Jian'ou Pressed Duck 建瓯板鸭
Jian'ou Pressed Duck is featured among the local specialties of Fujian.
Jian'ou Pressed Duck (建瓯板鸭) is a salted duck pressed flat, a traditional product of Jian'ou (建瓯) in Nanping, northern Fujian, praised as a 'fine dish of Fujian' (八闽佳肴) and counted among China's four great pressed ducks.
Where it comes from
The Nanping municipal government calls Jian'ou Pressed Duck an old, established northern Fujian brand, carefully made, convenient to eat and distinctive in flavour. The city traces it to the reign of Emperor Xiaozong of the Song (宋孝宗), when the pressed duck of a Jian'ou restaurant called Shengji (盛记饭店) was already well known. Xiaozong had once held the title Prince of Jian (建王) at Jian'an (建安), the old name of Jian'ou; fond of the duck, he took it to the Song court, where it was ranked a 'treasure of the Han table' (汉席珍品).
By the Qing dynasty the duck had long been famous and was popular with buyers in both north and south China. In the 1980s the China National Food Corporation (中国食品总公司) included it in its book Poultry and Traditional Poultry Products (家禽与传统禽制品), and it became known as one of China's four great pressed ducks, together with the pressed ducks of Nanjing in Jiangsu, Jianchang (建昌) in Sichuan and Nan'an (南安) in Jiangxi.
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.