Sour and Spicy Lemon Duck 柠檬鸭
Sour and Spicy Lemon Duck is featured among the local specialties of Guangxi.
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Sour and Spicy Lemon Duck (柠檬鸭) is a duck dish from the Wuming (武鸣) area of Nanning (南宁), Guangxi. China News Service files it under Guangxi cuisine (桂菜) and calls it one of the region's ten classic dishes. Chinese Wikipedia notes that cooking with lemon peel and sour juice is a trait of Zhuang (壮族) food culture that is rarely found elsewhere in China.
Ingredients
Duck is the main ingredient. It is cooked with a set of pickles: pickled scallion bulbs (酸藠头), pickled ginger and pickled chillies, plus wild wampee (山黄皮) and salted lemon. The result is sour and spicy.
Where it comes from
According to China News Service, the dish first appeared in the early 1980s at a small roadside shop beside Jiepai (界牌) on the Yongwu Road (邕武路), which served passing drivers, and grew into a named dish from there. A local story links it to Lu Rongting (陆荣廷), a Wuming native who became military governor of Guangdong and Guangxi in 1914 and built the Yongwu Road, described as Guangxi's first highway. Villagers are said to have killed local ducks and cooked them with home-pickled lemons, sour chillies, garlic and ginger for him when he came to inspect the road work.
In 2018 the Wuming lemon duck making technique entered the seventh batch of Guangxi's autonomous-region intangible cultural heritage list. The technique is also on Nanning's municipal list, and in January 2020 a transmission base for it opened at the Gaofeng Forest Farm (高峰林场) flagship of the Ganjiajie (甘家界) lemon duck restaurant, a business founded in the early 1980s.
How it is made
The duck is stir-fried. Nanning Daily profiled Gan Yonglan (甘永兰), a cook in Wuming with 30 years of frying the dish, and wrote that besides a special seasoning blend, the dish depends on skill handed down through practice and close control of the heat.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-26. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.