Guilin Rice Noodle Making Technique

The Guilin rice-noodle making technique is a representative of China's traditional noodle crafts, founded in the old town of Guilin and concentrated across its six urban districts and eleven counties, with Yangshuo as a Guilin county lying within its area of practice. In 2010 it was entered into the third Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region ICH list, protected by a local Guilin enterprise.

The craft turns on hand-pressed noodles: the rice is soaked, milled, steamed, extruded and cooled into fine round resilient strands, then dressed with a master stock of several dozen secret spices, and inheritors can weigh more than twenty spices by hand with less than a gram of error, the point where the craft shows its precision.

Guilin rice noodles are the most everyday staple and cultural symbol of Guilin and Yangshuo; their making technique carries more than two thousand years of rice-food tradition and is a representative food heritage of Guangxi, an important sample for studying the rice-based food culture of the Lingnan region.