Eating rice dumplings on Dragon Boat Festival.
The origin of Zongzi: In 340 BC, Qu Yuan, a patriotic poet and official of the Chu State, faced the pain of subjugation. On May 5th, he sadly and angrily threw a large stone into the Miluo River in order to prevent the fish and shrimp from harming him. With his body, people packed rice in bamboo tubes and threw them into the river. From then on, in order to express their respect and memory for Qu Yuan, on this day, people would pack rice in bamboo tubes and throw them into the river to pay homage. This is the origin of the earliest rice dumplings in my country: tube rice dumplings.
Why were mugwort leaves, reed leaves, and lotus leaves later used to make rice dumplings? There is a record in "The Beginner's Notes": During the Jianwu period of the Han Dynasty, a Changsha man dreamed of a man at night, claiming to be the Sanlu doctor (Qu Yuan). (official name), said to him: "All the things you sacrificed have been stolen by the dragon in the river. From now on, you can wrap them with mugwort leaves and tie them with five-color silk threads. The dragons are most afraid of these two things. So people used the dragon to steal them." Wrap millet leaves to make millet, which has been passed down from generation to generation and gradually developed into my country's Dragon Boat Festival food.
Emperor Qianlong of the Qing Dynasty was very happy after eating Jiuzi rice dumplings in the palace during the Dragon Boat Festival. I was full of praise and happily wrote a poem: The flowers in the four seasons are wonderful, and the nine rice dumplings are competing for new ones.
Nine rice dumplings are a kind of rice dumplings, which are nine rice dumplings connected in a string. Small, big on top, small on the bottom, different shapes, very beautiful, and made of nine colors of silk thread, colorful. Most of the nine-zi rice dumplings are given as gifts to relatives and friends, such as mothers giving to their married daughters and mother-in-law. Gifts for newlyweds and daughters-in-law, etc. Because zongzi is homophonic to neutron, there is a folk saying that eating zongzi can lead to a son. Wu Manyun, a poet in the Qing Dynasty, also wrote a poem praising Jiuzi Zongzi: "Wrapped in a tube of rice, Jiuzi." The colorful strands are heavily tied, the green wild rice has faded away and the skin is white. I laugh and say that the cook's lotus root has become loose again.
Zongzi not only come in many shapes and varieties, but also have different flavors in different places, mainly sweet and salty. The sweet flavors include white water rice dumplings, red bean rice dumplings, broad bean rice dumplings, date rice dumplings, rose rice dumplings, melon rice dumplings, bean paste lard rice dumplings, date mud lard rice dumplings, etc. The salty ones include pork rice dumplings, ham rice dumplings, sausage rice dumplings, shrimp rice dumplings, diced meat rice dumplings, etc., but pork rice dumplings are more common. In addition, there are Southern-style assorted rice dumplings, bean paste rice dumplings, mushroom rice dumplings, etc., as well as "double rice dumplings" with one end sweet and the other salty, and one rice dumpling with two flavors. These rice dumplings all have different flavors, making the rice dumpling family colorful.