DgcityWalk through a night market in Beijing, Harbin or Shanghai this month and you may need a moment just to read the menu. China’s beloved winter snack tanghulu — fruit on a bamboo stick, sealed in a shell of hot sugar — has undergone one of its most dramatic reinventions yet. Vendors now sell towering “layered” versions loaded with mochi, strained yoghurt, Inner Mongolian milk skin, taro paste, pistachio and chocolate, and because each skewer is named by listing every ingredient, the names have grown comically long. Chinese internet users have dubbed them “spell tanghulu,” and the line about names being longer than incantations became a trending topic in early November.
The classic version is a study in simplicity: tart hawthorn berries dipped in boiling syrup that sets into a glassy, cracking coat, usually sold for well under 10 yuan. The new creations are closer to dessert architecture. One Beijing shop’s flagship, called the mango-pomelo nine-layer tower, stacks hawthorn cake, red glutinous rice, taro paste, mochi, milk skin, cheese, yoghurt and chocolate butter crisp, and sells for 38 yuan. A Black Forest-style skewer weighs around 170 grams including the stick. On review apps, layered tanghulu generally range from about 20 to over 30 yuan, with group-buy discounts near 15.
The price gap has invited gentle grumbling. At Beijing’s main wholesale market, fresh hawthorn was trading at roughly 3.75 yuan per 500 grams in early November, which means a premium skewer costs as much as several kilos of raw fruit. Vendors point out that dairy toppings are expensive and labor-intensive in their own right: it can take roughly a kilo of ordinary yoghurt to produce 200 grams of the thick, strained kind, while a single sheet of milk skin from Inner Mongolia commands a substantial wholesale price.
The trend did not appear overnight. Milk-skin tanghulu first emerged in Baotou, Inner Mongolia, in late 2024 and spread nationally through short videos the following autumn, with customers in Harbin reportedly queuing around two hours. A strained-yoghurt-and-mochi version then appeared in Harbin in late September, locking in the stacked format that now dominates shop windows. Bases have expanded beyond hawthorn to Shine Muscat grapes, figs and strawberries.
For visitors, the skewers are a useful lesson in how Chinese street food evolves: regional dairy traditions from the north, southern fruit and social-media spectacle folded into a snack with centuries of history. Whether the nine-layer towers survive the winter or melt into the next fad, the sugar is still cracking, and business is brisk.
