10 traditional Shanghai sweets you should know
Ranked by how distinctly Shanghainese they are — treats you can't get done quite like this anywhere else.
Lotus root has nine hollow channels running through it lengthwise — a natural mould. Glutinous rice is packed tightly into every channel, then the whole root is braised until the lotus turns tender but retains a faint bite and the rice is fully cooked through. Sliced into rounds, each cross-section reveals a mosaic of white rice set in the pale lotus flesh. Then comes the osmanthus syrup — made from the small amber flowers that perfume Shanghai's old lanes every autumn — poured warm over the top. The result is floral, gently sweet, cool and deeply calming. Served as a cold starter or dessert at classic Shanghainese restaurants.
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Tangyuan are glutinous rice balls filled with ground black sesame, lard and rock sugar — the filling is dark and smooth, almost ganache-like, with a deep nutty sweetness. Served in a ginger and rock-sugar broth that is warming and gently spiced, they are one of the great cold-weather comfort foods. But ask for leisha yuan and you get the Shanghainese version: the cooked rice balls are lifted from the water and rolled in a mixture of toasted soybean flour and ground sesame until coated in a dry, dark, deeply fragrant powder. Served without broth. The outside is dry; the inside, when you bite through, is silky and molten. Both are traditional at the Lantern Festival but sold year-round in Shanghai.
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Every year around late March, Shanghai turns briefly green — not from the trees, but from qingtuan appearing in the windows of every traditional pastry shop. The colour comes from freshly pressed mugwort (艾草, aicao) juice mixed into glutinous rice flour; it is an unmistakable jade green, not dye. The classic filling is sweetened red-bean paste, smooth and subtly earthy. Bite through and you hit the filling at the same moment as the clean, grassy scent of the mugwort dough. Modern variants — salted egg yolk and pork floss, taro cream, matcha custard — exist and sell briskly, but the original red-bean version is the one with 1,500 years of history behind it. Tied to the Qingming (Tomb-Sweeping) festival, which falls in early April.
"Eight treasures" is not a metaphor: eight different dried fruits and seeds — dates, sesame, lotus seeds, water chestnuts, goji berries, job's tears, peanuts, raisins (the exact combination varies by shop and family) — are pressed in concentric rings onto the inside of a bowl, then packed with glutinous rice cooked with lard and sugar, then steamed until the whole dome holds together. Inverted onto a plate, it looks almost too pretty to eat. In the centre, a core of sweet red-bean paste. The flavour is rich but not heavy, with the different fruits providing occasional pops of sweetness and chew against the sticky rice. A fixture at New Year's Eve tables and wedding banquets in Shanghai for hundreds of years.
Walk past Shen Da Cheng on Nanjing East Road and you will see them in the glass case: finger-length rolls the colour of pale café au lait, smooth-surfaced and unassuming. This is tiaotougao — a cylinder of glutinous rice dough that has been mixed, kneaded by hand and wrapped around a core of smooth red-bean paste. The dough is soft and slightly chewy without being sticky on the fingers; the filling is sweet with a faint bitterness from the adzuki beans. Shen Da Cheng has been making this by hand since the Qing Dynasty, and in 2024 the pastry-making craft was formally listed as a Shanghai Intangible Cultural Heritage item. Eat it while still warm.
Families in old Shanghai sent these to children before examinations, believing the name — which sounds like "certain to succeed" in Chinese — would help. The cake is made from a mixture of rice flour and glutinous rice flour, coloured a gentle pink-orange with brown sugar or natural colouring, then steamed in wooden moulds carved with spring blossoms or lucky motifs. The result is a modest, honest thing: pale pink, faintly sweet, with the clean fragrance of steamed rice and a soft, slightly crumbly texture. No complex filling, no glaze — just a cake that means something to the people who grew up eating it. Found at festival stalls and traditional shops around the old city, particularly when families are visiting the temple.
A Shanghainese invention with no obvious equivalent elsewhere in China. The glutinous rice skin wraps two concentric layers of filling rather than one: the outer layer is typically smooth red-bean paste, and the inner layer is ground black sesame mixed with sugar — so each bite begins with red bean and ends with a richer, darker sesame note. Some versions coat the outside in toasted soybean powder, adding another layer of nutty fragrance. The skin is thin and elastic, yielding cleanly when bitten. This is the kind of thing you find in the side-street shops that don't advertise online and have been in the same neighbourhood for decades rather than in modern mall food courts.
Small amber-brown candies made by boiling pear juice with a blend of Chinese medicinal herbs — dried tangerine peel, asparagus root, fragrant rush — then pouring the syrup into moulds to set. The original recipe comes from a Tang Dynasty (seventh century) physician who prescribed pear syrup to Emperor Taizong for a cough. Shanghainese people eventually started making and eating them because they taste good, not because they were sick. The flavour is sweet up front, then cool and slightly bitter from the herbs, with a faint mintiness on the finish. They are sold in decorative tins and beautifully wrapped boxes throughout the Yu Garden area — one of the best portable souvenirs Shanghai produces.
Gaoqiao is a small historic town on the eastern bank of the Yangtze estuary, and it gave Shanghai one of its most beloved pastries. The songbing is a layered shortcrust-style pastry baked until golden, with distinct papery flakes that separate when you bite — but lighter and more airy than a Western shortbread, closer to a dry puff pastry without the butteriness. Fillings include sweet red bean, black sesame, peanut paste or savoury pork. The flavour is clean and not too sweet; the crumb falls gently. Think of it as the Shanghainese version of a mooncake, but made year-round and meant for everyday eating rather than ceremony. Gift boxes of twelve make excellent souvenirs.
Imagine a silken tofu that has been given ambition. Glutinous rice flour, sugar and osmanthus syrup are combined and steamed in a flat-bottomed tin until they set into a pale amber jelly that trembles when you carry the plate to the table. Cut into rectangular portions and drizzled with a little more osmanthus syrup, the texture is between a set panna cotta and a very soft rice cake — smooth on the tongue, with a clean sweetness and the unmistakable floral perfume of the osmanthus running through every bite. Cool rather than cold, it ends a meal gently without announcing itself. Standard at the dessert end of a classic Shanghainese dinner.