MUZIChinese Matrix
Pastries · FFET10155
Beijing's wandouhuang: yellow peas cooked soft and set with sugar into small, cool, sweet and smooth cakes.
A small white porcelain plate holds a ring of pale butter-yellow square pea cakes with sharp edges, smooth, fine-textured cut faces and a faint sheen, with two chopsticks resting beside the plate diagonally to its right.
Cakes and pastries of every kind, baked, steamed or fried.
Wandouhuang is a Beijing snack of yellow peas cooked soft, set with sugar into a slab and cut into pieces, smooth in texture, cool and sweet. A coarse folk version was sold at temple fairs as a spring food, while the palace kitchen made a finer one. No dated record was found, and the claim that it was well known in the Ming lacks a citation, so it is not adopted.
Wandouhuang is a Beijing snack: a pale-yellow, smooth slab made from yellow peas cooked soft and set with sugar, cool and sweet, eaten in cut pieces.1,2,3
Wandouhuang is a spring food, eaten in Beijing around the 3rd day of the 3rd lunar month; the Pantao Palace temple fair near Dongbianmen had many pea-cake stalls. No dated record was found: the fair is placed in the Ming, Qing and Republic periods without a specific year, and the unsupported claim that the snack was well known in the Ming is not adopted.1,3
Beijing. A July 5, 2018 account describes the coarse folk version with jujubes, called cao wandouhuang'r, sold from barrows at temple fairs; the palace kitchen refined it into xi wandouhuang'r.2
Peas are soaked and boiled soft, mashed or sieved, then cooked with sugar until a cut leaves a mark, poured into a mold, chilled until set, and cut. The palace version used white peas and a finer sieve.1,2,3,4,5
Wandouhuang is a seasonal spring food, cool and sweet. The available material gives no further reason, so none is inferred.1
It is still sold by old Beijing snack houses and a specialist shop. An August 4, 2025 article lists the pea cake at Huguosi Snacks as a must-try; an August 2 article names a shop on Huguosi Street selling only pea cake. A September 4, 2025 report includes pea cake in Kao Rou Ji's Beijing snack afternoon set. The claim that it is getting harder to find comes from a short entry based on just 1 report from 2019.1,6,7,8
Legend has it that one summer, resting at the Jingxin Studio in Beihai, the Empress Dowager Cixi heard a vendor crying pea cake and kidney-bean rolls. She called him in, liked what he made, and kept him in the palace to cook them.
Told in: A Beijing folk tale, told in a Beijing Tourism article of July 5, 2018 and retold as a legend by English Wikipedia. No dated palace record was found.
Grandma Li
This is a simplified home version, not the traditional restaurant method.
This is the simpler way I make it at home: dried split yellow peas from the supermarket, not the white peas of the palace version, puréed in a blender jar without an extra fine sieve. The amounts of peas and sugar follow one of the recipes, and the timings are my own choices at home, informed by two published recipes. They disagree on how long the peas take to cook, so I go by the peas being soft enough to crush at a pinch.
Grandpa Li
Picks come from public lists and guides and were checked on the dates shown; places can change, so confirm before you go.
Beijing, Huguosi Street
Order: Wandouhuang (pea cake)
A Beijing Tourism article of August 4, 2025 about the snacks of Huguosi Street lists the pea cake here among the must-try snacks. If you want to taste Beijing pea cake, I would start here.
Checked on 2026-11-02
Beijing, Huguosi Street
Order: Wandouhuang (pea cake)
In a Beijing Tourism list of Huguosi Street shops dated August 2, 2025, one shop sells nothing but pea cake. If you want pea cake and nothing else, this is the place to look.
Checked on 2026-11-02
Beijing, Shichahai
Order: Wandouhuang in the Beijing snack afternoon set
The Beijing Daily Group's Jingbao reported on September 4, 2025 that Kao Rou Ji at Shichahai offers a Beijing snack afternoon set that includes pea cake and aiwowo. If you want to taste several Beijing snacks in one sitting, consider it; the pea cake is just one item in the set.
Checked on 2026-11-02
