Chaoshan Beef Hotpot 潮汕牛肉火锅
Chaoshan Beef Hotpot is featured among the local specialties of Guangdong.
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Chaoshan Beef Hotpot (潮汕牛肉火锅) is a hotpot of freshly slaughtered, hand-sliced beef cooked briefly in a clear broth and dipped in shacha sauce (沙茶酱). It began in Shantou (汕头), grew out of an older dish called the "beef stove" (牛肉炉), and was put on Shantou's list of intangible cultural heritage in 2017. The founder of a Shantou-born hotpot chain says it reached the rest of China by way of Shenzhen (深圳).
Where it comes from
The original beef stove used a stock with shacha sauce stirred into it, and the beef was simmered slowly over charcoal. Over time it became a clear-broth hotpot, and the shacha sauce moved from the pot to the dipping dish. That makes it closer to Beijing's instant-boiled mutton (涮羊肉) than to the numbing, spicy hotpots of Sichuan and Chongqing.
Lin Haiping (林海平), who started the Bahe Li (八合里) chain from a 23-square-metre shop in a Shantou lane, opened in Shenzhen in 2014. He told Shenzhen News (深圳新闻网) that Chaoshan beef hotpot was copied to the whole country by way of Shenzhen.
The beef
Chaoshan does not raise its own cattle. Restaurants order live yellow cattle from Yunnan and Guizhou; one Shantou restaurateur quoted by China Daily also buys from Sichuan and the Loess Plateau and rests the animals for about a week after the journey. The beef must be slaughtered on the day it is eaten and is never frozen. It is divided by cut, with local names such as xiongkou lao (胸口𦛨, the fat at the front of the chest), feipian (肥胼, a strip from the belly), diaolong (吊龙, a long strip along the back) and boren (脖仁, a small raised piece at the shoulder blade). Only about 35 per cent of a carcass suits quick dipping; the rest is made into hand-beaten beef balls.
How it is eaten
The pot holds plain water or a beef-bone broth with little salt and no oil, at most flavoured with a few slices of galangal (南姜), lengths of scallion white or pieces of corn. Each cut has its own dipping time: diaolong needs only about 8 seconds, xiongkou lao about five minutes. At the Shantou restaurant described by China Daily, the plates are marked with times, 8 seconds for most cuts, 15 seconds for sanhua zhi (三花趾) and wuhua zhi (五花趾), and slices are cut by hand, in view of diners, no thicker than 2 millimetres. The dip is shacha sauce or Puning bean sauce (普宁豆酱).
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.