Huishan Flaky Pastries 惠山油酥
Huishan Flaky Pastries is featured among the local specialties of Jiangsu.
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Huishan Flaky Pastries (惠山油酥) are a Wuxi (无锡) snack from the Huishan (惠山) area, pastries shaped like Chinese chess pieces, with a filling of more than ten ingredients inside a skin of refined flour and sesame.
Ingredients and flavour
The filling combines peach flesh, green plums, candied melon strips, orange peel, sugar and vegetable oil among its ten or more ingredients. The skin is made from refined wheat flour and sesame. The flavour is described as fragrant, sweet, crisp and light.
Where it comes from
The pastry's original name was zhongyou shaobing (重油烧饼), heavy-oil flatbread. By tradition, after the fall of the Ming dynasty a member of the Ming imperial clan, Zhu Shengyu (朱圣谕), settled with his family at the foot of Huishan in Wuxi and made a living by baking the palace heavy-oil flatbread for pilgrims coming to burn incense at Huishan Temple (惠山寺).
Later a monk of the temple, Master Huixing (惠性法师), thought the pastry looked like the navels of the four guardian-king statues in the temple and jokingly called it jingang duqi (金刚肚脐), the guardian's navel. That nickname spread and made the pastry known across the Wuxi area.
The best-known makers, among them Zhu Shunxing (朱顺兴) and Zhu Dechang (朱德昌), were all Zhu families, and only Zhu-made pastries counted as the genuine article. After 1949 the government merged the shops into the Huishan Sweets Shop (惠山糖果店) and, because the old nickname had Buddhist overtones, renamed the pastry Huishan yousu. The Zhu Shunxing shop reopened in 2007, and in 2010 the pastry was entered on Wuxi's municipal intangible cultural heritage list.
More dishes to compare
Explore related local specialties and compare their names, preparation notes and ordering guidance.
Magnolia Fried Rice Cakes 玉兰饼 →
Another Wuxi snack; Huishan Flaky Pastries differ in their refined-flour and sesame skin around a candied-fruit filling.
Questions before you order
Why are Huishan Flaky Pastries also called jingang duqi?
By tradition a monk at Huishan Temple thought the pastry looked like the navels of the temple's four guardian-king statues and nicknamed it the guardian's navel.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-25. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.