Wenlou Soup Buns 文楼汤包
Wenlou Soup Buns is featured among the local specialties of Jiangsu.
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Wenlou Soup Buns (文楼汤包) are large, thin-skinned soup dumplings filled with crab and set pork-and-chicken stock, first made at the Wenlou (文楼) restaurant in the old town of Hexia (河下) in Huai'an (淮安), Jiangsu. A finished bun measures about 10 centimetres across and 3 centimetres high, with a wrapper thin as paper; through the top opening you can see crab oil moving in the soup. The dumpling is also known as Wenlou crab-roe soup buns (文楼蟹黄汤包).
Where it comes from
Wenlou was founded in 1817, in the Jiaqing reign (嘉庆) of the Qing dynasty, and began by selling tea and breakfast snacks before becoming a restaurant. According to the Huai'an CPPCC local-history site, owner Chen Haixian (陈海仙) took the leavened-dough soup bun of the Wulou (武楼) restaurant and remade it with a plain water dough. Over two generations the recipe moved from crab-and-pork dumplings to leavened crab-and-pork buns and finally to the present bun, with a wrapper of plain water dough and a filling of set aspic in place of minced meat.
The buns traditionally went on sale around the Double Ninth Festival (重阳), when crabs came into season. The China Cuisine Association named them a "Famous Chinese Snack" (中华名小吃) in 1997, and the Wenlou building is a Huai'an municipal protected heritage site.
How it is made
The filling is mostly soup. Free-range hens, pork belly, pork bones and pork skin are simmered for a long time over low heat; the hen and belly are taken out when about 80 per cent cooked and diced, and the softened skin is chopped fine. Everything goes back into the stock to thicken, seasoned with Shaoxing wine, salt, light soy sauce, shrimp roe, spring onion, ginger and sugar. Once cool and set, the aspic is minced and mixed with crab oil. The wrapper is rolled from a cold-water dough of fine white flour with a little salt, to about 18 centimetres across, thin and see-through at the edge and slightly thicker in the middle. The cook gathers the edges into a chrysanthemum-shaped top.
How it is eaten
A saying sums up the method: lift gently, move slowly, open a window, then drink the soup. Diners prick two or three holes in the skin with chopsticks, spoon in vinegar mixed with coriander and ginger, and slowly suck out the very hot soup through the holes. The crab, meat and wrapper are eaten last.
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.