Jishiteng Vine Rice Dumplings 鸡屎藤粿仔
Jishiteng Vine Rice Dumplings is featured among the local specialties of Hainan.
Jishiteng Vine Rice Dumplings (鸡屎藤粿仔) are a hand-made Hainan snack of small rice-dough pieces with powdered jishiteng (鸡屎藤), a vine, worked into the dough, served in a sweet or savoury liquid.
How it is made
The owner of Wu's grain-snack shop (吴记杂粮店) in Ding'an (定安) told Hainan Daily in 2019 that the dumplings are made entirely by hand, mainly from jishiteng, rice flour and cassava flour. A Ding'an stall owner who makes mixed guozai soup (粿仔汤) described the steps. Rice is soaked in water for several hours and milled to a fine powder. Jishiteng powder is then mixed into the rice flour and cassava flour and kneaded into a dough; spinach or pumpkin juice is used the same way for pieces of other colours and flavours.
How it is eaten
Depending on the diner's taste, the pieces go into brown-sugar ginger water, coconut milk or bone broth. In Ding'an they are night food: Wu's shop, in business for more than ten years, counts jishiteng guozai and sumi juanba (粟米卷粑) rolls as its specialities, and a Ding'an local recommends a bowl with some coarse-grain snacks on the side.
At the Ding'an stall the jishiteng pieces also go into the mixed guozai soup, with coconut-coated glutinous rice balls, spinach, pumpkin and wax-gourd taro balls, peanuts and chunks of fresh taro, topped with a large ladle of ginger water made by simmering old brown sugar, ginger and water for hours. A regular who has eaten it for more than ten years describes the bowl as sweet, sticky and a little chewy.
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Dongge Rice Dumplings in Ginger Syrup 东阁粿仔 →
Another Hainan guozai of small rice-dough pieces; the jishiteng version is set apart by the vine powder kneaded into the dough.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-24. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.