Crispy Aromatic Chicken 香酥鸡
Crispy Aromatic Chicken is featured among the local specialties of Shandong.
Crispy Aromatic Chicken (香酥鸡) in Qingdao (青岛) is the signature dish of Chunhelou (春和楼), a Shandong-cuisine (鲁菜) restaurant founded in 1891, the 17th year of the Guangxu reign (光绪) of the Qing dynasty. The Shinan District (市南区) cultural centre in Qingdao says the chicken has been one of the restaurant's main signature dishes since the 1920s and has passed through six generations of chefs. Its cooking technique was approved as a Qingdao municipal intangible cultural heritage item in 2015, according to the Qingdao Evening News (青岛晚报). The cultural centre says it entered Shandong's provincial list of representative intangible heritage items in 2016.
How it is made
Chunhelou uses locally raised free-range chickens of the same year, weighing 750 to 850 grams, and keeps its own rearing base within Qingdao to supply them. After slaughter, each bird goes through more than a dozen steps, among them cleaning, marinating, steaming, frying, cutting up and brushing with oil. The restaurant's chairman, Shen Jianji (沈健基), told the Qingdao Evening News that dedicated staff handle the whole process, which, from the rearing base to the plate, takes two days. The cultural centre lists the steps as slaughtering, marinating, slow simmering (煨), steaming and frying.
Flavour and texture
The finished chicken is golden, crisp outside and tender inside, and strongly fragrant.
Where it comes from
Chunhelou began making the chicken soon after it opened. The Qingdao city gazetteer's volume on commerce (青岛市志·商业志), quoted by the Qingdao Evening News, describes the dining scene after Qingdao was established: Qing loyalists, warlords, officials and foreign merchants gathered there and feasting was in fashion. The gazetteer names Chunhelou's crispy chicken first among the restaurant's specialities. According to the cultural centre, Prince Gong Puwei (恭亲王溥伟), Kang Youwei (康有为) and other notable visitors always ordered it. The restaurant has also served it to foreign guests, among them two US Navy admirals, Trost and Lyons. The Qingdao Evening News dates Chunhelou's boxed takeaway chicken to the 1980s.
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.