Lu Dan (鲁丹) came back to Yichang, in Hubei, to keep his father’s food factory from closing. He started on the workshop line and spent his off-hours learning the city’s traditional sweet-potato pastry. In 2018 he opened a small bun shop, Lubao Bao (鲁包包), in the city’s logistics district. Eight years later it runs seven branches and steams about three thousand red-oil buns a day at its busiest outlet.
Its rise has tracked a wider city campaign. At this year’s fifth “330” Three Gorges Talent Day, Lubao Bao was named a “Thousand People, Hundred Shops” brand store. On May 15, Yichang rolled out a youth-talent entrepreneurship action plan and a “Qingchuang Qihang Wharf” base, and the shop joined the “City of Calling” gift pack: certified talent who show a “Yicai Code” at the Guomao Building branch can redeem a food perk. “More than 700 students have verified and come to the shop so far,” Lu Dan said. He described the perk as a way to hand new arrivals something warm while carrying Yichang’s food culture and street life further afield.
How a Factory Worker Learned the Craft
Lu Dan’s father had run a food factory that once came close to folding. The son returned home, took a place as an ordinary worker on the line, and set about learning the traditional Yichang sweet-potato pastry from the ground up. When he founded Lubao Bao in 2018, he placed the first shop at the Three Gorges Logistics Park. He was drawn as much by the foot traffic as by the promise of traceable ingredients and dependable quality.
Numbers moved slowly at first, then faster. Over eight years the shop count went from one to seven. The menu began with a breakfast staple and widened into flavoured snacks, and the locations left residential streets for shopping districts, following customers rather than waiting for them.
What has not changed is the kitchen rule. Every branch wraps and steams its buns to order, with the dough kneaded and the baskets lifted in full view of the counter. Freshness a customer can watch, the company argues, is the whole point: a bun eaten minutes after it leaves the steamer tastes different from one that has sat in a warmer, and the shop has built its repeat trade on that gap.
Flavour has proved less fixed than method. “The traditional craft can’t be dropped, but the flavours have to move with the times,” Lu Dan said. The Guomao Building branch keeps the essence of local snacks while adding a graded-spice scale for different palates, and in May 2026 it introduced a crayfish-flavour version of xiaolongbao, the small soup dumpling, that pulled in younger eaters on purpose-built trips.
Buns Steamed in Plain Sight
Daily output at the Guomao branch runs to roughly 3,000 buns made and steamed on site, and climbs on holidays. Behind it, a central factory standardises production and cold-chains close to ten thousand buns a day to cities across the country, carrying a Yichang taste well beyond its home market. The division of labour lets a single small shop hold down a busy corner while the wider brand reaches customers that no one counter could serve on its own.
Training has become part of the same model. Early this year Lubao Bao began a work-study partnership with the Three Gorges Tourism Vocational and Technical College. More than ten students have passed through the factory and the shops, learning pastry technique and counter sales inside a real trading operation rather than a classroom.
Chu Cuisine Names a Home Taste
Red-oil buns are not a new invention. It belongs to the everyday table in Yichang, and this autumn the Hubei Provincial Department of Commerce put it on a provincial list of signature dishes. In its “A Table of Chu Cuisine for the World” series, the department described the red-oil bun as soft-crusted with a red-oil filling, fragrant at the first bite, spicy with a fresh edge, and a home taste Yichang people love.
Alongside it, the list carried the radish dumpling, its shredded-radish filling fried to a golden, crisp shell around a tender centre, and credited it with the plain savour of a street stall. Both items travel together at the city’s festival markets, which is where everyday food most often meets its visitors.
Chu cuisine, the cooking of the old Chu lands along the middle Yangtze, leans on river fish, cured meats and pickled vegetable flavours, and it has long been counted among China’s regional schools. To place a street bun beside named banquet dishes was the province’s way of pointing to the everyday end of that tradition, where a morning steamer can matter as much as a formal table.
On Yiling Square, a Guochao Market
On the evening of October 1, the 2026 Yichang Golden Autumn Consumption Season and the second Xilin Guochao Carnival got under way at Yiling Square in the city centre. Hanfu shows, a group dance titled “Chu Wind and Martial Rhyme”, and Guofeng red-song dances took the stage, followed by face-changing, lion dances and dragon dances from the folk repertoire. The garden party beside them drew early queues at shuttlecock kicking, pitch-pot, hammer-ball and wooden-archery stations.
Market aisles mixed radish dumplings, red-oil buns and Aizi stuffed pastries. Visitors could stamp a card at the free games to earn vouchers for food or a lacquer-fan craft session. The carnival ran free from October 1 to 6, daily from 4 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., each day given to a different programme: folk acrobatics and traditional opera on one night, Guochao rock, Guofeng poetry and music, and folk music on others. Through October, thirty further culture, commerce and tourism events are spread across Yichang’s Wuyue Plaza, Xiba, Jiefang Road, Erma Road and CBD districts.
Taken together, the buns, the brand and the talent programme point to a single effort to make a city’s everyday food speak for the city. For residents it is the spicy, fresh taste of a morning steamer; for visiting students and tourists it is a first impression that is easy to remember. The “Thousand People, Hundred Shops” scheme has tied the brand, its people and the city’s street life into a single thread. For a city that once watched a family factory nearly close, the steamer at the Guomao counter now reads as something more durable than a single morning’s trade.
