The best xiaolongbao in Shanghai: where to eat soup dumplings in China’s biggest city

The dainty, soup-filled treats are served everywhere in China’s most glamorous city, but sampling the finest requires insider knowledge

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Guyi Garden in Nanxiang, Shanghai, where the first xiaolongbao were made, allegedly. Pictures: Valerie Teh

Published: 1:17pm, 30 Dec 2017Updated: 1:17pm, 30 Dec 2017

Legend has it that Huang Mingxian, owner of a snack shop and bakery in the village of Nanxiang, now part of Shanghai, set out to reimagine the meat-filled steamed buns he and his competitors were selling.

Travelling around Jiangsu province in search of inspiration, he discovered the soup-filled buns of Wuxi and Huaian, and thought up a few modifications. The result – golf ball-sized morsels of pork and hot soup encased in thin but sturdy dough – became Nanxiang-style xiaolongbao (“little steamer buns”).

That was way back, in the 19th century. Today, the site of Huang’s shop, in a corner of Nanxiang’s classical Guyi Garden, is packed with devotees who, like me, have come to pay their respects at the birthplace of the Shanghainese soup dumpling.

I order two baskets, one of the original xianrou pork dumplings and one of xiefen (crabmeat) xiaolongbao, trying to ignore the fact I have just challenged myself to eat 26 dumplings for breakfast (the xianrou come in a steamer of 16, the xiafen in portions of 10). In return for 60 yuan (US$9), I am given a handwritten pink receipt that I trade for well-worn bamboo steamers at another counter, and cross a high-ceilinged hall decked out in lacquer and red paper lanterns to find an empty seat at a large communal wooden table. The ambience is pure China, diners alternating between boisterous conversation and unashamed slurping.