Qingming Fruit is a snack made in southern China during the Qingming Festival. It is also called Qingming Steamed Bun and Qing Tuan (it is also said that Qing Tuan and Qingming Fruit are two kinds of food with slightly different raw materials and shapes), etc. Different places have slightly different names, shapes and raw materials, but they are all dyed green with plants.

Let's talk about the raw materials of Qingming fruit first. The outer skin of Qingming fruit is made of glutinous rice, but the plants used for dyeing are different from place to place. Because many plants have such functions, the industrious and intelligent people in China use local materials. The raw materials can be Dactylogyrus japonicus, Artemisia argyi, Bromus japonicus, Phyllanthus urinaria, Ramie leaves, Pulsatilla chinensis, Houttuynia cordata, Paederia paniculata, and Quirrell, etc. Choose one or more of them, squeeze or cook them to make green juice, or directly mash the plants and mix them with glutinous rice to make green dough. The fillings of Qingming fruit are also varied, including sweet and salty. Sweet ones are generally made of red bean paste, sweet-scented osmanthus, sugar, peanuts, white sesame seeds, coconut paste and other raw materials, while salty ones can be filled with fresh meat, bacon, diced bamboo shoots, white radish, mushrooms, peppers, tofu, sauerkraut, preserved vegetables, bean sprouts and oyster sauce.

The shape of Qingming fruit varies, including jiaozi shape, steamed bread shape and even flat moon cake shape. Salty clear fruits are usually made into jiaozi shapes, and sweet ones are made into circles. In Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, most of them are steamed bread-shaped, while in Lingnan, Hakkas like to make them into oblate shapes, while in Jiangxi, Laobiao likes to knead them into jiaozi shapes. The most common processing method of Qingming fruit is steaming, but there are also a few places that use frying, branding and other methods.

Qingming fruit has a long history. At least in the Northern and Southern Dynasties, people in the south ate this snack during the Qingming period. At that time, people from the north migrated to the south in large numbers (mainly Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui, Fujian, Hunan, Jiangxi, Guangdong and other places). Because these places were hot, humid and rainy, in order to treat symptoms such as dysentery, some plants with medicinal value were used to make snacks, which not only served the occasion, but also played a role in diet therapy. During the Taiping Rebellion, when the people sent meals to the rebel army, they also hid the Qingming fruit in the grass to avoid the review of the Qing army.