Lushui Savoury Rice Dumplings 露水汤圆
Lushui Savoury Rice Dumplings is featured among the local specialties of Guangxi.
Photo adjustments
Full frame retained; EXIF orientation normalized, proportionally resized to at most 800 pixels and converted to WebP. No generated pixels or subject changes. Cards may crop the display.
Lushui Savoury Rice Dumplings (露水汤圆) are savoury dumplings from Liuzhou (柳州), Guangxi, with a filling of preserved vegetable, minced meat and mushrooms. The Liuzhou Municipal Bureau of Culture, Radio, Television and Tourism says the making technique is rooted in Qingyun Old Street (青云老街) in the city's Chengzhong District (城中区) and has been handed down for a century.
Ingredients
The filling is chosen with care: salted root mustard (头菜), minced meat, shiitake mushrooms, wood ear fungus, dried tofu skin sticks (腐竹), dried bamboo shoots and glass noodles. The skin is made from either waxy maize or non-glutinous rice (粘米). According to the Liuzhou bureau, the waxy maize version is simple and most people can make it, while the rice version is harder, because the proportion of rice to water has to be judged carefully. The rice version is the most traditional Liuzhou method.
How it is eaten
The local historian Dai Yikai (戴义开), in his book on local customs 'Luoyue Fengqing' (骆越风情), writes that the dumplings are lifted into a bowl as soon as they are cooked and served with lushui (卤水), a braising liquid. Long-time Liuzhou residents know that before Spring Festival nearly every household makes plenty of rice dumplings and fenli (粉利) rice cakes to keep for the New Year. Eating fenli stands for everything going smoothly in the year ahead, and eating the dumplings for the whole family being together.
Where it comes from
The name has several local explanations. Dai Yikai holds that it was originally lushui tangyuan (卤水汤圆), "braising-liquid dumplings"; the Liuzhou bureau adds that this is a Cantonese word, which word-of-mouth probably turned into the similar-sounding lushui (露水), "dew". Other explanations recorded by the Liuzhou bureau are that the many steps meant makers started before dawn in the frost and dew, that the white round dumplings look like morning dew, and that they are a light snack that fills you no more than dew would.
In June 2018 the Liuzhou Lushui dumpling making technique (柳州露水汤圆制作技艺) was added to Liuzhou's sixth batch of municipal intangible cultural heritage items.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-24. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.