Notoginseng Stewed Chicken 三七炖鸡
Notoginseng Stewed Chicken is featured among the local specialties of Yunnan.
Notoginseng Stewed Chicken (三七炖鸡) is a chicken soup cooked with the roots of notoginseng (三七), the medicinal plant that has earned Wenshan Zhuang and Miao Autonomous Prefecture (文山壮族苗族自治州) the name 'home of notoginseng'. At a 2020 press conference of the Yunnan Health Commission, Zhang Yan (张彦), a vice-governor of Wenshan prefecture, said that local people have eaten notoginseng for generations and that dishes such as Notoginseng Stewed Chicken appear at all kinds of festivals.
How it is made
China Food News (中国食品报) described the dish as cooked in Miao villages of Panlong township (盘龙乡), Yanshan county (砚山县), on the Start of Winter (立冬). The roots are dug and dried, paired with free-range chicken raised in the hills, and the two are stewed slowly in earthenware pots on earthen stoves. One villager told the paper that he goes out to his own garden that morning to dig fresh notoginseng roots.
Flavour and texture
The finished soup is clear and the chicken falls apart. The same report describes the notoginseng root as slightly bitter with a sweet aftertaste, and the broth as fresh and sweet without being greasy. A food feature from Wenshan Release (文山发布网), in its passage on the prefecture's 'notoginseng banquet' (三七宴), likewise describes the root-and-chicken soup as clear, with tender meat that is not dry.
Where it comes from
In Panlong the stew is the grandest Start of Winter ritual of Miao families, a medicinal dish that China Food News says has been kept up for several hundred years. The villager told the paper that since he could remember he had drunk a bowl of the soup every Start of Winter, and quoted a local saying: build yourself up at the start of winter, and next year you can fight a tiger (立冬补冬，来年打虎).
Notoginseng rootlets (三七须根), which the Wenshan feature lists among the parts of the plant cooked for the banquet, gained a food-safety standard of their own when the Yunnan Health Commission issued a local standard for them in 2020. The commission described them as the fine roots growing on the main root, a principal by-product of the crop with a long tradition of being eaten in Yunnan.
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.