Bijie Glutinous Rice Dumplings 毕节汤圆
Bijie Glutinous Rice Dumplings is featured among the local specialties of Guizhou.
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Bijie Glutinous Rice Dumplings (毕节汤圆) are tangyuan, balls of glutinous rice dough wrapped round a sweet filling, and the Bijie (毕节) city government counts them among the city's traditional snacks. Their making technique entered Bijie's third batch of municipal intangible cultural heritage in December 2021.
How it is made
The dough is made from glutinous rice flour, and the traditional flour is pounded in a stone mortar (碓窝). The steps are selecting the rice, picking it over, washing, soaking and resting it, then pounding the flour, sifting it, spreading it out and packing it for storage. The rich-oil filling has its own process: the ingredients are chosen and mixed, packed into a jar to ferment, then unsealed and mixed again.
Ingredients
The fillings are made from suma (酥麻), lard, sesame, peanut, walnut, rose and white sugar. Different ingredients and methods give different kinds of dumpling, among them rich-oil tangyuan (富油汤圆), suma tangyuan (酥麻汤圆), cold-water tangyuan (冷水汤圆) and hot-water tangyuan (热水汤圆).
Where it comes from
Two family lines represent the craft, the Nie (聂家) and the Yu (喻家), and each has passed it down for a hundred years. The Nie family keeps to the traditional stone-mortar pounding. Nie Zhongxiang (聂忠祥), born in 1962 and the fourth-generation inheritor, was a small child when his mother pounded tangyuan flour in the stone mortar for other households; in 2014 he fitted the mortar with electric gears, which raised output considerably.
The Yu family makes its rich-oil filling from pork leaf lard sealed in a jar to ferment. Its fourth-generation inheritor, Yu Min (喻敏), born in 1968, learned the craft from her father, Yu Guanfang (喻观方), and now adds a specially prepared sesame oil while the filling cures and ferments, for a fuller, more mellow flavour.
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Xingyi chicken-filled rice dumplings 兴义鸡肉汤圆 →
Another Guizhou tangyuan; Bijie's are known for stone-mortar pounded flour and a jar-fermented lard filling.
Questions before you order
Do Bijie Glutinous Rice Dumplings contain lard?
Lard is one of the listed filling ingredients, and the Yu family's rich-oil filling is made from pork leaf lard fermented in a sealed jar.
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.