Rouge Red Radish 胭脂萝卜
Rouge Red Radish is featured among the local specialties of Chongqing.
Rouge Red Radish (胭脂萝卜) is a radish from Fuling District (涪陵区), Chongqing, whose skin and flesh are both red, which is why it is also called the red-heart radish (红心萝卜). It is a Chinese geographical-indication product, and in Fuling it is eaten mainly as pickles.
The radish
The fleshy root is close to the shape of a bottle gourd, and a few are cylindrical. The Chongqing Municipal Local Chronicles Office (重庆市地方志办公室) describes the tissue as dense, the pungency as low and the texture as crisp and tender, qualities it considers suited to processing.
Chinese radishes are mostly white-skinned and white-fleshed, red-skinned with white flesh, or green-skinned with red flesh like the Xinlimei (心里美) radish of northern China. The chronicles office states that a radish red in both skin and flesh is found only in Fuling. It is rich in red pigment, and laboratory analysis it cites puts its pigment content at eight times that of the northern Xinlimei, which makes it a good raw material for natural red colouring.
How it is made and eaten
For a long time the radish has been eaten mainly as paocai (泡菜), Sichuan-style pickles. Used as the main ingredient, it gives pickles a natural bright colour and a crisp, tender bite, and these pickles are well known in Chongqing and Sichuan. Added as a secondary ingredient, a practice locally called "打盐水" (literally "beating the brine"), it turns the pickled vegetables red. Pickles, sauce-cured vegetables, carved banquet garnishes and decorative dishes made from it are bright in colour with a clean, fresh taste.
Red dried radish (红萝卜干) is made by washing good radishes, drying them naturally in the air and sealing them in traditional earthenware jars to cure. It contains no synthetic colouring and is brightly coloured, soft but not hard, crisp but not mushy, and fragrant. The young leaves and heart leaves left after the harvest are made by traditional methods into a dried salted vegetable (干盐菜) that is also crisp and fresh-smelling. Local people have a custom of giving the radish to friends and relatives.
Where it comes from
Fuling lies where the Wu River (乌江) meets the Yangtze. The chronicles office describes hilly country with a foggy, humid subtropical monsoon climate, little sunshine and mostly purple, iron-rich soil, conditions it calls suited to the radish. The main growing areas are towns and subdistricts of Fuling including Jiangbei (江北), Jiangdong (江东), Lanshi (蔺市), Qingxi (清溪), Longqiao (龙桥), Shituo (石沱) and Tongle (同乐).
The earliest record the office cites is a Fuling gazetteer (《涪陵县续修涪州志》) of the 17th year of the Republic, covering events up to 1911, whose local-products section lists red, white and rouge radishes. A national survey of vegetable varieties in the 1970s confirmed it as a Fuling speciality. From 1998 the Fuling District agricultural science institute collected more than 100 red-heart radish germplasm samples, and in 2007 it bred the varieties Fuling Red Heart No. 1, 2 and 3, restoring the red skin and red flesh; two hybrid varieties followed in 2011.
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Tongnan Radish Rolls 潼南萝卜卷 →
Another Chongqing radish entry; Rouge Red Radish is a Fuling crop valued for its red flesh and eaten mainly as pickles or jar-cured dried radish.
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.