Boiled Fertilized Chicken Eggs 活珠子
Boiled Fertilized Chicken Eggs is featured among the local specialties of Jiangsu.
Image notes
Resized for the web; the photo itself has not been edited.
Boiled Fertilized Chicken Eggs (活珠子) are a snack of free-range chicken eggs incubated by the traditional method for twelve to fourteen days, then boiled in plain water, peeled and dipped in roasted salt.
How it is made and eaten
The traditional way is simple: the egg with its developing embryo is boiled in clear water, the shell is peeled off and the contents are dipped in fine salt that has been dry-roasted in a wok. In recent years a second way has appeared, in which the peeled egg is fried in oil before eating.
The name and related eggs
The Chinese name, huozhuzi, means living pearl: held up to the light, the developing embryo looks like a pearl. Eggs with a developing embryo in general go by several names, including wangjidan (旺鸡蛋) and maodan (毛蛋), and in the Jiangsu and Zhejiang area they are also called xidan (喜蛋) or huodan (活蛋).
Huozhuzi is not the same stage as maodan. In a maodan the feathers have already turned to keratin and cannot be digested, while huozhuzi refers only to the twelve-to-fourteen-day embryo.
Eating incubated eggs is disputed. Some people regard eating an incompletely developed chick as cruel, while many others see it simply as a food habit. Food safety is also questioned: illegal nitrite may be used in processing, and cracked eggs easily grow bacteria.
Questions before you order
How do Boiled Fertilized Chicken Eggs differ from maodan?
They are an earlier stage, twelve to fourteen days of incubation; in maodan the feathers have already turned to keratin and cannot be digested.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and fact-checked against them on 2026-09-25. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.