The city of Liuzhou, in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in south China, is the home of the now nationally famous rice noodle dish, luosifen. The reason for the dish's fame is not only its distinctive flavor, but also the unrivaled efforts the city has put into promoting the dish over the last 10 years.

Luosifen has its origins as an inexpensive street snack sold in Liuzhou in the late 1970s. Liuzhou locals, having a lot of love for both river snails (luosi) and rice noodles (fen), created the dish by dipping the rice noodles in a broth made from stewed river snails, yielding a unique and popular flavor. The creators also made good use of other local specialties by topping the dish with pickled bamboo shoots, tofu skin and fried peanuts.

The pungent and distinctive scent of the noodles, which is said to come from the pickled bamboo shoots, has gradually attracted trendy diners from around the country. Some like to compare luosifen to durian, as both have a pungent odor and a loyal following.

Despite its popularity, for decades this local delicacy remained popular only within Liuzhou. It was in the early 2010s that Liuzhou's local government and businesses began to see the potential of luosifen and started to explore possibilities for maximizing its value.

From one bowl to a billion

In 2011, the Liuzhou local government initiated a project to begin opening luosifen restaurants in Beijing. Chen Wei, a luosifen restaurant owner in Liuzhou, opened his first Beijing branch in a bustling area of the city. In contrast to the many small and shabby hole-in-the-wall shops serving the dish in Liuzhou, Chen made a higher investment in design and interior decoration for his Beijing restaurant with the intention of creating a clean and modern image for luosifen.

The appearance of luosifen in the highly acclaimed 2012 food documentary, A Bite of China, gave the snack the push it needed to achieve nationwide fame, which in turn gave Chen the confidence to promote the dish more assertively. His ambition at the time was to open 1,000 branches in Beijing. However, the profits he made with his first restaurant barely covered the high rent he paid in China's capital and, finally, he closed the restaurant in 2016.

"Unlike other restaurant chains that serve food made with pre-prepared or semi-prepared ingredients, in those days luosifen couldn't be prepared and packaged in advance. Each bowl of noodles needed to be boiled one after another, which had a big impact on efficiency," Chen said.

Yan Zhenhua, who at the time ran a store selling local specialty food near the Liuzhou Railway Station, also discovered a limitation on the luosifen business caused by packaging. "Many tourists who visit Liuzhou love to eat luosifen and want to take it home with them when they leave. Unfortunately, at the time we were unable to sell it as a packaged product," Yan told the People's Daily.

Yan began contacting manufacturers that had the capacity to produce packaged luosifen, and after many rounds of development and trials, succeeded in producing a packaged product that maintained the original flavor. In 2014, Liuzhou's local government granted its first permit for packaged luosifen production. With that, the first packaged luosifen company in Liuzhou was established, putting the industry on the fast track.

The development of e-commerce and online food shows fuels further enthusiasm for local food. Li Ziqi, an online celebrity with over 100 million followers worldwide shared a video of her making luosifen at home in 2019, making the dish even more popular.

The arrival of COVID-19 gave a massive boost to the sales of luosifen in China. According to data from Tmall and Taobao, both e-commerce platforms under the Alibaba Group, the sales volume of luosifen in 2020 was 15 times more than that of 2019, with the number of customers growing nine times year on year. The largest group of customers was those born between 1990 and 2000.

"Currently, the production of packaged luosifen must follow a comprehensive set of standards," said Ni Diaoyang, head of the Liuzhou Luosifen Association and director of the Luosifen Museum in Liuzhou. Ni revealed that in recent years, Liuzhou has built industrial parks for luosifen production and e-commerce parks, attracting more than 100 companies in the fields of raw materials supply, processing, e-commerce, and logistics and delivery.

Now, more than 100 companies in Liuzhou engage in the production of packaged luosifen. The number of luosifen restaurants around China has now reached 18,000, up from 5,000 a decade ago.

This mass industrialized production of luosifen is having a positive impact not only on local businesses, but also on local farmers, with a new facility for the purchase and distribution of raw materials resulting in standardized pricing, better handling of produce and decreased wastage of raw materials. "The luosifen raw material base in Liuzhou has increased incomes for around 200,000 farmers," Ni said.

During this year's five-day May Day holiday, Liuzhou received more tourists than any other destination in Guangxi. Most of the tourists visiting the city did so to try genuine luosifen, with every restaurant packed and with long lines at every door.

Street food is big business

In May, the processes involved in preparing luosifen were included on the Fifth National List of Representative Elements of Intangible Cultural Heritage of China.

Additionally, the processes of preparing two other local delicacies, Shaxian snacks from Fujian Province and hulatang, or hot pepper soup, from Henan Province have both been added to the same list of intangible cultural heritage.

Both Shaxian snacks and hulatang were originally developed by street vendors, but each developed in very different ways. Locals from Shaxian County in southeast China's Fujian Province began opening up branches of Shaxian snack eateries in the early 1990s and in 1997, the local government established the Shaxian Snacks Bureau with the aim of unifying, standardizing and modernizing operations at the restaurants.

The menus in each Shaxian snack eatery around China are not identical, but all include noodles, wontons, steamed dumplings, and fried rice cooked in traditional Shaxian style. There are now eateries of Shaxian snacks in 62 countries and regions, with its trademark registration approved in eight countries.

Hulatang has a much longer history, dating back to the Song Dynasty (960-1279). With over 20 ingredients, including beef, mutton or pork, pepper and chili powder, vermicelli, eggs, bone soup, it has long been a traditional breakfast food for people in Henan Province.

Over the centuries, the soup has continued to evolve, with different recipes emerging in different places. It is the method of preparation used in Xiaoyang Town in Henan's Zhoukou City that has been placed on the list of China's national intangible cultural heritage.

Gao Qunsheng, head of the Hulatang Association of Xiaoyang Township, has been making and selling hulatang for over 40 years, and has opened over 200 hulatang shops around China.

After graduating from college, Gao's son, Gao Peng, chose to return to his hometown to help run the family business. Gao revealed that there are now more than 4,200 hulatang shops nationwide, all opened by people from Xiaoyang Town, and that these shops employ over 26,000 people.

"Hulatang still needs to gain more popularity, especially among youngsters," Gao Peng said. "I hope through our efforts, more customers will be able to enjoy the taste of genuine hulatang." 

(Print Edition Title: The Savory List）

Copyedited by G.P. Wilson

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