Mingjue Wind-dried Fish Making

Item name and level

Mingjue Wind-dried Fish Making appears in Appendix 2, the district-level ICH list, of the third batch of district-level ICH material; the appendix states that the list contains 22 items in total.

This entry records the level as district level and the batch as the third district-level batch, 2017 (Li Zheng Fa [2017] No. 197); the project number and the guardian unit are absent from the cited sources and remain to be verified.

As to "third batch", this library holds two documents that each style themselves the third batch: a 2017 district government notice (Li Zheng Fa [2017] No. 197), whose Appendix 2, the district-level ICH list of 22 items, includes this item; and a 2021 notice of the district government office (Li Zheng Ban Fa [2021] No. 3), whose Appendix 1, the third-batch list of district-level representative ICH items, contains six items and does not include this one. The two documents differ and this entry cites each as it stands without merging them. The difference affects the batch sequence, not the year: the notice relied on here is the one of 2017, whose document number Li Zheng Fa [2017] No. 197 and date, the twenty-second day of the eleventh month of 2017, are enough to fix the year, so the batch is filled in as the third district-level batch, 2017. The notice of 2021 remains recorded alongside, and the year is not changed on its account.

Place of transmission and the product

The item title carries the name Mingjue. According to a Lishui Fabu post, the wind-dried fish "is a local speciality of the Mingjue area right by Lake Shijiu, and also a Lishui ICH food"; the same and other reports place its drying and marketing in the Shiqiu Subdistrict area. A Xinhua Daily report of February 2026 places bearer Liu Wenju in Shiqiu Subdistrict, Lishui District, and names bream as the fish being processed.

Materials and season

According to the Xinhua Daily report, the busy season runs for three months from November each year; Liu Wenju says that "a single batch is four to five thousand jin", and that she hires women from the village to help. The product is mostly steamed, and because it is usually torn by hand it is also called "hand-torn wind-dried fish"; the report describes it as "fresh without fishiness, chewy without greasiness and with a long aftertaste".

Processes (three accounts side by side)

The cited sources differ on the curing process, and are set side by side below rather than decided:

• Xinhua Daily (bearer Liu Wenju, Feb 2026): the scales are not removed; only a small slit is cut below the gill, and salt and spices are put in; "the wind is the method, the fish is the star, and time is the only recipe".
• Lishui Fabu, "Cured flavours as the snowy season arrives": choose a fresh fish, cut a small slit with scissors, remove the innards and wash it, rub fine salt evenly inside and out, put prepared seasonings into the belly, and hang it in a ventilated place to dry.
• Lishui Fabu, "Pickled greens, wind-dried fish and chilli sauce": the craft follows the old method of "opening the belly, rubbing in salt, filling and air-drying".

The three accounts disagree on whether the fish is gutted or the belly opened: one cuts only a small slit below the gill and does not gut the fish; one cuts a small slit and removes the innards; one opens the belly. On rubbing in salt, filling and air-drying the three agree in substance.

Bearer

Appendix 3 of the third-batch district ICH material, the list of representative bearers, contains 19 persons in total and records Liu Wenju as a bearer of that batch, under the wording "Mingjue Pickled Greens / Wind-dried Fish". Appendix 2 of the 2021 notice, the third-batch list of representative bearers, contains nine persons and records Liu Wenju's date of birth as August 1961, her address as Mingjue Community, Shiqiu Subdistrict, and her project as "Mingjue Pickled Greens / Wind-dried Fish". This entry and the entry on Mingjue Pickled Greens each follow the merged wording of the appendices and are not split. The Xinhua Daily report of February 2026 calls Liu Wenju a "district-level representative bearer of Mingjue Wind-dried Fish Making".

Present-day practice and trade

According to the Lishui Fabu post (sourced from Shiqiu Subdistrict), the Feiyang agricultural cooperative in Xiangyang village, Shiqiu Subdistrict, markets Mingjue pickled greens and wind-dried fish under its "Feiyang pickles" brand, using Xiangyang village's "old Mingjue" speciality platform for unified production and sales; the report describes the wind-dried fish as following the old method of "opening the belly, rubbing in salt, filling and air-drying". The Xinhua Daily report adds that in February 2026 orders came from Nanjing, Shanghai and Beijing. A cooperative is a business operator, not the guardian unit of an ICH item, and this entry does not fill the guardian field from it.

Points in doubt

First, the three accounts of the process differ (see above) and are set side by side, not decided or rewritten.

Second, the batch sequence and the year are two separate questions: the two documents that each style themselves the third batch differ, and this item appears in Appendix 2 of the 2017 notice but not in Appendix 1 of the 2021 notice, so there are two accounts of the batch sequence. The year, however, is fixed by the document number and date of the 2017 notice on which this entry relies; the difference between the two documents does not bear on it, and it has been filled in as 2017.

Third, "Mingjue Pickled Greens / Wind-dried Fish" is the merged wording of the appendices; this entry and the entry on Mingjue Pickled Greens each record it as it stands, without splitting or merging.

To be added

The criteria for choosing fish beyond the species used, the curing time and salt ratio, the form of the finished product, the area and number of generations of transmission, the project number and year of publication in the third-batch district list, and the guardian unit are all absent after searching this library's seven source layers, namely official web pages, published notices and lists, the local-gazetteer system, academic papers, classical full texts, media reports and maps; no conjecture has been added.