DongguanTravel Budget Guide

Houjie town's most iconic everyday dish: golden roast goose laid over silver-white lai fun rice noodles in broth, known as "golden goose, silver noodles."

A famed speciality of Dongguan's Daojiao town, a wrapped zongzi of late-crop glutinous rice, salted egg yolk, pork belly and mung bean, hailed as the "finest zongzi under heaven."

Dongguan's most widespread everyday fast meal: slow-braised melting trotters over white rice, drenched in rich gravy, the daily taste of the working city.

A water-town speciality of Dongguan's Daojiao, fresh hand-pounded pork meatballs simmered in congee so the rice is fragrant and the meat bright, a homely taste of the riverside villages.

A celebrated dish of Dongguan's Tangxia town: a whole goose first seared then braised in a rich dark sauce, where Hakka and Cantonese flavours meet.

A traditional Dongguan sweet: cooked glutinous rice balls coated in syrup and crushed peanut, soft, chewy and fragrant, a classic of Cantonese dessert houses.

A vast lantern said to have been first built by the Zhao clan of Dongguan, descendants of the Song imperial house, in the early Yuan dynasty, with a thousand horns and twenty-four streamers, remade only once a decade and hailed as the "first lantern of China."

The traditional qilin dance of Zhangmutou, Dongguan's only Hakka town, brought by Hakka settlers in the late Ming and early Qing with a lineage of over four hundred and fifty years.

The dragon-boat building craft of Dongguan's Zhongtang town, passed down for over three hundred years, producing the willow-leaf-shaped "big-head dragon," the lifeblood of the "hometown of Chinese dragon boats."

The annual dragon-boat racing folklore of Dongguan's water towns, starting from Wanjiang and spreading across the towns in a month-long "dragon boat season," a national-level folklore item.

A narrative-singing art of the Cantonese-speaking Lingnan region, declared from Dongguan, once mostly performed by blind singers and popularly called "blind men's song."