Home / What to eat in Xingyi
The local dishes worth trying, what each one actually is, and how to order them without a word of Chinese.
If you eat one thing in Xingyi, make it this. Rice noodles in a rich, long-simmered goat-bone broth, topped with thin slices of goat meat, a spoon of chilli oil, spring onion and coriander. It's a breakfast dish above all — locals queue for it from early morning — and Xingyi's version is one of the most famous in a province that takes its 羊肉粉 seriously. In English it's usually called mutton rice noodles, though the meat is goat; a bowl is cheap, roughly ¥12–18. Some stalls are halal (清真 qīngzhēn), useful to know if that matters to you.
Elsewhere in China, tangyuan are sweet glutinous rice balls eaten as dessert. Xingyi does them savoury: soft rice-flour balls served in a clear chicken broth, dusted with ground sesame and peanut. It sounds strange and is genuinely local — a dish you'll struggle to find done this way outside the region. Worth ordering once for the novelty alone.
Little steamed open-topped dumplings pinched into a shape said to resemble the head of a bamboo dish-brush (刷把), which is where the name comes from. The filling is usually minced pork with winter bamboo shoots. A classic teahouse and breakfast snack, ordered by the basket.
Erkuai are pressed cakes of steamed rice — a staple of the Yunnan–Guizhou borderlands that Xingyi sits on. On the street they're grilled over charcoal until blistered and chewy, brushed with chilli or a sweet-savoury sauce, and often folded around a fried dough stick or pickles. Cheap, filling, and easy to order by pointing.
A Bouyei speciality: glutinous rice naturally dyed black, red, yellow, purple and white using plant extracts, giving a striped, festive bowl. You'll see it especially around the third-month festival (三月三) in spring, but it turns up at markets year-round. More about texture and colour than strong flavour — a good gentle option.
Guizhou cooking is sour-and-spicy (酸辣 suānlà): fermented and pickled sourness alongside chilli, rather than the mouth-numbing Sichuan peppercorn. It's punchy but not usually punishing, and most stalls will make a bowl milder if you ask (bù là = not spicy).
The one to know about is zhe'ergen (折耳根), or fish mint. It's a pale root herb, eaten raw, scattered through salads, dipping sauces and noodle bowls all over Guizhou. It has a strong, unmistakable fishy-medicinal taste that locals adore and a lot of first-time visitors quietly push to the side of the bowl. Neither reaction is wrong — but it's worth trying knowingly rather than being ambushed by it. To skip it: bù yào zhē'ěrgēn (no fish mint).
Get shown the local food → or plan the rest of your trip: Xingyi in 2–3 days.