How Tanghulu Went From a Chinese Street Snack to a Colorful Controversy

With their glassy coatings and bright colors, tanghulu is a treat that has gone from traditional Chinese street snack to social media sensation. It’s most recognizable as a stick that’s about eight inches long stacked with bright red hawthorn berries, like strings of rubies clustered atop food carts. The candied skewer has origins in ancient China, but recently, it’s shapeshifted—becoming modernized by new purveyors and TikTok stars incorporating a rainbow of new fruit variations.

Here’s everything you need to know about tanghulu, why you’re seeing it everywhere, and what the debate is all about.

What is tanghulu?

Tanghulu is a sweet-and-sour treat of skewered candied fruit, traditionally hawthorn berries, encased in crystallized sugar. It’s said to have originated in northern China during the Song Dynasty (960 to 1279), when the emperor's favorite concubine supposedly fell sick and a two-week diet of tanghulu healed her. (It then apparently became a favorite snack of the royal family.) Tanghulu literally translates to “sugar gourds” in Mandarin, the bubbled shapes resembling the calabash gourds that were symbols of good luck in ancient China. Today, in China, tanghulu often appears around the new year and Lunar New Year as a festive food item, where the baubled snacks are displayed and sold in parks, street stands, food markets, and temples. “The fruit, leaves, and flowers of hawthorn are considered to have herbal medicinal properties for addressing a range of heart, digestive, and circulatory issues,” Nancy N. Chen, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, says.

Unlike other types of candied fruit, what makes tanghulu unique is the way the fruit is candied. It doesn’t require any special tools: Fruit is skewered and dipped into boiling sugar, coated, shaken a bit to remove the excess, and, oftentimes, immediately plunged in ice water. The process creates a cool, hard shell that cracks and splinters upon biting. The sourness of the hawthorn offsets the sweetness, and the crunchy outside belies a soft interior.

Why am I seeing it everywhere?

As Chinese people started immigrating to neighboring countries like Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore in the following dynasties—particularly between the Yuan and Ming dynasties, when many northern Chinese people fled to Korea—the snack became a part of other cuisines, also largely sold in areas with street vendors.

Today, different variations of tanghulu have sprung up in these regions. Most notably, vendors have swapped hawthorn berries for strawberries, grapes, whole peeled tangerines, tomatoes, pineapple, even marshmallows. While this transformation began in China, it’s accelerated in Korea. Celebrities like K-pop group Blackpink’s Jennie have played a role in popularizing the snack in South Korea, notably when she and bandmate Jisoo made it in their 2020 Netflix documentary Blackpink: Light Up the Sky. And as the Hallyu wave, a concerted government effort to disseminate Korean pop culture, continues to make its way through Western countries, it’s migrated into the American cultural periphery.

As a result, tanghulu has become more commonly associated with any kind of candied fruit, rather than hawthorn specifically. The variations “reflect creative approaches when certain food items might not be available,” Chen says.

Chef Tristan Kwong, known as Fruitsomm online, says that the evolution of tanghulu can also be attributed to factors such as cost effectiveness and simplicity to reproduce. It’s a snack that only calls for three ingredients—sugar, fruit, and water—and by using fruits immediately available, the tanghulu can be made in every season. Kwong says he has also noticed differences in the technique of tanghulu from his travels to Asia depending on the community’s tastes and preferences. “From a technical and personal perspective, the candy coating in Korea is most certainly thinner and less heavy,” he says.

On TikTok, tanghulu has found global stardom, with celebrities and influencers like Nick DiGiovanni and K-pop idols Tomorrow X Together making tanghulu at home (with rather varied results), trying different kinds of tanghulu (a favorite seems to be strawberry and grape), and riffing on the treat by candying everything from dragonfruit and watermelon to Takis and raw animal testicles. Hawthorn berries are seldom seen—Korea’s rainbow, Instagram-friendly skewers very much seems to have inspired TikTok’s plays on the treat.

The treat is gaining more and more fans across the US, too. Though immigrant vendors in historic Chinatowns have set out garlands of tanghulu on their streets for years, more businesses across the country are making the snack more accessible to those who want to try it. New York’s popular Mochi Mochi Donut brand, which usually sells a variety of flavored mochi-based donuts, added tanghulu to the menu in October of last year. New storefronts like Los Angeles’s Tangtastic have cropped up stateside just to sell tanghulu—and were greeted with long lines. (Their menu items appear to be fully modernized, with an assortment of fruit-platter mainstays and no hawthorn flavor mentioned.) Shops in Dallas, Oregon, and Oakland have started selling it, too. We’ve included an abridged list below.

Why are people calling it controversial?

Of course, when traditional foods go viral, sometimes historical details get left out. “I didn’t know it was an Asian snack, and that part of the treat wasn’t brought up a lot, so for a while I mostly thought of it as a TikTok snack,” says food creator and ceramist Lucas Lee Ho, who regularly makes traditional Asian dishes on his platform and first saw tanghulu on TikTok in 2021. “There’s definitely an ASMR appeal,” he adds, noting the crunch and crack of tanghulu’s crystallized sugar. Creators like Poya Kitchen have called it a “Korean-style” dessert, while other creators have hashtagged #japanese or #koreansnacks in their posts as commenters correct them. In January, some Asian American creators on TikTok criticized the San Francisco Chronicle for calling tanghulu Korean in a headline: Korea’s candied fruit craze has reached the Bay Area. It hit a nerve, with many pointing to a storied record of Western creators crediting Korea or Japan with trends that originated in China.

Tanghulu is far from the first food whose origins have become muddled. Chinese–Korean cuisine is an expansive genre of food, largely including dishes that have originated in the Chinese population in Korea. Jjajangmyeon, a black bean noodle dish that has also taken off online due to the Hallyu wave, is an adaptation of the Chinese dish zhajiangmian. (Both share the base of noodles topped in a fried bean sauce, but jajangmyeon is thicker in consistency and darker in color.) Jjamppong, a spicy noodle soup filled with seafood, meat and vegetables, is a notable Chinese-Korean dish that also resulted from northern Chinese emigration.

It’s the same debate sparked anew about the authenticity of food as it makes its way through global diasporas, and what appreciating and safeguarding a part of one’s culture looks like. Some have pointed out that the tanghulu criticism largely comes from people living outside of Korea or China. For many who may have grown up feeling alienated for eating their cultural foods, watching these dishes become social media fads can stir feelings of defensiveness. But Kwong says that increasing discussion on social media has helped him better understand his own Asian American identity.

“In the grand scheme of things I think food trends being shared across countries via TikTok and the discussion and questions they raise, within oneself and in the comments, is a net positive,” Kwong says. “Each individual voice helps better inform the greater picture, as well as help guide the ideal of what being Asian in America means.”

Okay, so how do I eat it?

So if you’re ready to try tanghulu, you can do it from the comfort of your own kitchen; the recipe can be found here. Be warned—it’s not too complicated, but it can be time-consuming and a little finicky. Kwong says the key factor in making delicious at-home tanghulu is temperature control. “Proper tanghulu coating is crunchy, and it’s only achievable by heating your syrup mixture to 300 to 310 degrees Fahrenheit,” he says. “Any higher than 310 degrees, you get caramel; any lower than 300 degrees, you make butterscotch.”

Spear fresh fruit—like strawberries, golden berries, or whole tangerines—with a wooden skewer. Thoroughly dry the fruit with a paper towel. “Fruit that is overly ripe or too wet will cause bubbles to form between your candy coating and the fruit,” Kwong says. “Fruit that’s too soft will also spin on the skewer, which is annoying when trying to drip the excess syrup off.” In a pot fitted with a candy thermometer (or with an instant-read thermometer nearby), combine two parts sugar to one part water (for example, 1 cup sugar and ½ cup water, depending on how much fruit you’ve got). Cook over medium-high heat, stirring occasionally, until the hard crack stage (300°–310°). Turn off the heat then carefully dip the fruit into the hot sugar, rotating it until coated. Now immediately dip the sugared fruit into an ice bath to harden the shell.

And if you’re not ready to try it on your own, here are a handful of vendors across the country selling modern tanghulu, including Mochi Mochi Donut and Tangtastic.

• Nut orchard INC — Queens, New York
• Mochi Mochi Donut — New York City, New York
• Tang Hulu — Brooklyn, New York
• Tangtastic — Los Angeles, California
• Dulce Republic — Riverside, California
• Sweet Box — Buena Park, California
• Brian’s Coffee Roasters —Carrollton, Texas
• Pixiu Mala Hongtang — Oakland, California
• Mandarin House — Portland, Oregon