Eating Up the Landscape in Guangxi...

Once a sleepy village on the banks of the Li River, Yangshuo is now a bustling city at the center of Guangxi’s famous scenery: preposterous, steep karst formations that rise from rivers and rice paddies. What might seem stylized to the point of surrealism in ink paintings is revealed as (almost) faithful representation. And the dining options in this landscape? From the water come fish, frogs, turtles, shrimp, crawfish, snails, ducks, and other fare. Game includes bamboo pigs and pheasants. We scared up one of the latter from the brush as we rode our bikes along a dirt track. While water buffalo still work the paddies, domestic livestock are often what we would call “free range” and must thrive on human scraps, scavenging, and hunting: chickens, pigs, goats, and, yes, dogs. The latter are a specialty item in local restaurants, and you would be as likely served a marbled filet mignon instead of ground meat—and everything else—in a cheap burger as have canine surreptitiously foisted upon you. Still, the legend persists: in a familiar pattern, a well-traveled engineer on a mini-bus with us supposes that he has doubtless unwittingly eaten dog many times. No, the simple fact is that you have to order and pay for it. But while grazing cows do not make sense here, we discovered that since our last visit to Yangshuo several years ago a well-known American fast food chain has set up shop, where it adds to its running total of billions of burgers sold. The choice is yours….

One of the famed dishes in the region is “beer fish,” and—as you would guess—it is fish cooked in beer (speaking of which, the local beer, Liquan 灕原, takes its name from the limpid Li and is brewed with its waters). While ordering some “beer fish” is de rigueur, we might suggest another item that is just as ubiquitous on menus but infinitely better: stuffed rice paddy snails. The snails themselves are about the size of the common French land variety (Helix pomatia)—the same pesky type that now slither onto the sidewalks in Southern California when the marine layer moves in—but the shells are black. The meat is removed, chopped, pork and fat added, along with mint and other herbs, everything stuffed into the shells and cooked in a rich sauce. Some differences in seasoning aside—soy sauce mainly—this dish would be right at home in, say, Provence, Burgundy, or Périgord. Other striking parallels between this part of Guangxi and the French countryside abound, such as preserved duck and, of course, frogs. The reasons are simple: climate, land, and a catholic palate, today less driven by necessity but no less appreciated for that.

Rice Paddies and Karst Mountains

Freshwater Snails

Freshwater Eels

Local fare in a Yangshuo restaurant

Stir-fried Frog with Garlic Stems and Hot Peppers

Stuffed Snails... artfully blurred

Preserved Duck