Guilin is not only famous for its natural landscape, but for its age-old rice noodles nationwide. It represents Guilin’s food culture. When you are lingering every streets in Guilin, you can see many shops selling different kinds of rice noodles, such as beef noodle, pork noodle, horse meet rice noodle, three-fresh(pork, pig’s liver and pig’s oviduct) noodle, sour and hot noodle, river snail rice noodle and so on.
Guilin Rice Noodles, according to its making procedure, it can be classified into 2 kinds, namely Mifen(米粉, shaped in round and string) and Qianfen(shaped in flat slab). Mifen is row squeezed, while Qianfen is ripe steamed. The main ingredients are rice, beef, pork, horse meet, and the auxiliary materials are bittern water, bone soup, peanuts, pickled vegetables, chives, chili and garlic. Each shops serve the rice noodles in its own taste, because they have different recipes in their own bittern water, the famous ones are the Chongshan Rice Noodle, Youyixue Rice Noodle and Qingyun Soup Rice Noodle.
There’s a legend about Guilin’s Rice Noodle which goes like that, about 2,200 years ago, during the reign of Qinshihuang, the first emperor of Qin Dynasty, after making the unification in the whole country, to recapture his lost territory in southern China, he dispatched 500,000 of his military troops to make the southern expedition. After arriving in Guilin, almost all the warriors felt uncomfortable, for they had no appetite and lots of them got ill and had loose bowels. The reason is that the warriors came from northern China, they were not suitable the food in the south, just like the old saying, every place has its own way of supporting its own residents. Later an imperial chef found out a solution, he thought that all the soldiers came from the north, they used to the food that made from wheat, like noodles, mutton and bread pieces in soup, and something like somewhat. While in the south, the main food material is rice, for the northerners, after taking the rice, it’s not easy to digest, they got sick, for their bad bodies condition, they lost their combat effectiveness in the battles, so he finally invented rice noodles and the recipe for the bittern water, thus the rice noodles came into being. This great invention helped the emperor recaptured his lost territory. Since then, the rice noodles were very popular among the locals until nowadays.
Mao Dun, a very noted Chinese literary master, during the anti-Japanese war, he completed his famous novel “Maple leaves are even more red than blossoms in Feb” in Guilin by on credit the rice noodles. Li Zong Ren, the late vice-chairman of KMT, he won his election by serving Guilin Rice Noodles to his supporters in Nanking in 1948.
Article Added By Richard Lee,
An old-hand tourist information advisor, sparkplug green eco-tourism
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Guilin Rice Noodles and its legend