Jingzhou Carved Candied Fruit 靖州雕花蜜饯
Jingzhou Carved Candied Fruit is featured among the local specialties of Hunan.
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Jingzhou Carved Candied Fruit (靖州雕花蜜饯) is candied fruit carved into pictures, made in Jingzhou Miao and Dong Autonomous County (靖州苗族侗族自治县) in Huaihua (怀化), south-west Hunan. Its main material is unripe green pomelo, cut into thin pieces and carved with a small willow-leaf knife before it is boiled, sugared and dried. It is also called 'ten-thousand-flower tea' (万花茶), and the most common way to enjoy it locally is steeped in hot water.
How it is made
The national intangible-heritage entry breaks the craft into choosing the fruit, slicing, carving, boiling, sugaring and turning in the sun, with dozens of steps in all. Green pomelo is scraped of its thin outer skin and sliced, or shaped into little jars and animals. Carvers work in flat, pierced and relief styles, cutting flowers, animals, figures and scenes. The pieces are then rinsed in old-well water, boiled in a copper pot to keep them green, rinsed again, steeped in cane sugar and turned and dried in the sun.
Luo Xianmei (罗先梅), a municipal-level inheritor in Xiaxiang village (夏乡村) of Quyang town (渠阳镇), picks pomelos about the size of a rice bowl, scrapes off surface blemishes with a shard of porcelain and cuts fan-shaped slices. She calls relief carving the hardest: too heavy a cut splits the skin, too light a cut loses the depth. Her finished pieces soak for three hours in mountain spring water before the copper-pot boil.
Ingredients
Besides pomelo, the Hunan provincial government portal lists winter melon, cucumber, tomato, bitter melon, red beans and sword beans among the materials. Each has its own form: bitter melon is carved into toads, cowpeas are twisted into knots, sword beans become orchids and tomatoes become crabapple flowers. Patterns include two dragons playing with a pearl, a peacock spreading its tail and magpies among plum blossom.
How it is eaten
Eaten straight, the pieces are crisp and sweet and crunch audibly. More often a few pieces go into a cup of boiling water for three to four minutes, sometimes with candied dates or flower tea. When guests arrive, the host brews a few carved pieces with candied dates as a wish for a sweet life, and families keep their supply in blue-and-white porcelain jars.
Where it comes from
Tradition traces the craft to the Eastern Zhou, and the heritage entry notes that Jingzhou's Song-dynasty gazetteer already records it. It was passed mainly from mother to daughter. The making technique entered Hunan's second provincial intangible-heritage list in March 2009 and the fifth national list in 2021 (item VIII-274), put forward by Jingzhou; the national entry also places Suining County (绥宁县) in Shaoyang (邵阳) within its core area.
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.