Shiquan Guiguzi Cured Pork 石泉鬼谷子腊肉
Shiquan Guiguzi Cured Pork is featured among the local specialties of Shaanxi.
Photo adjustments
EXIF orientation normalized; resized without changing aspect ratio; converted to WebP. No subject edits.
Shiquan Guiguzi Cured Pork (石泉鬼谷子腊肉) is smoked, salt-cured pork from Shiquan County (石泉县) in Ankang (安康), Shaanxi, sold under the Guiguzi (鬼谷子) brand. The brand belongs to a curing works in Banqiao Village (板桥村) at the foot of Yunwu Mountain (云雾山), where Gao Dechang (高德昌), a well-known local smoker of cured meat, built it into what Western China Network (西部网) calls a brand known across the province before handing the business to his daughter Gao Anxiu (高安秀).
How it is made
The Shiquan County culture and tourism bureau describes the household method. In the eleventh and twelfth lunar months, farm families slaughter pigs they raised themselves, keep back fresh meat for the New Year, and cut the rest into large pieces while it is fresh. The pieces are packed into crocks with salt, Sichuan pepper, star anise and other spices for 7 to 15 days, then strung up on palm-leaf cords to drip dry. They are slowly smoked over cypress branches, sugarcane peel and Chinese toon bark, or hung above the kitchen stove or a heating stove.
At the Guiguzi works the smoking has been adapted: the meat is smoked slowly over a wood fire with the smoke screened off, then hung in a ventilated room to lose the smoky smell. The works buys pigs from village households, and meat smoked in winter goes into cold storage when the weather warms in April and May.
Flavour and texture
Boiled and sliced, well-smoked pieces are translucent and glossy, yellow shot through with red. The county bureau describes the fat as rich without being cloying and the lean as tender rather than stringy, and quotes the local saying that when one family boils its cured pork, a hundred households smell it.
Where it comes from
The Chinese name, larou, comes from the twelfth lunar month (腊月) when the meat is salted. A story recorded by the county bureau holds that after the Eight-Nation Alliance entered Beijing in 1900 and Empress Dowager Cixi (慈禧) fled to Xi'an with the Guangxu Emperor (光绪), officials in southern Shaanxi sent Shiquan cured pork as tribute, and Cixi praised it.
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.