Surprising food products from Northeast China

Many Chinese people have recently been surprised to find that many types of food they thought were imported are actually grown or produced in Northeast China.

The northeastern region of the country has been attracting a huge amount of attention this winter, with visitors flocking to its tourist attractions in search of ice and snow, and praising the hospitality of its people.

To show its gratitude to the people of Heilongjiang for taking good care of a group of 11 kindergarten children from South China's Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region during their visit to the northeastern province, Nanning, the regional capital of Guangxi, sent 189 tons of mandarins to Harbin, Heilongjiang's provincial capital. Heilongjiang then returned the gesture and sent 100,000 boxes of cranberries to Guangxi.

The cranberries surprised a lot of Chinese people, even many from Heilongjiang Province, who didn't realize that the fruit is cultivated in the region.

Since the introduction of cranberries from North America in 2014, Fuyuan city in Heilongjiang province has grown 280 hectares of cranberries, making it one of the largest cranberry growing bases in Asia.

Other types of berries grown in Northeast China include blueberries and raspberries, which are also often thought to be imported into China from other countries.

Many people have also discovered that some precious foods, such as Wagyu beef, black truffles and caviar, are also produced in Northeast China.

Black truffles from China, mainly from the northeastern and southwestern parts of the country, have been exported to many other countries. Last year, Fuyuan city artificially bred 56,000 sturgeons and produced 1,000 kilos of caviar, some of which was exported abroad.

In addition, Yanbian in Northeast China's Jilin province supplies more than 80 percent of the Alaska pollock consumed in South Korea. While 70 percent of wakame, a type of edible brown seaweed, consumed in Japan is imported from China, more than 90 percent comes from Dalian in Northeast China's Liaoning province.