Panjin River Crab 盘锦河蟹
Panjin River Crab is featured among the local specialties of Liaoning.
Panjin River Crab (盘锦河蟹) is the Chinese mitten crab as farmed in the rice paddies of Panjin (盘锦), the Liaoning city at the mouth of the Liao River (辽河) on the northern Bohai Gulf. It was approved as a protected origin product in 2007, and a Farmers' Daily report treats Panjin's paddy crab as the representative northern river crab, set against the Yangcheng Lake (阳澄湖) crab of Jiangsu.
Where it comes from
The Liaoning Development and Reform Commission calls Panjin the home of the river crab, citing a legend in which crabs formed a bridge for a Tang emperor's eastern campaign and a folk rhyme about crabs crawling into the cooking pot. It credits the city with China's first artificial crab-seed hatching and first rice-field crab farming, and calls it China's largest crab-seed production base. Where sea water and fresh water meet at the river mouth, conditions suit hatching the young crabs.
Farmers' Daily traces the paddy method to a 1991 trial. The farmer Li Baoqi had failed to rent a pond and asked the aquaculture technician Li Xiaodong for help, and the two raised the crabs in a rice field instead; four mu of paddy gave 600 kilograms of crabs. In the paddies the crabs loosen the soil, weed and eat insects, while the rice gives them shelter from predators, a pairing summed up locally as one field used twice and one season with two harvests.
Flavour and texture
Panjin crabs are smaller than their southern rivals. Because the north turns cold early, the crabs build up roe and fat sooner, so the early-maturing females weigh only about 75 to 100 grams but carry very fragrant roe. Farmers' Daily sums up the contrast as southern crabs being sweet and delicate, and northern crabs winning on aroma, bright colour and strong flavour.
How it is eaten
The harvest comes in the eighth lunar month, ahead of the Mid-Autumn Festival and before the Yangcheng Lake crabs are ready. When the season opens, the Hujia (胡家) crab market in Panshan County (盘山县), with more than 600 traders, fills with buyers and lorries day and night.
Crab tofu (河蟹豆腐) belongs to Liaohekou fisherman cuisine (辽河口渔家菜), whose ingredient-processing skills and food customs were put on Liaoning's provincial intangible-heritage list in 2020. The dish shows no crab and contains no tofu. In the version served by Zhang Song (张嵩), a fourth-generation inheritor of the tradition, the meat and roe of 12 Panjin crabs are simmered together until they thicken into a small bowl of potage (羹). The older method was to pound the crabs in a crock, squeeze out the juice and steam it into a paste or cook it into egg-drop-like flakes.
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.