Eating in Guizhou Province, China

In August 2014, Emmett and I flew to China to the city of Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou province.

In Guiyang, we stayed with a friend and his family and had a wonderful time for so many reasons. One of those reasons is the food. Everything we ate in China was excellent. It not only tasted delicious but varied greatly in flavor, texture, and seasoning. One of the best ways I can demonstrate this to you is by sharing pictures of the street food we encountered in our travels around Guizhou. Most of the pictures below are of food we ate, but in some cases they're pictures of food we saw for sale but did not eat. Feast your eyes on the street food of Guizhou.

Food from street vendors was often placed directly into a small plastic bag like this one. Here Emmett is holding out our breakfast on one of the first days we were in Guiyang. Our breakfast-to-go was onion, seaweed bits, lotus root, and peppers pan fried with rice and soy sauce.

A cart offering Tanghulu in Qianling Park. Tanghulu is just candied hawthorn berries on a kebab. We almost cracked our teeth on these, but they were still pretty tasty.

Big blocks of slightly blackened tofu for sale in the pedestrian streets of Qingyan Ancient Town.

A man sells slices of sweetened dried yams among other treats in Qingyan Ancient Town.

Qingyan’s pig’s feet and fried fish on offer in the ancient town. In Guizhou, pig's feet symbolize good luck.

It was a very hot day when we visited Qingyan. To quench our growing thirst, we stopped at this stand and got some bayberry juice. It was perfect: tart and refreshing.

We each had a bowl of this. I can't recall the name. It was dessert, a thick sugary soup with sweetened rice cake balls within and peanuts & sesame seeds on top.

One of the most common street cart foods in the province was sunflower seeds sold still in the flower.

A woman in a small open kitchen down one of the many back alleys in Zhijin had us help her make these little rice cakes filled with powdered red beans and sugar.

On the left is something we had a few times while in Guizhou: ice jelly with peanuts. Ice jelly consists of frozen gelatin suspended in sweetened iced tea. Just behind the ice jelly is the only thing we ate that I didn't like much: cold, gelatinous noodles sliced off of a loaf. Emmett thinks it may have been a type of tofu. Below the unappetizing loaf noodles is a spicy dipping sauce with onion and peanuts.

This was so good! Thick rice noodles with soy sauce and vinegar, topped with green onion, cooked fresh peanuts, and an egg that had been marinated in soy sauce. I was really a fan of the way many of the noodle dishes that we ate used peanuts. Not roasted peanuts like I was previously used to but sauteed fresh peanuts. Wonderful.

I wish I'd gotten a better picture of this, my favorite Guiyang city street food. Crispy, greasy, fried onion and sesame seed pancakes. A bag of these cost less than an American dollar.

One day we visited Zhijing, a Miao settlement surrounded by rice paddies in the lush green mountains of Guizhou. We saw quite a few women making and selling rice cakes. They'd put freshly boiled glutinous rice into these wooden containers and mash it until it was really sticky. Then they'd roll it into a ball in sugar and stuff the center with sweetened red bean powder and more sugar. Voila, another take on the rice cake.