Donggang Swimming Crab 东港飞蟹
Donggang Swimming Crab is featured among the local specialties of Liaoning.
Donggang Swimming Crab (东港飞蟹) is the swimming crab, Portunus trituberculatus, from Dandong (丹东), Liaoning, sold under the Donggang (东港) name. The Ministry of Agriculture gives feixie (飞蟹, "flying crab") and "big sea crab" (大海蟹) as common names for the swimming crab (梭子蟹), calls it a well-known Dandong specialty, and notes that the catch is high in the Yalu River (鸭绿江) estuary of the northern Yellow Sea. In 2007 the ministry reported signs for "Donggang big sea crab" and "Donggang flying crab" at farmers' markets in Shenyang, Dalian, Beidaihe and Beijing. China News Service also reports it under the name Donggou flying crab (东沟飞蟹).
Where it comes from
The ministry credits the local sea for the crab's quality: the waters off Dandong are shallow, with broad flats and a large tidal range, and runoff from the Yalu and Dayang (大洋河) rivers keeps the inshore water actively exchanging, with moderate salinity and plenty of feed organisms.
Dandong began farming the crab relatively early. At the end of the twentieth century farmers first raised it in hanging cages in ponds, then switched to free-range and mixed pond culture, but the young crabs all came from the wild. In 2007 a city project achieved large-scale artificial rearing of seed crabs. On 13 September 2011 the Donggang Swimming Crab (东港梭子蟹) was registered as a national agricultural geographical indication, together with the Donggang yellow clam and Donggang variegated clam, after the Donggang Yellow Sea Aquatic Products Industry Association (东港市黄海水产品行业协会) applied in early 2010.
Flavour and texture
The species has a broad, roughly shuttle-shaped carapace with a long spine on each side, dark purple with bluish-white cloud markings, and a flattened, paddle-like fourth pair of legs for swimming. Compared with the same crab from other waters, the Ministry of Agriculture says the Dandong crab has plumper meat, a fresher, more tender taste and more fragrant roe. Females with well-developed gonads are called red-paste crabs (红膏蟹). A buyer for the Hema (盒马) supermarket chain told China News Service that the colder water makes Donggou crabs grow more slowly and that they average about 30 percent larger than East and South China Sea crabs.
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.