Danjiangkou Topmouth Culter 丹江口翘嘴鲌

Where it comes from

A Shiyan Daily (十堰日报) feature carried on the Shiyan municipal government portal ties the fish to the dam. Work on the Danjiangkou Dam began in 1958, and in 1959 the Han River (汉江) was closed off for the construction, cutting migratory fish in the upper Han off from the lower river and the Yangtze. The reservoir became a relatively separate fish habitat, and over generations the culter adapted to its water quality, temperature, light and spawning grounds.

The same feature claims the culter family for a line by the Tang poet Du Fu (杜甫) in the poem Xia Ai (峡隘): "白鱼如切玉", white fish like cut jade. Locally the fish also goes by nicknames such as baiyu (白鱼, white fish), diaoziyu (刁子鱼) and qiaozui (翘嘴, upturned mouth).

On 10 December 2008 the national quality-inspection authority placed culter growing within Danjiangkou City's part of the reservoir on the national list of protected geographical-indication products and named it Danjiangkou Topmouth Culter. Danjiangkou City then issued protection rules that trace the product through farming, catching, processing, transport and sale. Between July 2014 and the end of 2017 the fish cages in Shiyan's waters were cleared, and the culter is now among the fish raised in land-based recirculating tanks around Danjiangkou.

The fish

The Shiyan feature lists the marks of the local fish: a long slim body, an upturned mouth, raised back muscles and a red line 10 to 15 millimetres long below each eye. Chinese Wikipedia describes the species as elongated and flattened from side to side, with a blunt snout, a lower jaw longer than the upper one and turned upward, large eyes and small scales. It lives in slow or still open water in rivers, lakes and reservoirs and hunts fish and shrimp.

How it is cooked and how it tastes

The feature names pan-frying, steaming and red-braising as the ways it is cooked, and describes the flesh as white as cut jade, fine as gossamer, fresh and tender whichever method is used. Hotels and restaurants across Shiyan treat it as a house speciality, and a Danjiangkou company also processes it into a seasoned "flavour fish" (风味鱼).

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