Kaiping Chikan Claypot Rice 开平赤坎煲仔饭
Kaiping Chikan Claypot Rice is featured among the local specialties of Guangdong.
Kaiping Chikan Claypot Rice (开平赤坎煲仔饭) is rice cooked in individual clay pots over a wood fire in Chikan (赤坎), a town in Kaiping (开平) under Jiangmen (江门), Guangdong. Toppings such as rice-field eel, beef, spare ribs or cured meats go in part-way through the cooking, and each pot is finished with soy sauce and chopped spring onion. In 2022 its cooking technique entered Jiangmen's ninth list of municipal intangible cultural heritage.
How it is made
The Kaiping government sets out the method: the rice is soaked for two hours, brought to the boil over a high flame and then cooked over a medium flame until the water is taken up. The toppings go in when the rice is about 70 per cent cooked; the fire is then put out and the covered pot left for five minutes to finish in its own heat, the step that forms the crust. Soy sauce and spring onion go on when the lid comes off.
Chikan cooks still burn fruit-tree wood, with dozens of pots on one stove. Guan Yongjun (关永君), a fifth-generation cook of the Guan family's claypot rice, told Southern Metropolis Daily that he stops feeding lychee wood into the stove once the rice is 70 per cent done, and keeps turning the pots so every side meets the flame.
Ingredients
The pots are chosen for thickness and heat-treated before use, and the rice is a late-season crop that farmers grow themselves. Toppings include rice-field eel, beef, spare ribs, sliced pork, cured meats, salted fish, chicken and cured duck, and there is also a plain rice cooked with oil and salt. At the Guan shop the raw ingredients sit on a counter by the door and diners pick what goes into their pot.
How it is eaten
Much of the appeal is the crust of browned rice on the bottom of the pot. Guan Yongjun suggests pouring a little soup over it to loosen it. A usual meal is one pot of rice with a standard portion of roast goose or other roast meat and a plate of seasonal greens.
Where it comes from
According to the Kaiping government, the dish began in the early Republican years with craftsmen at Chikan market, such as wok menders, coopers and blacksmiths, who carried clay pots to cook as they worked. In the 1920s, as arcaded shop streets went up and trade grew, locals began selling food cooked in clay pots. The Guan family traces its version to Guan Yaohong (关耀宏), born in Chikan in 1862. The first stoves were iron sheets with five round holes; in the 1980s some shops moved to ten. The dish was named a Guangdong traditional specialty snack in 2014.
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.