Great Wall Biscuit: "Mountain Snack" becomes a rich cake

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(Video reporter: Zhang Shuo, reporter: Zhang Chen)

Shijiazhuang, 6 Oct (Xinhua) -- After smearing corn starch paste and filling, pieces of palm-sized alder leaves are folded in half into a sheet of oak leaf cakes, and after simple modification by scissors, they become beautiful "yuanbao". In the "Mulan Food" production workshop in the harbor area of Qinhuangdao City, Hebei Province, workers are busy with Mid-Autumn Festival National Day orders from all over the world.

"We've been working overtime since mid-September, and now our daily production has increased from 1.5t to 3t." Yang Guiyun, head of the enterprise, said.

In the villages along the Great Wall of Qinhuangdao, there has always been a custom of eating queer leaf cakes during the Dragon Boat Festival. With the improvement of living conditions, nowadays, the leaf cake is no longer limited to the Dragon Boat Festival and has become a special snack.

"The old people in the village said that eating queer leaf cakes is a tradition left here by our ancestors in Yiwu, Zhejiang Province." Yang Guiyun told reporters while making biscuits with workers.

In the first year of Ming Longqing, the border pass was in a hurry. In order to resist the strong enemies in the north who constantly attacked the border, the imperial court urgently transferred Qi Jiguang to the north and served as the commander-in-chief of Jizhen, shouldering the heavy responsibility of defending the Beijing Division. Accompanying Qi Jiguang to the north were the "Yiwu soldiers" recruited and trained in Yiwu, Zhejiang Province, when he fought against the Wokou, known in history as the "Qi Family Army".

It is not known how many "Yiwu soldiers" went north with Qi Jiguang at that time, but only along the 223.1-kilometer-long Ming Great Wall in Qinhuangdao, there were 158 natural villages with descendants of "Yiwu soldiers". Yang Guiyun's Qianshuiying South Village is one of them.

More than 400 years later, the smoke of the past has long gone, leaving only the majestic Great Wall winding and undulating in the lofty mountains, accompanied by the oak trees that spread over the mountains.

Quercus tree, scientific name quercus tree, is widely distributed on the slopes along the Great Wall, and the leaves are wide and soft, fragrant and non-toxic. According to legend, the "Yiwu soldiers" guarding the Great Wall missed the rice dumplings in the south, but suffered from the lack of suitable ingredients, so they invented the alder leaf cake from local materials.

Ji Yang, a professor at Northeastern University Qinhuangdao Branch, said that the biscuit is a very distinctive food along the Great Wall of Qinhuangdao, a combination between rice dumplings in the south and dumplings in the north, reflecting the fusion of food culture in the north and the south.

Yang Guiyun shows off the finished biscuit. (Courtesy of the interviewee)

For hundreds of years, the descendants of "Yiwu Bing" have flourished in villages along the Great Wall, and although the accent and customs have changed dramatically, the habit of eating biscuit has been inherited and has become a link between themselves and their ancestors.

Yang Guiyun, who has failed to start a business many times, found a business opportunity in 2005 from the well-known local people' alder leaf cake. She wanted to turn this "mountain snack" into a rich cake.

However, the process of promoting the biscuit is not easy. "In order to save costs when starting a business, I went to pick the leaves by myself, and I don't know how many times I slipped from the mountain." Yang Guiyun said that when selling biscuits in major hotels, it is even more difficult to encounter walls everywhere.

With tenacious persistence, Yang Guiyun finally succeeded in opening the market and put the originally unknown alder leaf cake on the table of the local restaurant. After years of development, Yang Guiyun's corporate sales reached 21 million yuan in 2019, and the products have also developed from the initial single alder leaf cake to more than ten types such as sticky bean buns, wild vegetable dumplings, mixed grain nests, and scallop cakes.

"A person is not rich, I want to lead the villagers to get rich together." Nowadays, Yang Guiyun's enterprise not only absorbs more than 30 people for a long time, but also drives 200 surrounding farmers to develop planting, with an average annual income of 1500 yuan to 2000 yuan per household.

Zhao Cuiyun, a 64-year-old villager in Qianshuiying South Village, has been working as a farmer at home for a long time, and his income after a year of hard work was only 4,000 to 5,000 yuan. Ten years ago, she came to Yang Guiyun's company to make biscuits, and now she earns 2,000 yuan per month, which can take care of her family and work in the field without delay.

With the success of Yang Guiyun's career, the fame of the alder leaf cake has also become more and more famous, and it has become a business card of the local Great Wall special cuisine. Farms along the Great Wall in Qinhuangdao have launched biscuits, and this originally inconspicuous "mountain snack" has become a must-order food for tourists.

Yang Guiyun plans to use webcasting to promote the Great Wall cuisine of Qinhuangdao to more places. "I hope that one day I can sell the biscuit leaf cake to Yiwu, Zhejiang Province, so that this special snack will become a new link between our generation and Yiwu." She said.