Poyang Lake Bighead Carp Head 鄱湖鳙鱼头
Poyang Lake Bighead Carp Head is featured among the local specialties of Jiangxi.
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Poyang Lake Bighead Carp Head (鄱湖鳙鱼头) is a traditional dish of Jiujiang (九江), Jiangxi, made from the head of a bighead carp from Poyang Lake (鄱阳湖). Nanchang Release (南昌发布), the Nanchang municipal government's news account, places it in the Xunyang (浔阳) branch of Gan (赣菜), or Jiangxi, cuisine.
Ingredients
The bighead carp (鳙鱼) is one of China's four traditional farmed carps and has an exceptionally large head; in Chinese it also goes by pangtouyu (胖头鱼, 'fat-head fish') and datouyu (大头鱼, 'big-head fish'). Nanchang Release credits the strong Jiangxi character of the dish to where the head comes from: Poyang Lake, which it calls China's largest freshwater lake and the 'mother lake' of the people of Jiangxi.
Flavour and texture
Nanchang Release sums up the dish as fresh and spicy with a slight sourness, the flesh rich and tender.
Where it comes from
In September 2018 the China Cuisine Association (中国烹饪协会) named Poyang Lake Bighead Carp Head one of Jiangxi's ten classic dishes on its 'Chinese Cuisine' (中国菜) list, which gathered 340 classic dishes from 34 provincial-level regions. A 2022 essay on Gan cuisine by Zhu Hong (朱虹) and Lei Ming (雷鸣), carried by Jiangxi News, opens its list of the cuisine's representative dishes with it, under the name Pohu Pangyutou (鄱湖胖鱼头, 'Poyang Lake fat fish head'), ahead of Lianhua Blood Duck (莲花血鸭).
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.