小籠包

In 1871, Huang Mingxian, the owner of the Ri Hua Xuan teahouse in Nanxiang, a market town outside Shanghai, began folding thin skins over a mixture of pork and jellied pork-rind stock. When steamed, the aspic melted into hot broth sealed inside the bun. The technique required precise skin thickness: too thick and the bun was heavy, too thin and the bottom tore. Huang's method produced a skin so delicate that the bun had to be lifted by its pleated crown and eaten from a spoon.

The name describes the vessel, not the food: 小 (xiǎo, small) 籠 (lóng, bamboo steamer basket) 包 (bāo, stuffed bun). Early sources also used the shorter term 湯包 (tāng bāo, soup bun), which emphasized the liquid interior. Food writers in English adopted the shorthand XLB from the 1990s onward, probably the only Chinese food with a widely used English acronym.

Xiaolongbao spread from Nanxiang into Shanghai's old city, where the Chenghuang Miao quarter became famous for competing dumpling shops by the early twentieth century. Republican-era food journalism documented at least six major establishments in the French Concession offering xiaolongbao during the 1920s and 1930s. After 1949, state consolidation of restaurants paradoxically codified the recipe by fixing the official version.

The international spread came through Taiwan, where Shanghainese refugees arrived after 1949. Din Tai Fung, founded in Taipei in 1958 as a cooking-oil retailer, converted to a restaurant in 1972 and opened in Japan in 1993. The New York Times named it one of the world's ten best restaurants that same year, and branches followed in Singapore, Australia, and the United States. The name xiaolongbao entered English-language menus globally, carrying Huang Mingxian's 1871 Nanxiang technique around the world.