If you walk past the Yiliang County gymnasium before October 7, the smell will tell you what is happening inside. The 2026 Yiliang Roast Duck Food Carnival opened there on September 29, and its headline event is a national roast duck cooking contest that brought 116 chefs onto one floor.
Organisation sits with the China Cuisine Association, whose roast duck committee works alongside the Yunnan and Yiliang cuisine associations. Individuals get 80 minutes to prepare a duck and roast it in a traditional closed oven, and the finished bird has to come out golden, with crisp skin and fragrant meat. Teams of two get 100 minutes for a whole duck plus a cold dish, a dim sum and a soup, which tests how well they work together as much as how well they cook.
Beijing’s Quanjude, Bianyifang and Dadong sent cooks, and a judging panel scored the finished ducks. Dong Zhenxiang, a supervisor of the China Cuisine Association and chairman of the Dadong Roast Duck Restaurant group, said in his address that the contest, held under the theme “Heritage Duck Craft, National Skills Gather in Yiliang”, forms part of carrying out national policy on service consumption and rural revitalisation. He then declared the oven open. A lion dance took the floor, the performers dipping and leaping in a blessing for the county that made its name on duck.
Jiang Yaobi, president of the Yunnan Cuisine Association, explained that the event is a contest of technique between northern and southern roast duck traditions and a deeper conversation between the two food cultures. It matters, she added, for drawing out the heritage behind the dish, training skilled cooks and getting the whole supply chain to work together. The Yunnan association will keep developing and promoting Yunnan cuisine under the guidance of the national body, pushing exchanges in both directions and helping build the Yiliang roast duck brand.
A Century of Local Reworking
Yiliang’s duck descends from Beijing’s open-flame roasting and was reworked locally over more than a century into something with its own character: crisp skin, tender meat, a full savoury finish. It is one of Yunnan’s best-known intangible cultural heritage foods. Opening day also carried an oven-lighting ceremony, a tourism pitch, a duck-industry investment session and a set of signings.
Around the bird the county has built a complete chain: breeding stock for the Yunnan Ma duck, ecological farming, roasting, cold-chain sales. Yiliang slaughters 11 million ducks a year and has more than 400 roast duck restaurants, and the duck industry’s annual output is expected to reach 2.2 billion yuan, with products selling across China and beginning to move into export markets.
Two of the day’s agreements point outward. Yiliang signed with ZTO International’s Southeast Asia arm and with a representative of the UAE Yunnan Chamber of Commerce on a strategy to take Yiliang duck products international, and separately signed a brand promotion project called “Yiliang Roast Duck Meets Dubai”, opening the Middle East and Southeast Asia as target markets. Tourism investment projects and travel agency agreements were signed as well.
Four Festivals, One Long Table
Running from September 25 to October 7 at the gymnasium, the carnival is tied to the 2026 Dianchi Food and Produce Season and is timed to catch four festivals at once: the roast duck food festival, the Chinese Farmers’ Harvest Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day. Long-table banquets outside the competition floor have been filling with guests and residents working through plates of Yiliang duck, and the investment sessions have put companies and officials in the same room.
From October 1 to 7 the programme shifts to participation. A thousand-person duck-eating contest, a duck-catching contest and heritage performances run alongside a roast duck culture exhibition and a market for Yiliang goods and heritage experiences. The county is selling a combined route, eat roast duck, soak in a hot spring, walk the flower streets and visit Jiuxiang, to pull visitors into the area rather than past it.
A Yiliang County government official framed the strategy in plain terms. “Northern and southern flavours meet, tradition embraces the market, and Yiliang is using roast duck as a breakthrough to push a traditional food toward standardisation, branding and industrial scale, so that a century-old heritage duck keeps its everyday life while opening a much wider space to grow,” the official stated.
