Yihe Freshwater Clams 义河蚶
Yihe Freshwater Clams is featured among the local specialties of Hubei.
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Yihe Freshwater Clams (义河蚶) are freshwater bivalves from the Tianmen River (天门河) in Tianmen (天门), Hubei, and a banquet dish the city is known for. The Tianmen city government calls them a noted aquatic product of Tianmen, rare nationwide, with the old name che'ao (车螯) and the scientific Chinese name ganlan chengbang (橄榄蛏蚌). They are made into soup or stewed, and winter and early spring are the season for eating them.
Ingredients
Two narrow, elongated shells, golden yellow or dark green, close together into the shape of a short sword. The Hubei Intellectual Property Office (湖北省知识产权局) describes the shell as thin and brittle and the animal as having a well-developed foot, and says an adult's shell can grow four to five times as long as it is high. The meat is milky white to milky yellow. "Yihe Clam" was registered as a geographical-indication certification trademark on 21 February 2013; the applicant was the Tianmen Yihe Clam Breeding Association (天门义河蚶养殖协会).
Where it comes from
The name goes back to the Song dynasty. According to the Tianmen County Gazetteer (天门县志), Zhao Kuangyin (赵匡胤), the future first Song emperor, escaped his pursuer Guo Yancheng (郭延成) in disguise and crossed the county river at Jingling (竟陵) without being charged by the boatman. After taking the throne he named the stretch from Xiaoban (小板) to Jiehe (截河) the Yihe, the "righteous river", and freed it from fishing dues; clams from that stretch took its name. This water is part of the Xijiang (西江) that the Tang tea scholar Lu Yu (陆羽) praised, and the city government reads a line by the Tang poet Pi Rixiu (皮日休) about che'ao as a poem on the same shellfish.
The city government describes the river here as clear and slow, with a clay-and-gravel bed and plenty of natural food for the burrowing bivalves. It says the species was once also found below Suya Lake reservoir (宿鸭湖水库) in Zhumadian, Henan, and in the Taihu basin in Jiangsu, but is now essentially extinct in both. Tianmen has set up a nature reserve on the Tianmen River where fishing for it is strictly controlled.
How it is made
For stewed Yihe clams (清炖义河蚶), a recipe published by the Tianmen city government, the meat is taken out of the shell, cleaned and scored in a criss-cross pattern on both sides. It is cooked for 15 minutes with winter bamboo shoots, shiitake mushrooms, chicken stock, coarse salt, MSG and minced ginger, then transferred to a bowl and steamed for an hour. Hot oil, white pepper and chopped spring onion go on at the end.
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.