海陸豐小吃：百種粿，一碗茶Hailufeng on a Plate: a Hundred Kinds of Kueh, One Bowl of Tea

\[Zheng Ge's Take\] Column: Zheng Ge's blog commentary | Date: 2026-11-04

Erma Road is an old street in Shanwei's urban district. Walk into it at night and the steam from the baskets rises in layers — vegetable kueh, xiaomi dumplings, beef patties, thin pancakes; the whole street smells of food. When Shanwei people talk about eating, they are never talking about expense. They are talking about handwork. Hailufeng's snacks are famous not because of how many celebrated shops there are, but because the women of this place can each make several kinds of kueh.

1. The base of a hundred snacks: starting from the sacrificial kueh

Xu Yuhang wrote a piece called 'Traditional Snacks of Hailufeng' for the Shanwei Daily, republished on the municipal government portal, and it opens plainly: Hailufeng snacks are varied and complete in range, using rice, wheat, tubers, beans, vegetables, herbs, meat and fish, with rice flour and sweet-potato flour as the signature. The origin, it says, is the sacrificial offering 'kueh' — also called 'ban' — set out for the gods and the ancestors.

The same piece says there are no fewer than a hundred kinds of snack in Shanwei; women commonly know how to make several, from rice flour (glutinous and ordinary) and sweet-potato flour, in savoury and sweet versions, divided into 'festival kueh' and 'everyday kueh'. That sentence already explains why you cannot eat this once you leave the province: one kind follows the ritual calendar, the other follows the household. Neither follows a menu.

The items that have broken out are named in the report as five: Haifeng xiaomi dumplings, Haifeng vegetable tea, Haifeng beef patty, Luhe oil tea and Meilong vegetable kueh. The snack street on Erma Road in the urban district has become famous as a whole, and Lufeng has simply packaged its own into a single brand, 'the taste of Lufeng'.

Source: 汕尾日報《【家鄉風物】海陸豐傳統小吃》（許宇航），2025-02-08（汕尾市人民政府門戶轉載） | https://www.shanwei.gov.cn/shanwei/swly/swtc/content/post_1122072.html

2. Xiaomi dumplings and vegetable kueh: the precision of a hand movement

Xiaomi is really a sweet-potato dumpling, known locally as 'gaozai'. Where the name comes from is a guess the report offers: it may relate to the Cantonese pronunciation of the dim sum 'siu mai', since both are little cloth-bag shapes. The difference is that siu mai is left open at the top, while xiaomi is pinched shut — and the wrapper is swapped for sweet-potato flour.

The method is set out concretely: sweet-potato flour is scalded with boiling water and kneaded into a dough for the wrapper; pork belly is minced and seasoned with salt, soy sauce and 'tiepu' (dried flatfish) powder for the filling; the dumplings are pinched into shape and steamed for about ten minutes, then brushed with oiled water as the lid comes off. They come out translucent and springy, and the standard accompaniment is a small dish of oyster sauce. In Haifeng, xiaomi is eaten with beef patty — flat, hand-beaten, its broth finished with white pepper.

Vegetable kueh is most famous in Meilong, Haifeng; in Gongping the same thing becomes a triangular kueh, different in shape and heavier on meat. In the past it was made only for the eight festivals of the year, and it doubled as a 'mianqian' — a gift to bring when visiting. The skill is all in the wrapper: ordinary rice flour is poured into boiling water with a little salt and oil, stirred to a paste, then kneaded by hand in a basin and rolled into round 'kueh blanks'. The blank sits in the left palm while the right hand takes a clay ball called a 'kuelin' and runs it in a full circle over the dough, pressing it into a thin concave shell.

The filling runs through shredded radish, cabbage, bean sprouts, jicama, celery, garlic, diced pork, dried squid, dried shrimp, peanuts and dried flatfish powder. The whole thing is folded into a spindle, pinched at both ends, laid in order on a bamboo 'langbu' rack and steamed hard over a fierce flame, then brushed with raw oil, scattered with coriander and eaten hot. By filling it divides into vegetable and fish versions — the fish one made with grey mullet, famous from Jinpanwei.

Source: 汕尾日報《【家鄉風物】海陸豐傳統小吃》（許宇航），2025-02-08；海豐縣人民政府門戶《海豐特色小吃三劍客之小米、牛肉餅、菜粿！》，2019-05-15 | http://www.gdhf.gov.cn/gdhf/zjhf/yswh/content/post_263869.html

3. Vegetable tea: a bowl with time inside it

Vegetable tea used to exist for one month a year only, at its height around the Lantern Festival, and was called fried dice tea. The makings are pork, sausage, fresh prawns, shredded squid, glass noodles, bean-curd sticks, white beans, red beans, wheat grains, spinach and snow peas, all cooked and cut to a size fit to lift with chopsticks, laid in a bowl, scattered with peanuts and puffed rice, then flooded with light tea or pork-bone broth and seasoned with white pepper. Among the Hakka, and around Gongping in Haifeng and Donghai in Lufeng, people add rice and call it rice tea.

The bowl has rules. In the old days, any household that had gained a son in the past year would invite the neighbours in over New Year to eat vegetable tea, which is why it is also called male-child tea; and guests would judge the host's generosity by how thick the bowl was with ingredients. In the Daoguang reign, Huang Hanzong, a Haifeng provincial graduate, wrote: Haifeng custom holds salted tea dear; the tooth-marked bowl is raised, one family together. Where else do you see the depth of a man's hospitality? Look how much sesame she lets fall.

Luhe runs it differently. On the seventh day of the new year they eat seven-vegetable tea, which by definition means gathering seven kinds of greens. Local custom holds that on the seventh you do not go out, on the eighth you do not come back, so nobody travelled on the seventh; once this bowl is finished the New Year is more or less over, and the eighth is when you may set off. There are two families of it: clear tea, or salted tea, made from pan-fired green tea, raw sesame and fried peanuts; and oil tea, where fresh mugwort, soft camphor leaf, perilla and pearl vegetable are blended, pan-fired, ground upright in a scored clay mortar and drunk with hot water, the liquor an apple green.

Source: 汕尾日報《【家鄉風物】海陸豐傳統小吃》（許宇航），2025-02-08；汕尾市人民政府《陸河擂茶（七樣菜茶）》，2024-04-19 | https://www.shanwei.gov.cn/slhwz/zjsw/content/post_1030227.html

4. After the crossing: item 3.57 on the list

Vegetable tea crossed the water. In May 2021 the Hong Kong Commercial Daily carried a piece by Yip Tak-ping setting it out: choi cha is entered in Hong Kong's first Intangible Cultural Heritage Inventory as item 3.57, described as Hailufeng and Hoklo families welcoming visiting relatives and friends with vegetable tea at Lunar New Year.

Hoklo, also written Hoklo and Holok, began as what Cantonese and Hakka people called Fujianese, and later came to mean specifically the people of parts of Huidong in Huizhou and of Shanwei's urban district, Haifeng and Lufeng who speak Hoklo. In 1895 E. J. Eitel, once a Hong Kong government officer, published Europe in China, in which he sorted the Chinese of Hong Kong Island and Kowloon into three races: Punti, Hakka and Hoklo. So by the end of the nineteenth century at the latest, Hoklo people were already in Hong Kong.

Between 1949 and 1970 large numbers came by boat and on foot, first settling around Sheung Wan, then in Shau Kei Wan, Lo Fu Ngam, Lam Tin, Kwun Tong Kai Liu, Tsz Wan Shan, Diamond Hill, Ngau Tau Kok and Chai Wan; Hoklo-speaking boat people went to Cheung Chau, Sam Mun Tsai and Aberdeen to fish. The report quotes a woman of Huidong descent saying she learned to make vegetable tea from her mother, who learned from her grandmother: it feels like the continuation of a family, and a kind of inheritance.

Source: 香港商報《海豐時俗尚鹹茶——福佬菜茶》（葉德平），2021-05-26 | https://www.hkcd.com.hk/content_app/2021-05/26/content_1270486.html

5. Zheng Ge's Take

First, the most valuable thing about these snacks is not the taste; it is that they are not standardised. Every household has its own recipe for vegetable tea; the same vegetable kueh is one shape in Meilong and another in Gongping. Standardisation exists precisely to erase that difference, which is why most Hailufeng vegetable kueh eaten elsewhere is only a shape.

Second, what stays with me is male-child tea and Huang Hanzong's poem. How much sesame went into a bowl was the ledger of human feeling in that year. Today you judge a host by the menu and the ratings; then, you judged by how heavy his hand was at the bottom of the bowl. Crude arithmetic, but real.

Third, vegetable tea making the heritage inventory is a good thing, but an inventory keeps the name, not the stove. What actually keeps it alive is that someone in the family is still willing to stand in the kitchen on the seventh day of the new year and fry all seven vegetables. No policy can do that for you.

One line to finish: Hailufeng snacks are not just food. They are a calendar written in rice and sweet-potato flour: which solar term calls for which kueh, which event calls for which bowl of tea, all of it accounted for. You think you are eating a piece of kueh; you are eating someone's way of keeping time.