Xinjiang Licorice: The Sweet Root Behind the Region’s Candy, Tea and Medicine

I first noticed the smell before I understood the plant. On a cold March morning in Toksun, 70 km southeast of Turpan, I was waiting for a minibus when a vendor pushed a cart past me loaded with knotted brown sticks that looked like kindling. He snapped one, and a scent came off it, part root cellar, part vaguely medicinal, with a sweetness that hit the back of my throat. That was licorice root, and in Xinjiang it is everywhere once you learn to see it.

Most travellers meet it by accident. It turns up as a stir stick in a glass of dark herbal tea, as a chewy candy sold by the roadside, or as a bundle at the bottom of a market stall beneath the dried apricots and raisins. This article is the guide I wish I had then: where the root actually grows, how people here use it, and the small but real tricks to buying good licorice instead of pale, dusty seconds.

Where the sweet root grows

Licorice is a member of the pea family that sends a thick taproot down three, four, sometimes six metres into sandy soil. It wants heat, low rainfall, and ground that drains fast, which is why the semi-deserts ringing the Tarim and Dzungaria basins suit it so well. The plant is hardy where orchards would fail, and its roots hold the soil against the wind that never quite stops in this part of the world.

The heartland is the corridor between Turpan and Korla. I spent a week driving the G3012, and the roadside earth between Toksun and Yanqi is littered with the low, grey-green shrubs, though you have to look hard because nothing about them shouts for attention. In late October the leaves turn yellow and the whole flat country reads as a faint gold carpet if you know the sign.

Further west, the land around Aksu and the fields outside Kuqa carry long-established stands, and the Ili valley in the far northwest grows a milder, sweeter root that locals prize for tea. The climate there is softer, with more rain off the mountains, and the root loses some of the bite you get from the dry south. I tasted the difference side by side in Yining and never went back to the southern stuff for my own pot.

What surprised me is how much of it is still wild-dug. Across the flat country south of the Tianshan, you meet pickers in late autumn with tarpaulins full of fresh root, because the season after the first hard frost is when the sweetness peaks. Cultivation is growing, especially near Korla, where fenced plots keep the soil from blowing away, but the wild root still sets the price and the reputation at every market I visited.

The people who dig it

I joined a picker for an hour outside Yanqi one November. He worked a shallow trench with a narrow spade, following the root by hand because a machine would shatter the long taproot and ruin the grade. A good wild root runs the length of his forearm and weighs close to a kilo fresh, though it shrinks by half as it dries on the rooftop racks behind his house.

He told me, in a mix of gestures and the few English words he knew, that a strong day might yield 40 kg of fresh root, which dries to maybe 18 kg and sells at the gate for around ¥12 a kilo. The maths is thin, which is why wild licorice gets over-harvested and why the fenced plots near Korla matter. When you buy, you are quietly voting for one method over the other.

How I learned to drink it

My real education happened in a teahouse in the old town of Kashgar. I had ordered a pot of black tea the way I always do, and the owner dropped a two-inch piece of dried root straight into the pot with the leaves. Twenty minutes later the same bitter tea had rounded into something almost syrupy, with a sweetness that needed no sugar.

That is the oldest use here. Licorice is a sweetener first and a medicine second, at least in daily life. In Urumqi I found it in nearly every herbal tea shop on the street behind the Grand Bazaar, sold by the slice, the vendor scooping a handful into a paper twist for ¥15 or so. Steeped alone it tastes like liquid liquorice candy with a faint bitterness behind it. Mixed with rosebud, goji, or the tart local sea buckthorn, it balances the sour edge.

If you want to try it the local way, ask for a pot in any teahouse from Hotan to Yining and watch whether they add root. Many do without telling you. The piece slowly releases its sweetness over an hour, so a single stick is enough for a whole pot, and you can lift it out when the balance tastes right. I learned to ask for it on the side after a vendor in Turpan made my tea so sweet I could not finish it.

The candy and the roadside sweet

The candy is the version most visitors remember. At bus stations and on long desert highways I kept finding small chewy sticks, dark brown, that turned out to be pressed licorice. They are nothing like the polished black liquorice wheels from Europe. Xinjiang’s version is denser, drier, and the sweetness fades into a clean rooty finish instead of a salted anise hit.

I bought a bag of the stick candy in Hami for ¥10 and ate it across two days of driving the route toward Dabancheng. It is the kind of sweet that quiets a dry throat, which matters when you are crossing 200 km of nothing between water stops. Vendors near Sayram Lake sold a softer, almost taffy-like round that children were buying by the string, and the texture there was closer to a northern caramel than to the hard southern stick.

Not every licorice sweet is pure root. Some are mostly sugar with a little powder for flavour, and you can tell by the price: the real stick candy costs more and snaps rather than bends. The powder-heavy versions go soft in your pocket by afternoon. Ask to see the root itself if you can, because the best candy comes from the same whole root you would brew, and a stall that shows you both is a stall worth trusting.

Regional taste runs deeper than texture. The Turpan stick is dark and almost smoky, the Korla slice candy is lighter and cleaner, and the Ili rounds taste of the milder northern root. I packed one of each and ran a small blind test with two friends in a Yining guesthouse; we all picked the Ili round first and the Turpan stick last, which told me more about our palates than about the plant.

Remedies on the shelf

I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice, but the remedy side is why licorice has been dug here for more than two thousand years. In the traditional system that runs through every bazaar apothecary from Kuqa to Karamay, the dried root is treated as a calming, soothing agent for the throat and stomach, and it shows up as a supporting ingredient in countless herbal mixes.

Walking the herbal lane of the Urumqi International Grand Bazaar, I watched an apothecary build a custom packet for a customer with a cough: sliced root, a few dried figs, a handful of what he called cooling seeds, all weighed on a brass scale to the gram. The total came to ¥28. He told me, through a translator, that people here steep it for a rough throat after a dusty drive, which described most of my own days on the road.

The way it is prepared matters as much as the plant. A short steep gives a sweet, gentle drink. A long boil with other herbs draws out the darker, more medicinal notes that the apothecaries use. I tried the boiled version once at a friend’s kitchen in Aksu and found it too strong to enjoy, which is the point: the remedy is medicine, not a treat, and the line between the two is the brew time.

The caution matters as much as the custom. Real licorice is strong, and the same compounds that make it sweet can raise blood pressure if you drink strong root tea every day for weeks. I mention this because the travellers most likely to overdo it are the ones who love the taste. A cup after dinner is a habit; a litre before noon is not, and the apothecary himself tapped his wrist when I asked how much was too much.

Buying it well

Good licorice is not hard to find, but the market sorts itself fast into grades you can read with your eyes. The best root is a deep reddish brown outside and a pale, almost yellow flesh inside, with a snap when you break a piece and a perfume you can smell from a foot away. Pale, spongy, or greyish sticks have been sitting too long or came from weak, water-stressed plants.

Form follows use. Whole root keeps longest and proves the grade, so I buy it that way and slice what I need at home with a garden shear. Slices are convenient for tea and cheaper to ship. Powder is the riskiest buy, because it is the easiest to cut with filler, and once it is ground you cannot inspect it. For a first purchase, whole or sliced is the honest choice, and the price gap is small enough that saving a few yuan is not worth the risk.

What a fair price looks like

In the autumn of 2026 I paid between ¥60 and ¥110 per kilo for good sliced root in the big bazaars, and around ¥140 for clean whole root of the grade I wanted. Prices climb toward spring as stocks thin, and they climb again in the tourist strips near the airports. A vendor quoting ¥200 a kilo for ordinary slices is charging for the location, not the root, and you can walk two lanes over and pay half.

Where to shop

The bazaars are the obvious start, and the herbal alleys behind the big covered markets in Kashgar and Urumqi are where I found the widest choice and the most willing talkers. Take the same patience you would to any shopping in the bazaars exchange: smell three stalls before you commit, and do not be shy about asking the vendor to break a piece so you can check the colour.

For a wilder angle, the same regions that grow the root feed the wild edible plants trade, and a few foraging guides around Turpan can point you at living shrubs if you want to see the plant in the ground rather than in a sack. I did this outside Toksun and it changed how I read the landscape for the rest of the trip, because every grey-green low bush suddenly had a name and a use.

If your interest is the drink side rather than the root itself, the northern sea buckthorn drinks pair with licorice in a way worth tasting, and the same spice stalls that sell cumin and spice souks goods often keep root on the lower shelf beside the dried chilies. One afternoon in Korla I bought root, cumin, and safflower threads in a single walk and paid less than ¥50 for all three.

Speaking of safflower, the red safflower oil fields of the Ili valley are worth a detour on their own, and the road between Yining and the flower country passes stalls selling both the oil and the root side by side. The vendors there taught me that the two are often farmed by the same families, root in the sandy margins and flower in the irrigated rows, which is a neat piece of desert agriculture I had not expected.

Bringing it home

Dried licorice root travels well. I packed 500 grams of sliced root in a zip bag inside my checked luggage and it arrived in Europe without a hint of mould six weeks later, though I declare it at customs because some countries ask about plant products. Whole root is the safest bet for that reason: it is unmistakably a plant part, not a powder someone might question, and the border officer who waved me through in Amsterdam just smiled at the smell.

Carry a little for tea and a few sticks of candy for the road, and you will have a souvenir that actually tastes of the place you visited. The melon and the raisins get the postcards, but the sweet root is the thing I reach for now when I want the trip back. On a grey February evening I steep a piece, and the room fills with that same Turpan dryness, the memory of a cart and a snapped stick and a smell I finally understood.