Red Bean Soup with Rice Balls 赤豆元宵
Red Bean Soup with Rice Balls is featured among the local specialties of Jiangsu.
Red Bean Soup with Rice Balls (赤豆元宵) is a Nanjing (南京) sweet of red beans and glutinous rice balls, yuanxiao (元宵). The Nanjing Local Chronicles Office remembers it as an afternoon snack of the old southern city and the Confucius Temple (夫子庙) quarter.
Ingredients
The Nanjing Local Chronicles Office calls glutinous rice one of the key ingredients of Nanjing snacks. One version adds jiuniang (酒酿), fermented glutinous rice taken before the wine is drawn off. It is very low in alcohol and tastes slightly sour and slightly sweet. Restaurants and rice-cake shops buy it from the market to make fermented-rice yuanxiao and fermented-rice red bean yuanxiao (酒酿赤豆元宵).
Where it comes from
In old Nanjing, xiazhou (下粥) was a mid-afternoon snack, something like afternoon tea. In the early 1970s, the long-established restaurants and snack shops along Gongyuan West Street (贡院西街) and Gongyuan Street (贡院街) by the Confucius Temple reopened after three in the afternoon to serve it. A chronicles-office memoir of that street walks south to the Lianhu rice-cake shop (莲湖糕团店) for a bowl of red bean yuanxiao or fermented-rice yuanxiao, and describes it as both sweet and chewy.
It was also sold on the street. A Nanjing Local Chronicles Office article on the street cries of the old southern city recalls afternoon shoulder-pole stalls selling snacks that included yuanxiao, and vendors of fermented rice and red bean yuanxiao who struck a wooden fish instead of calling out. The sound brought to mind the osmanthus scent of the fermented rice and drew customers over.
More dishes to compare
Explore related local specialties and compare their names, preparation notes and ordering guidance.
Rice Balls in Sweet Fermented Rice Soup 酒酿元宵 →
Fermented-rice yuanxiao is the companion bowl sold in the same Nanjing shops, made from the same jiuniang that goes into the fermented-rice red bean version.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and fact-checked against them on 2026-09-25. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.
Image credits & notes (1)
- A common version of Red Bean Soup with Rice Balls · 赤豆元宵常见做法参考照片。Photo: 三猎 · CC BY-SA 4.0Resized for the web; the photo itself has not been edited.
