Jiangbei Old-Style Hotpot 江北老火锅
Jiangbei Old-Style Hotpot is featured among the local specialties of Chongqing.
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Jiangbei Old-Style Hotpot (江北老火锅) is the old-style hotpot of Jiangbei (江北), the district on the opposite bank from Chongqing's old city. Jiangbei has a particular place in the hotpot's history: the writer Li Jieren (李劼人) placed the origin of Chongqing's buffalo-tripe hotpot there.
Where it comes from
An essay by Zeng Yan (曾焱) on the Sichuan provincial local-chronicles website quotes Li Jieren's account: buffalo-tripe hotpot began in Jiangbei, across the river from Chongqing. Pedlars there bought buffalo offal, washed and parboiled it, and cut the liver and tripe into small pieces. They carried a clay stove holding a large divided tinplate basin of bubbling brine that was hot, numbing and salty. Labourers from the riverbanks and bridges gathered around the carrying pole to eat. Another writer, Che Fu (车辐), dates the start to the 1920s, when someone in Jiangbei County sold cheap buffalo meat, then the heart, liver, tripe and tongue as well, at stalls with benches and iron pots along the Jialing River (嘉陵江). The dish was first called maodu (毛肚, tripe) hotpot.
The origin is not settled. The historical writer and food critic Sima Qingshan (司马青衫) lists five origin stories, among them Li Jieren's Jiangbei City (江北城) account, and the historical geographer Lan Yong (蓝勇) of Southwest University (西南大学) says no source shows exactly where in Chongqing hotpot began. Both spoke in April 2023, when the Chongqing hotpot association's naming of Dongshuimen Old Street (东水门老街) as the birthplace was widely questioned.
How it is made
In 2025 Jiangbei District put the Hao Shancheng (郝山城) hotpot restaurant in the Liyuchi (鲤鱼池) area on its eleventh list of intangible cultural heritage. The owner, Bai Taiping (白太平), is the fourth generation of her family to fry hotpot base by hand. The base is fried fresh and then simmered slowly for three hours, with heat and spice proportions judged by experience, to give the beef tallow its aroma. The restaurant, open for 37 years, serves laoying tea (老鹰茶) at dark wooden tables and long benches.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-25. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.