Xitang Eight-Treasure Cake

Eight-Treasure Cake is a traditional Xitang medicinal pastry, made by steaming glutinous and non-glutinous rice flours with sugar and eight Chinese herbs including yam, poria, job's-tears, malt and gorgon seed; it is pale gold, soft and chewy, with a faint herbal and rice fragrance.

The cake was created around the late Qing dynasty by Zhong Daosun, founder of Xitang's Zhong Jiefu Tang pharmacy, who adapted the "Eight-Immortal Cake" formula from the Ming-dynasty surgeon Chen Shigong's Orthodox Manual of External Medicine and added his own clinical insight; it takes its name from the eight herbs within, and folk saying pairs it with Beijing's poria cake.

Eight-Treasure Cake is mostly taken as a teatime or table-side snack, sliced and shared while still soft, gently sweet and never cloying with its soft herbal note; it is also eaten as a daily tonic for the digestion and is a must-bring treat for visitors to Xitang.

Its food-as-medicine philosophy, the delicate herbal aroma of eight ingredients, and the century-old fame of the "Eight-Treasure Cake of the South" set it apart from pastries elsewhere.