Dalian Sea Cucumber 大连海参
Dalian Sea Cucumber is featured among the local specialties of Liaoning.
Dalian Sea Cucumber (大连海参) is the spiny sea cucumber (刺参) raised and harvested in the waters off Dalian (大连), at the southern tip of the Liaodong Peninsula (辽东半岛) on the shores of the Yellow Sea and the Bohai Sea. It is a national geographical-indication product of China. The materia medica Bencao Gangmu Shiyi (本草纲目拾遗) already singled out the black-brown sea cucumber of Liaodong, calling it Liaoshen (辽参) and rating its quality the best.
Where it comes from
Science and Technology Daily calls Dalian the core producing area for Chinese spiny sea cucumber, with 2.4 million mu (about 1,600 square kilometres) of natural sea area. The water averages 13.3 degrees Celsius with a salinity of 30 parts per thousand, and more than 40 kinds of seaweed, among them sargassum (鼠尾藻) and wakame (裙带菜), grow on the sea floor, forming what the paper calls an 'undersea grassland'.
The animals grow slowly: two months in the hatchery, then three to five years in pens, and longer still when seeded on the open sea bed. A grower in Xianyuwan (仙浴湾) in Wafangdian (瓦房店) told Science and Technology Daily that a sea cucumber has to reach three years before it starts to build up polysaccharides and other active substances, and that the bigger it is the more it is worth. The Dalian Ocean Fishery Association expected the 2025 spring harvest in Dalian's nine producing areas to run from mid-May to the end of June; divers known locally as 'haipengzi' (海碰子) bring the catch up in net bags.
How it is made
Dalian processors sell sea cucumber in four main forms: salted, dried, ready-to-eat and health products. At one Wafangdian processing plant, fresh sea cucumbers landed at Yongning (永宁) go through twelve steps, including washing, steaming and quick-freezing, to become ready-to-eat sea cucumber. Since December 2024 the Dalian Ocean Fishery Association has issued origin traceability codes to certified Dalian producers; scanning one shows where the sea cucumber was raised, how long it grew and how it was processed.
How it is eaten
In Dalian cooking the sea cucumber appears in 'Eight Immortals Crossing the Sea' (八仙过海), a dish of six kinds of seafood with mushrooms and bamboo shoots in which ingredients stand for the immortals: the sea cucumber plays Cao Guojiu (曹国舅) in his black robe. On Pingdao (平岛) island in Pulandian (普兰店), a sea cucumber theme park lets visitors try diving for sea cucumbers.
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.