Artemisia and cured pork is the spring dish of Jiangxi, and the signature of Nanchang's table. Li hao — the tender stems of marshland artemisia (Artemisia selengensis, a riverside cousin of mugwort) gathered wild from the Poyang Lake shallows — is cut into short jade-green batons and stir-fried hot and fast with thin slices of home-smoked cured pork. The lake-plant snaps crisp and carries a clean, cool, faintly medicinal fragrance found in nothing else; the cured pork brings smoke, salt, and rendered fat that slicks each stem. Local people say it plainly: 'grass from Poyang Lake, treasure on the Nanchang table.' The window is short — the best stems come only in early spring, before the plant toughens — which is exactly why the dish tastes like the season. It was named one of Jiangxi's ten great Gan dishes in 2021.
Marshland artemisia is an old plant — it appears in the Book of Songs and other classics under the name fan — but as a dish, artemisia with cured pork is a Poyang Lake foodway, said to have begun with the lake's fishing families, who gathered the wild stems from the shallows and turned them into a stir-fry that gradually spread inland to Nanchang and beyond. A folk tradition holds that the Tang calligrapher Yan Zhenqing, while serving as prefect at nearby Raozhou, took a liking to the plant; the story is charming but unverifiable, and the dish itself is better understood as country cooking risen to fame than as anyone's invention. What is documented is its modern stature: it was served on a 2008 Beijing Olympics menu and listed in 2021 among Jiangxi's ten famous Gan dishes. The plant's brief spring season is the whole reason it is prized — Nanchang eats it fresh, while it lasts.
The first thing is the snap — the stems break crisp and stay crisp through the wok, juicy and watery-fresh inside. Then the fragrance hits, cool and green and faintly bitter-medicinal, like a hill herb, unlike any ordinary vegetable. The cured pork is the counterweight: chewy, deeply smoky and salty, its fat half-melted and glossing the stems so the plant's edge of bitterness rounds into something savoury. There is almost no sauce — a sheen of pork fat, a little chili and garlic — so what you taste is the clean clash of crisp wild stem against rich smoked meat. It begs for a bowl of plain white rice.
This dish lives or dies on heat and timing. The artemisia stems are mostly water held in a crisp, fibrous structure; a few seconds too long in the wok and the cells rupture, the water weeps out, and crisp turns to limp and grey. So the cooking order is deliberate: the cured pork goes in first over a moderate flame to render its fat and release its smoke into the oil, then the heat is cranked high and the stems go in for a hard, fast toss of well under a minute — long enough to heat through and wilt slightly, not long enough to collapse. Curing and smoking the pork beforehand is what concentrates its flavour: salting draws out moisture and the smoke lays down aromatic phenols, so even thin slices carry enough savour and rendered fat to season the whole pan. A pinch of salt is usually all that's added, since the pork is already salty; the wok's own scorching heat does the rest.
Variations
Cooks differ on the pork: home-smoked cured pork belly is classic, but some use cured pork jowl or lean-and-fat slices, and a leaner version skips the meat for a plain stir-fry of artemisia with dried tofu or pressed bean curd. Dried, smoked bean curd in place of or alongside the pork is common in the lake towns. The artemisia is sometimes blanched briefly first to soften the bitterness, though purists keep it raw into the wok for maximum crispness. Fresh red chili adds colour and warmth; the dish is rarely made truly hot, since the plant's clean fragrance is the point.
On the Palate
Where Artemisia and Cured Pork sits in the Chinese flavor cloud
Render the cured pork first to smoke the oil, then blast the artemisia over the highest heat for under a minute — a second too long and the crisp stems weep water and go limp and grey.
Ingredients
Serves 3How it's made
6 steps · 15 min
- 120 min
Steam the cured pork until just translucent, then slice thin against the grain.
- 25 min
Pick over the artemisia, keeping only the tender stems; cut into short batons and rinse.
- 33 min
Heat a wok dry, then add a little oil and the cured pork; render over medium heat until the fat turns clear and the edges curl.
Watch outRender until the fat goes clear and glassy and the pork edges curl — that's when the oil is smoky enough.
- 41 min
Add sliced chili and garlic and stir until fragrant.
- 51 min
Crank the heat to high, tip in the artemisia stems, and toss hard and fast for under a minute.
Watch outFlame at its highest, keep the stems moving — under a minute, just wilted, still vivid green.
- 61 min
Season with a pinch of salt and a splash of light soy, give a final toss, and plate at once while the stems are still bright green.
Watch outPlate the instant it's seasoned; sitting in the hot wok will steam the green out of it.
