Guyuan Shengcuan Noodle Soup 固原生汆面
Guyuan Shengcuan Noodle Soup is featured among the local specialties of Ningxia.
Guyuan Shengcuan Noodle Soup (固原生汆面) is a noodle soup from Guyuan (固原) in Ningxia in which raw minced-beef balls are cooked in a sour, spicy tomato broth and ladled over the noodles. Shengcuan (生汆) means the meatballs go into the pot raw. Economic Daily reported in 2022 that the county town of Xiji County (西吉县) in Guyuan had forty to fifty restaurants serving it, and the Yinchuan Evening News calls it a noodle dish that is homegrown in Ningxia.
How it is made
Economic Daily sets out the steps. The dough is mixed first, and beef is chopped fine and shaped into raw meatballs. For the soup, linseed oil (胡麻油) is heated and red onion, ginger and garlic are fried hard in it, then diced tomato goes in with water and seasonings. When it boils, the raw beef balls are dropped in to cook. The noodles are boiled last, the tomato and beef-ball soup is ladled over them, and the bowl is finished with a little coriander and chilli oil.
Flavour and texture
The meatballs are fresh-tasting and the broth is sour and hot. Mi Chunmiao (米春苗), owner of the Mishi (米师) noodle house in Xiji, says that many parts of northwest China make shengcuan noodles, mostly with hand-pinched dough pieces, while Xiji pulls the dough into noodles, which are chewier and springier. Describing a bowl in Yinchuan, the Yinchuan Evening News writes of white, chewy noodle pieces under a shiny layer of chilli oil, with minced-meat balls and starch noodles in the meat broth.
Where it comes from
According to Economic Daily, Mi Guoqi (米国歧), founder of Mishi, opened the first cuan-noodle shop in the Xiji county town in 1986, and the dish took off in the town from then; by 2022 Mishi had 16 franchised branches in Xiji, Guyuan, Yinchuan (银川) and elsewhere. The Yinchuan Evening News credits the Tongxinchun (同心春) restaurant, run by people from Tongxin (同心), with being among the first to bring the dish from the southern mountain districts to the Yinchuan plain. When Guyuan's Yuanzhou district (原州区) promoted its food in Beijing in 2025, People's Daily Online listed shengcuan noodles with their rich broth among the dishes cooked on site.
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.