Mountain City Sweet Rice Dumplings 山城汤圆
Mountain City Sweet Rice Dumplings is featured among the local specialties of Chongqing.
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Mountain City Sweet Rice Dumplings (山城汤圆) are small glutinous-rice balls with a sweet sesame filling, made in Chongqing's Yuzhong (渝中) district by the Yu family, whose "Yuji Shancheng Xiao Tangyuan" (余记山城小汤圆) craft is on Chongqing's municipal intangible heritage list.
How it is made
The dough is made by the traditional Chongqing diaojiang (吊浆) method, in which soaked, ground glutinous rice is hung in a cloth to drain, giving a moist, smooth dough. It is wrapped around a sweet, refreshing filling of fine sesame paste. The Yu family combined this Chongqing dough with the small, delicate style of Zhejiang, so each stuffed dumpling is about the size of a longan fruit.
Where it comes from
The craft traces back to 1911 and a family technique of Yan Jun (颜钧) from Hangzhou, which passed to Yu Guohua (余国骅) and his wife Chen Xiuqing (陈秀卿). In the early 1940s the family moved to Chongqing and opened a sweet shop specialising in tangyuan on what was then Baoan Road (保安路), today's Bayi Road (八一路) in Yuzhong. Because the family came from Hangzhou, they called it the Hangzhou Small Tangyuan (杭州小汤圆) shop. It was renamed Shancheng Small Tangyuan (山城小汤圆), after Chongqing's nickname "Mountain City", in 1964.
After Yu Guohua, the second generation, refined the recipe, the name became Yuji Shancheng Xiao Tangyuan. In 2019 its traditional making technique entered the sixth batch of Chongqing's municipal intangible cultural heritage list. The third-generation inheritor is Yu Zhaofang (余兆放).
More dishes to compare
Explore related local specialties and compare their names, preparation notes and ordering guidance.
Chongqing small sweet rice dumplings 山城小汤圆 →
Both carry the Shancheng tangyuan name; the Yu family version is a longan-sized sesame dumpling of diaojiang dough from the Yuzhong shop renamed Shancheng Small Tangyuan in 1964.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-23. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.