Dinghu Vegetarian Mushroom Medley 鼎湖上素
Dinghu Vegetarian Mushroom Medley is featured among the local specialties of Guangdong.
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Dinghu Vegetarian Mushroom Medley (鼎湖上素) is a well-known Cantonese vegetarian dish of mushrooms, edible fungi, nuts and vegetables. It takes its name from Dinghu Mountain (鼎湖山) in Zhaoqing (肇庆). Chinese Wikipedia records that an old monk of Qingyun Temple (庆云寺) on the mountain taught it. It became the signature dish of the Xiyuan restaurant (西园酒家) in Guangzhou, one of the four Guangzhou restaurants known for luxury and quality between the late Qing dynasty and the Second World War.
Ingredients
The dish is built on the 'three mushrooms and six fungi' (三菇六耳), a collective name for prized ingredients of Chinese vegetarian cooking: dried shiitake (冬菇), straw mushrooms (草菇) and Mongolian mushrooms (口蘑), with wood ear, white fungus (银耳), yellow fungus (黄耳), elm fungus (榆耳), rock ear (石耳) and osmanthus fungus (桂花耳). Wikipedia notes that rock ear and osmanthus fungus are no longer found, so cooks now substitute morels or other wild mushrooms.
Bamboo fungus (竹笙), ginkgo nuts, fresh lotus seeds, fresh lily bulb and winter or other bamboo shoots complete the list.
How it is made
Each ingredient is cooked separately in a vegetarian stock made mainly from dried shiitake stems and dried straw mushrooms, with soybeans, red dates, sugar, salt, ginger and white pepper. Everything is then stir-fried together over high heat. Wikipedia describes the process as extremely laborious and the ingredients as hard to gather in full, and credits the head chef Bagua Tian (八卦田) with developing the dish.
Where it comes from
Qingyun Temple stands in a valley in the east-central part of Dinghu Mountain in Zhaoqing and is counted among Guangdong's four famous Buddhist temples.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-26. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.