soup

Fujian’s own food writers admit that for a long time even they struggled to name its famous dishes.

Fujian is folded between mountains and the sea, cut by rivers, and was for centuries hard to reach. It was settled late: after the Han emperor Wu conquered the kingdom of Minyue he moved its people north, and from the end of the Western Jin, waves of refugees from the Central Plains brought northern farming, wine-making and words into the province. Min cuisine, one of China’s eight great cooking traditions, was born in Fuzhou, and its Fuzhou core only took shape in the late Qing, borrowing from Cantonese cooking to the south and Zhejiang to the north.

The Fuzhou writer Chen Zhou remembers trying in the 1980s to impress friends from other provinces with Fujian food and running dry after Buddha Jumps Over the Wall, stir-fried kidney and jellyfish, meat-skin wontons, fish balls and dingbianhu. Fine Fujian cooking used wild, seasonal and rare ingredients and took a long time, so few people ate it; visitors summed up what they did eat as “sweet and sour, sticky and soupy,” and complained about shrimp oil, Fuzhou’s pungent fish sauce. The province has since learned to show off, and its cooking is better known for the things that make it different: soup at every meal, a sweet-sour balance, red wine lees and fine knife work.

Sources [1]

02

Sweet and sour, soupy, and red with lees

Three habits mark Fuzhou cooking: sweet-and-sour sauces, soups and red wine lees.

Fuzhou cooking is sweeter, sourer and lighter than most Chinese food. Chen Zhou explains it by the place: the province grows sugar cane, Fuzhou sits in a hot, damp river basin, its ingredients are mostly seafood, and vinegar cuts fishiness while sugar wakes a tired appetite; chili, people say, brings on “internal heat” in such a climate, so even Sichuan restaurants in Fuzhou tone it down. Cooks use a mellow local yellow rice vinegar, add the sugar first and splash in the vinegar just before the dish leaves the wok, so it arrives smelling sharp. A local saying runs: to know if a cook is good, look at the sweet-and-sour dishes. The Fuzhou chefs’ exam includes stir-fried kidney and jellyfish, which tests knife work, heat and sauce at once; the craft is summed up as slices thin as paper, shreds fine as hair and scoring like a lychee.

The flavor no other Chinese cuisine shares is red wine lees, 红糟: the bright red mash left after brewing Fujian’s red yeast rice wine, a technique northern migrants brought south. Families once packed fish and pork in layers of it to keep them through the New Year, and Fuzhou cooks now fry a spoonful into stir-fried snails, clams, bamboo shoots and ferns the way Cantonese cooks use oyster sauce. There is raw lees, coarse and strong, and cooked lees, chopped fine and fried with ginger, sugar and soy; dishes are named for the technique, from fried lees eel and drunken lees chicken to the paper-thin conch slices in a light lees sauce that show off a chef’s knife.

Sources [1]

03

The Fuzhou banquet

A formal Fuzhou meal is built around a few famous dishes, most of them served at Juchunyuan, the restaurant that claims Buddha Jumps Over the Wall.

At the top is Buddha Jumps Over the Wall, dried seafood and slow-cooked meats in a wine jar, national intangible heritage since 2008. Its partner is clams poached in chicken broth: a clear, fat-free chicken stock poured over raw clam slices at the table, which cook in seconds. Lychee pork is the sweet-and-sour classic, scored pork fried into lychee shapes. Red-lees conch slices and drunken lees chicken show off the lees. In 2026 Juchunyuan charged 798 or 498 yuan for one person’s Buddha Jumps, 68 for chicken-broth clams, 270 for the conch and 58 for lychee pork.

Sources [1][2][5]

04

Fuzhou mornings: dingbianhu, oyster cakes and fish balls

Fuzhou eats rice batter and soup for breakfast.

鼎边糊 (dingbianhu) is the classic: a soup of tiny river clams with pork, wood ear, dried fish, laver and dried shrimp, into which the cook drizzles rice batter around the hot rim of the wok; it sets into thin sheets, which are scraped into the soup, and the whole thing is seasoned with shrimp oil. Ding is the old word for a wok and wen for simmering, words the Central Plains migrants brought. Before the 1990s two yuan bought a bowl with a fried oyster cake or taro cake, and when overseas Chinese families from Fuzhou first came home in the 1980s, the first thing many wanted was a bowl of dingbianhu. The fried partners are made from rice and soybean batter: oyster cakes with cabbage, oysters and a few peanuts in a ladle-shaped mold, wedges of taro cake, and shrimp fritters.

Fuzhou fish balls are made from pounded fish, often eel, with a pork filling and served in a clear soup with pepper and scallion; Juchunyuan charged 7 yuan a ball in 2026. 肉燕, “meat swallow,” is a wonton wrapped in a skin made from pounded pork and sweet-potato starch. In the evening, street stalls sell stew pots and 5-yuan bowls of noodles tossed with lard, and crab cooked over sticky rice. 光饼 (guangbing), a small ring of baked bread, is said to have been made for General Qi Jiguang’s soldiers to carry on a string when they fought pirates on this coast in the 1560s.

Sources [1][5][6][9]

05

Xiamen and Quanzhou: noodles, sea worms and peanut soup

Southern Fujian speaks Minnan, the same language as much of Taiwan, and eats much as Taiwan does.

Breakfast in Quanzhou and Xiamen is 面线糊 (mianxian hu), fine wheat vermicelli cooked into a thick, peppery soup, with your choice of toppings ticked off at the counter: vinegar-marinated fried pork, intestines, squid, oysters, razor clams, braised egg or blood. Quanzhou cooks the noodles so long they almost disappear into a paste; Xiamen leaves them in short strands. Everyone dips youtiao in it, and in peanut soup too, a sweet soup of peanuts simmered for hours until they melt on the tongue, often with an egg stirred in. Quanzhou also eats 牛肉羹, thin slices of beef coated in sweet-potato starch and dropped into a broth with ginger and green garlic.

Xiamen’s signature is 沙茶面, shacha noodles: noodles in a rich, nutty broth made with shacha paste, topped from a counter of intestine, tofu, oysters, shrimp, squid, pork liver and duck gizzard. 五香卷, five-spice rolls of pork, onion and water chestnut wrapped in tofu skin and fried, 四物鸭面线, duck noodle soup with four medicinal herbs, and 满煎糕, a thick griddle cake filled with peanut or sesame sugar, round out the snack stalls. Then there is 土笋冻 (tusundong), sea-worm jelly: small marine worms dug from the mudflats, boiled so that their own gelatin, usually helped by a little added gelatin, sets around them in small cups, and eaten cold with a sweet chili sauce built on tomato. Every Fujian coast outside Fuzhou eats it, and southern Fujian serves it to open a banquet. Along the Hui’an coast, where the poor soil grows mostly sweet potatoes, sweet-potato starch turns up in everything, from Chongwu’s fish rolls to its “piglet” dumplings. Quanzhou’s West Street still queues for it: one shop there had been selling the cake for nearly 40 years by 2019, and the story goes that it was first made to feed Qing troops fighting the Taiping armies that entered Fujian in 1855.

Emigration shaped this coast. Fujianese left for Southeast Asia from as early as the 15th century, kept close ties with home and brought dishes back with them. Shacharou, beef or pork in a spicy peanut sauce, is one result: the writer Pauline Loh calls it strangely reminiscent of satay, without the sticks.

Sources [1][3][4][7][8]

06

Putian: the city of braised noodles

Between Fuzhou and Quanzhou sits a coastal pocket with its own dialect, and its signature dish is a pot of noodles braised until the broth has gone into them.

Putian and Xianyou once formed Xinghua prefecture, and the Puxian people are proud of their exam record: 2,482 imperial graduates, 21 top scholars and 17 chief ministers. Chen Zhou admits to having once found Puxian food mild and unmemorable, until a Puxian chef went through the dish names: Jiangkou lumian, Xinghua fried rice noodles, Zhongmen braised tofu, Xianyou warm-soup mutton, Xitianwei wontons. Each is simply a place, an ingredient and a method, “as plain as a village girl,” and each piles in many ingredients, frying them fragrant before the broth goes in.

Lumian (卤面) is cooked in every Puxian household and is a main dish at every wedding, which is why Putian calls itself the city of lumian. In the Puxian dialect 卤 means to braise. Chen Zhou remembers a friend in the 1980s frying scallions golden in a wok, then dried squid and dried shrimp, then shredded pork, shiitake, carrot, garlic and garlic chives, and pouring in the broth from razor clams and clams boiled on the next burner before adding raw noodles to simmer. Small local oysters and greens go in as the liquid reduces. A good cook stops when the noodles look wet but no broth drips from them when lifted: soft, not chewy like northern noodles, with all the sea and pork flavor soaked in. Jiangkou, an old post town, is said to make the most authentic version.

On Meizhou Island, where the sea goddess Mazu is worshipped, a national-level Fujian chef created a Mazu banquet of seafood dishes; it is now on Putian’s heritage list and was named one of China’s famous banquets in 2009.

Sources [1]

07

Western Fujian: Hakka taro dumplings, nine-part offal and rice wine

The Hakka counties of the west eat for long days of work in damp hills.

In Ninghua and the other Hakka counties of western Fujian, sweet potato and taro grew alongside rice, and the local 烧卖 is nothing like a Cantonese siu mai: cooked taro is mashed with sweet-potato starch and a little salt into a dough, pinched into thin-edged cups and filled. Old Tingzhou is known for its “eight dried delicacies,” which include dried field rat, once sold as a remedy as well as a delicacy.

Liancheng has the heaviest breakfast in a province that usually starts the day with plain congee. Shuanjiupin (涮九品), “nine blanched cuts,” is a big platter of beef and beef offal blanched in hot rice wine, eaten in the morning with Hakka cakes, and the wine it was cooked in is drunk as the soup. Local folklorists told Chen Zhou it began with the boatmen and raftsmen of the Pengkou stream, who shipped timber and paper down to Guangdong and worked in water and damp all year. Hakka cooks put wine into almost everything: Liancheng is known for wine-blanched dishes of pork offal, young hen, rabbit with red mushrooms, frog and crucian carp, and for fish, chicken and duck cured in wine lees.

Sources [1]

08

Sanming and northern Fujian: Shaxian, old tofu and rice-paddy carp

The north and centre of the province are forest and tea hills, with some of Fujian’s oldest recipes.

Sanming’s Shaxian county exported its wontons and peanut-sauce noodles to snack shops all over China. Further north, the Pucheng county gazetteer gives the origin story of the meat-skin wonton: a cook for the Southern Song minister Zhen Dexiu botched a dish while catering for a home-town banquet, and the paste of pounded pork came out tasting like bird’s nest. Rolled thin with sweet-potato starch into a wrapper, it became 燕皮, and over about a century it moved from a mountain snack into Fuzhou’s banquet soup, Taiping yan, served with a whole duck egg because “duck egg” in Fuzhou dialect sounds like “calming the waves.”

In the border townships of Shaowu, Taining, Ninghua and Jianning, where brine and gypsum were once scarce, tofu is still set the old way: the maker swirls a ladle of soured whey from the previous batch through the hot soy milk until curds form. This youjiang tofu (游浆豆腐) is smooth but springy, made only by hand and in small amounts, and families keep the technique to themselves; Hakka households make a pot every first lunar month. Taining’s Shangqingxi has tofu banquets built on it. In Wutun township north of Wuyishan city, carp raised in high, cold paddy fields are eaten after National Day in October, when they are fattest. And Wuyishan is the home of rock oolong, which Chen Zhou says cannot be brewed properly with the hard water of the north.

Sources [1]

09

Fujian, area by area

Fujian has several dialect areas, and each eats differently.

Sources [1][7][8]

10

How to eat your way through Fujian

Plan around breakfast snacks and one serious dinner.

Sources [1][8]

11

Start with these