Season 4 of the Chinese food-and-travel show Go Where Flavors of Hunan Abound premiered on 12 October 2026, airing Monday to Thursday at 7:30 p.m. on Hunan Satellite TV and Mango TV. This season carries the theme "A Season of World-Class Landscapes" and puts the Greater Zhangjiajie International Tourism Area front and centre, with host Wang Han leading a team through Zhangjiajie, Cili, Jishou, Fenghuang, Changde, Shaoyang and Huaihua.
The opening episode is a handy itinerary in itself: a ride up the Bailong Elevator, then hiking along Golden Whip Stream in Zhangjiajie, a park that draws more than a million international visitors a year from over 190 countries — for many of them, the first stop on their China trip.
But the food is the real story. In Longweiba Village, young returnee entrepreneurs are folding local ingredients like kudzu root and vine tea into coffee and bingfen, a chilled jelly dessert. In Cili, the dish Yanghe Dumi — pork tripe cut rice-thin so it could feed more people — dates to 1935 and a community's act of sharing during hard times. In Jishou, Wang Jixiang has served four kinds of rice noodles at her shop for 35 years, topped with everything from stir-fried pork to fermented chili, that signature sour-hot pairing of western Hunan. In Fenghuang, ex-tour guide Xiao Yang has turned Miao-style smoked pork trotters in sour soup into a wider draw.
The show also explains why sour soup defines Miao cooking: during ancestral migrations, salt was scarce, so the Miao fermented green vegetables for seasoning. The sourness stuck around as a culinary memory of those journeys.
New this season is a tasting panel at each stop — locals, domestic travellers and international guests — who vote on "Hunan Flavor Signature Dishes." The picks so far include claypot rice with Chinese giant salamander and Tujia-style Sangun Wawa in Zhangjiajie, Xikou beef and Lao Sizhong rice noodles in Cili, and Fangyuan rice noodles plus the smoked trotters in Fenghuang.
Each destination gets two episodes: one on rural and mountain flavors, with hiking, village visits and home-cooked meals; the other on urban food culture, from long-running restaurants to chef-prepared signature dishes.
For travellers, the show doubles as a route guide through western Hunan's greatest hits — Zhangjiajie's sandstone pillars, Cili's Loushui River, Jishou's Wanrong River, and Fenghuang's Tuojiang River, Hongqiao Bridge and stilt houses. If towering karst scenery plus a bowl of sour, spicy rice noodles sounds like your kind of trip, this region deserves a spot on the list.
