Beef Chyme Hot Pot 牛瘪火锅
Beef Chyme Hot Pot is featured among the local specialties of Guizhou.
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Beef Chyme Hot Pot (牛瘪火锅) is a hotpot of the Dong (侗族) and other peoples of Qiandongnan (黔东南), Guizhou, whose broth is made from the partly digested grass taken from a cow's stomach and small intestine. The Guizhou provincial government calls niubie and its goat counterpart, yangbie (羊瘪), a dish the minority peoples of Qiandongnan regard as fit for honoured guests, praised as a "hundred-herb soup" (百草汤).
How it is made
Chinese Wikipedia says the cow is usually fed good grass and Chinese medicinal herbs before slaughter. The partly digested contents of the stomach and small intestine are then taken out and the liquid is squeezed from them. The provincial government describes the next stage: the liquid is filtered, cattle bile and seasonings are added, and it is cooked for a long time and filtered again before salt, spring onion, garlic and chilli go in. Wikipedia notes that it is simmered slowly over a low fire.
Flavour and texture
The provincial government warns that the smell may give first-timers pause, and describes the taste as slightly bitter at first, then rich and full, with the scent of grass mingling with that of the meat. Local people credit it with settling the stomach and aiding digestion; Chinese Wikipedia notes that experts have questioned this.
Where it comes from
The goat and cow bie making technique of Rongjiang County (榕江县) was entered in Guizhou's fifth list of provincial intangible cultural heritage in 2019, and the county promotes itself as the "first bie city of China" with a street of niubie restaurants. Xinhua reported that during the 2023 village football league (村超) the number of niubie restaurants in Zhongcheng (忠诚) grew from a dozen or so to forty or fifty, with a queue of up to three hours at a restaurant that had won a county niubie hotpot contest in 2017.
Since the football league made Rongjiang famous, the provincial government says, cooks there have turned bie into several dishes: beef stir-fried with niubie, raw beef dressed with niubie juice, and raw niubie as a dip.
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.