Alxa Whole Roast Lamb 阿拉善烤全羊
Alxa Whole Roast Lamb is featured among the local specialties of Inner Mongolia.
Alxa Whole Roast Lamb (阿拉善烤全羊) is a whole sheep roasted in the Alxa League (阿拉善盟) of Inner Mongolia. The league's culture, tourism, radio and television bureau calls it a dish found only in the Alxa region and an "artwork" of its food culture, with a history of close to 300 years.
Ingredients
The Alxa bureau says the dish is known for strict choice of materials and careful roasting. The animal is a castrated ram of the native sheep breed (土种绵羯羊), whose meat the bureau describes as tender and free of a muttony smell. The fire is fed with saxaul (梭梭), a desert plant, which burns for a long time and gives off no unpleasant smell.
Where it comes from
The roast whole sheep technique (烤全羊技艺) entered the second national list of intangible cultural heritage in 2008, under the entry for beef and mutton cooking techniques (牛羊肉烹制技艺). In January 2025 the Alxa bureau announced that it was one of two national-level heritage items from the league invited to the recording of China Central Television's 2025 intangible-heritage gala, to be broadcast on CCTV-1 on the evening of the second day of the Lunar New Year.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-25. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.