Mount Tai Red-Scale Fish 泰山赤鳞鱼
Mount Tai Red-Scale Fish is featured among the local specialties of Shandong.
Mount Tai Red-Scale Fish (泰山赤鳞鱼) is a small wild freshwater fish from the mountain streams of Mount Tai (泰山) in Shandong, which the Tai'an (泰安) city government calls a famous specialty of the mountain. It is also called chilin fish (螭霖鱼) and shilin fish (时鳞鱼). The Tai'an city government records that emperors who came to Mount Tai for the Fengshan sacrifices (封禅) always had it on the imperial menu, and CCTV-7 describes it as a tribute fish to the imperial court from the Song dynasty onwards.
The fish
It is a member of the carp family, Onychostoma macrolepis (多鳞铲颌鱼). In the wild it lives in Mount Tai streams between 270 and 800 metres above sea level, and adults are under 20 centimetres long and weigh no more than 100 grams, according to the city government. The body is flattened from side to side, dark brown with a white belly and a faint blue back, with fine scales that are yellowish along the sides; the dorsal and tail fins are greyish yellow and the other fins orange, and in the breeding season the males' fins turn orange-red.
The fish is hard to keep in captivity and, CCTV-7 notes, rarely survives elsewhere, which gave rise to the saying that 'the red-scale fish does not come down the mountain' (赤鳞鱼不下山). Shandong Agricultural University and the city's fisheries staff have since bred it artificially, and the Tai'an fisheries office built a breeding and protection centre for it at Shangliyuan village (上梨园村) in Taishan District (泰山区). The fish was placed under China's geographical-indication product protection on 13 December 2007.
How it is cooked
Tai'an chefs turn the fish into a set of named dishes. The city government lists clear-poached red-scale fish (清氽赤鳞鱼), a deep-fried version, 'green dragon lying in snow' (青龙卧雪) and 'dragon and phoenix treasure-pearl soup' (龙凤宝珠汤).
Flavour and texture
The flesh is fine and tender, fragrant without being greasy and fresh without a fishy taste. Tests cited by the city government found it has more than twice the fat of crucian carp; a story holds that a fish left on a rock in the summer sun melts away to its scales and bones.
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.