Nanxiang — Where Xiaolongbao Actually Began

Every Shanghai visitor eventually eats xiaolongbao, the city's signature soup dumpling. What most don't realize is that the dish wasn't invented downtown — it traces back to Nanxiang, a town now inside Jiading District, close enough to Shanghai International Circuit to make a genuinely easy stop before or after a race weekend.

The dumpling itself dates to the 1870s, credited to a cook named Huang Mingxian, who reworked an older tradition of soup-filled buns into something more refined: a thinner wrapper wrapped around a filling built partly from solid pork-skin aspic that melts into liquid soup during steaming. The technique moved into central Shanghai by 1900, where the Nanxiang Steamed Bun Restaurant beside Yu Garden became the dish's most famous early home downtown — but Nanxiang itself, the actual town, is where the recipe started.

Nanxiang is one of Shanghai's oldest settlements, established during the Liang Dynasty in 505 AD, roughly 1,500 years before Formula 1 ever came to Shanghai. Its old town still has the twin pagodas and the classical Guyi Garden that give the area its character beyond the food. Behind Guyi Garden sits Guyi Garden Restaurant, founded in 1871 and still serving the same style of dumpling the town is known for — a real, working link to where xiaolongbao actually started, not a themed recreation.

This is a genuinely budget-friendly stop: dumplings are inexpensive street-level or casual-dining food across China, and Nanxiang's old town doesn't charge circuit-adjacent or tourist-trap prices for the privilege of eating where the dish began. Pair it with a walk through the old town itself and it's a half-day that costs very little and delivers a real piece of food history most race-weekend visitors to Shanghai never find.