Changde Beef Rice Noodles 常德牛肉米粉
Changde Beef Rice Noodles is featured among the local specialties of Hunan.
Changde Beef Rice Noodles (常德牛肉米粉) are rice noodles in a hot broth topped with beef, from Changde (常德) in Hunan. The version on the city's heritage list is the beef rice noodle of Jinshi (津市), a county-level city within Changde, where the Changde government says the day starts with a bowl of noodles.
Where it comes from
The Changde government's heritage entry places the origin in the Hongwu reign of the Ming dynasty (1368 to 1398), when troops were stationed around Changde and Lizhou (澧州) and many Hui and Uyghur people moved in. On the Dongting Lake (洞庭湖) plain rice was the staple, so Hui settlers from the north replaced their wheat noodles with local rice noodles but kept beef, and the combination became Jinshi beef noodles. The entry ranks them with Yunnan's crossing-the-bridge rice noodles and Guilin rice noodles as China's three best-known rice noodles.
In 2019 the craft, listed as "Changde rice noodle making (Jinshi beef rice noodles)", was added to the fifth batch of Changde's municipal intangible cultural heritage list as an extension item.
How it is made
Over a century, people in Jinshi changed the traditional plain broth (原汤) into a medicinal broth (药汤) made with more than twenty Chinese herbs. The Great Compendium of Chinese Hunan Cuisine (中国湘菜大典), which recorded the dish in 2009, describes it as a blend of Hui and Han flavours: the noodles are thin rice noodles instead of the wheat noodles of Hui tradition, and the toppings leave out the pork common in Han cooking.
Flavour and toppings
The same compendium describes the noodles as soft, slippery and scalding hot, the beef as braised until it falls apart, and the bowl as strongly aromatic. It lists more than ten toppings, among them shredded beef, beef offal, braised egg, beef steak, beef tendon and red-braised beef.
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Changde rice noodles 常德米粉 →
The broader Changde rice-noodle page; this dish is the beef-topped bowl whose Jinshi form, with its herbal broth, is the version on Changde's heritage list.
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)
- Reference photo of a similar dish · 同类菜品参考照片A similar preparation is pictured; the local version may differ. 同类菜品参考照片，当地做法可能不同。Photo: Mystery6002 · CC0Resized for the web; the photo itself has not been edited. Thumbnails may show a cropped view.
