Yunmeng Fish Noodles 云梦鱼面
Yunmeng Fish Noodles is featured among the local specialties of Hubei.
Yunmeng Fish Noodles (云梦鱼面) are fine dried noodles with fish meat worked into the dough, a speciality of Yunmeng County (云梦县) in Xiaogan (孝感), Hubei. They are white as silver and thin as thread, which earns them a second name, 'silver-thread fish noodles' (银丝鱼面). In 2010 they were rated a national geographical-indication product.
How it is made
The Hubei Department of Culture and Tourism lists black carp, grass carp, silver carp or common carp as the fish, combined with good white flour and corn flour and seasoned with sesame oil and fine salt. The dough goes through kneading, rolling, steaming, cutting and sun-drying.
Liu Wenhua (刘文华), a Xiaogan municipal inheritor of the making technique, works mainly with grass carp and black carp of more than four jin (about 2 kg), caught the same day. He told Jimu News that the hardest step is rolling by hand: the chopped fish, flour and starch must be blended evenly and rolled into a sheet as thin as paper, which is steamed, cooled and folded to set before it is cut into strands. His workshop still dries the noodles naturally, laid out on rows of shallow winnowing baskets.
How it is eaten
The noodles look like ordinary noodles but finer. Once dried they can be boiled, stir-fried or deep-fried. Stir-frying is the most common way, and the one said to show off their delicate texture and fresh flavour best.
Where it comes from
Yunmeng sits on the northern Jianghan Plain (江汉平原), with the Yun River (涢水) running north to south through the county and many rivers, lakes and ponds full of fish. The county annals (云梦县志) date the noodles to 1835, the fifteenth year of the Daoguang reign of the Qing dynasty, and credit a cook surnamed Huang at a cloth shop run by a family named Xu. In Xinhua's retelling, the cook knocked over a basin of fish paste and mixed it into the flour. A folk legend instead credits a woman named Wang Yaogu (王幺姑) who lived below Yuntai Mountain (云台山), north of the town.
A local rhyme sets the rules for good fish noodles: take water from Osmanthus Pool (桂花潭), dry them on Yuntai Mountain, and catch the fish at Baihezui (白鹤嘴). In 2006 the Ministry of Commerce named the Chuhe (楚河) brand of fish noodles in its first group of 'China Time-honored Brand' (中华老字号) products.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and fact-checked against them on 2026-09-24. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.