Fenyi Dianchang River Snails 分宜电厂螺蛳
Fenyi Dianchang River Snails is featured among the local specialties of Jiangxi.
Fenyi Dianchang River Snails (分宜电厂螺蛳) are braised freshwater snails from Fenyi County (分宜县) in Xinyu, Jiangxi, named after the Fenyi power plant (分宜发电厂) beside Hengxi Village (横溪村), where the dish started in the mid-1990s.
How it is made
The Xinyu city government's feature on the dish says it is made with wild field snails from the shores of Qianyang Lake (钤阳湖), cooked with a special seasoning mix. Chen Changqing (陈长青), whom the feature names as the dish's creator, gives his method: choose large, fresh snails with blue-yellow shells, snip off the tail ends, scrub them clean and blanch them to remove the muddy smell. They then go into the pot with garlic, ginger, chilli, Sichuan pepper, cassia bark, angelica root (白芷) and bay leaf and are simmered for an hour.
Where it comes from
In 1992 Chen opened a small restaurant in the living quarters of the Fenyi power plant. His stir-fried snails were an immediate success and became the house speciality. According to Chen, workers from the plant ate there often, word spread, and he eventually renamed the restaurant Dianchang Luosi, "power-plant snails"; his two daughters later opened two more shops under that name in the Fenyi county town.
From 2013, Hengxi Village became one of Fenyi's food destinations, and restaurants built around the dish have multiplied across Xinyu. The feature counts about a hundred shops using the name in Xinyu's central districts alone, and describes the dish as one of the most distinctive local foods and representative of the food culture of western Jiangxi.
Fenyi County has since built the Fenyi Dianchang Snail Town (分宜电厂螺蛳小镇), a food and tourism project that combines the power plant's industrial heritage with the snail-eating culture.
More dishes to compare
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Fairy Lake Whole Fish Banquet 仙女湖全鱼宴 →
Another Xinyu dish built on local lake produce; Fenyi Dianchang River Snails are wild field snails from Qianyang Lake simmered for an hour with chilli, Sichuan pepper and cassia bark.
Questions before you order
Why are the snails named after a power plant?
The dish began in Hengxi Village, next to the Fenyi power plant, and its first restaurant, opened in 1992 in the plant's living quarters and popular with plant workers, was renamed after it.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and fact-checked against them on 2026-09-26. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.