Xunyang Eight-Dish Banquet 旬阳八大件
Xunyang Eight-Dish Banquet is featured among the local specialties of Shaanxi.
Photo adjustments
EXIF orientation normalized; resized without changing aspect ratio; converted to WebP. No subject edits.
Xunyang Eight-Dish Banquet (旬阳八大件) is a full feast of steamed and cold dishes from Xunyang (旬阳), Shaanxi, listed there as the Shuhe eight-dish banquet (蜀河八大件) after Shuhe (蜀河), an old town in Xunyang. Its making technique is a Shaanxi provincial intangible cultural heritage item (third batch, number VIII-83), and the Shaanxi Department of Culture and Tourism counts it among Xunyang's eight provincial-level heritage items. The Shaanxi Provincial Culture Centre describes it as widely influential along the Han River (汉江).
How it is eaten
The feast is built on sets of eight: eight meat and eight vegetable dishes, eight cold and eight hot, and 24 dishes in all once the staple course is counted. Eight guests sit together at an Eight Immortals table (八仙桌). The eight cold dishes, four with meat and four without, are picked into a central plate and dressed with a sour sauce of hot-oil chilli before eating. The eight hot dishes, four soups and four other dishes, come to the table soups first. With the staple course come six more steamed bowls, three with meat and three without, plus one soup, again making eight. The staple must be rice.
The banquet carries strict etiquette about how the dishes are laid out, how many guests there are, where they sit and how they speak and behave, and it appears mainly at traditional festivals, weddings and funerals.
How it is made
All the hot dishes are steamed: first over a fierce fire until the steamer is full of steam, then slowly over a low one, and chicken broth is poured over each just before it goes to the table. The ingredients are fixed: fresh local lotus root with nine holes, free-range chickens and their eggs, black-haired pork and wild carp from the Han River.
Where it comes from
The skill is passed on mainly from father to son or from master to apprentice. Xunyang has a provincial heritage workshop for Shuhe eight-dish banquet food culture and making technique, one of two provincial workshops in the city.
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.