Lucheng Hand-Stretched Flatbread 潞城甩饼
Lucheng Hand-Stretched Flatbread is featured among the local specialties of Shanxi.
Lucheng Hand-Stretched Flatbread (潞城甩饼) is a thin flatbread that is swung over a rolling pin until round, baked on a charcoal griddle with donkey fat and rolled round cured donkey meat. The Shanxi provincial government describes it as a folk snack found only in the Lucheng (潞城) area of Shangdang (上党), now a district of Changzhi (长治), and the Lucheng District government calls it a provincial intangible cultural heritage item.
How it is made
According to the Shanxi government portal, a piece of rested dough is rolled out with a rolling pin pointed at both ends, sprinkled with chopped spring onion and pepper salt (椒盐), folded and coiled into a round. It is rolled into a disc again, draped more than halfway over the rolling pin and swung until it is round, then laid on the griddle, brushed with donkey fat, turned, brushed again and baked for about two minutes.
The portal names three essentials: the right ratio of flour to water, so the dough comes away cleanly from bowl and hands; quick, well-coordinated handling, so each bread comes out even and the size of the griddle; and a charcoal fire, which blackens the bread if too hot and leaves it pale if too cool. A layer of red clay is pasted under the griddle so the bread turns crisp outside and stays soft inside. China Daily's Chinese site adds that the edges are rolled thin and the centre left slightly thicker, so the dough stretches when swung without tearing in the middle, and that the fat is brushed on with a cotton-thread brush.
How it is eaten
In Lucheng, the Shanxi government says, the bread is usually made with donkey fat and eaten rolled round cured donkey meat; the portal's method has it wrapped round thin slices of cured meat and dipped in mashed garlic. China Daily reports that a plain version is now sold alongside the traditional pepper-salt one, and that younger diners who do not like the taste of Sichuan pepper choose the plain bread.
Where it comes from
The provincial portal classes Lucheng Hand-Stretched Flatbread as a kind of spring pancake (春饼), eaten at the start of spring, and notes that the Ming-dynasty Luzhou gazetteer (潞州志) and the Qing-dynasty Lu'an prefecture gazetteer (潞安府志) both record spring pancakes among the customs of the start of spring. No written record dates the bread itself. A local story says a cook in Lucheng invented it when a too-wet noodle dough fell into the oil, and that the future Tang emperor Xuanzong (唐明皇), then an official in Luzhou (潞州), named it shuaibing, "swung bread", after seeing how it was shaped.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-25. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.