Zongzi is the festival food of Dragon Boat Festival. Chinese people all over the world, whether local, China, Taiwan Province, Hongkong or overseas Chinatown, will traditionally prepare all kinds of Zongzi before the fifth day of the fifth lunar month.
But you know, Zongzi has a long history. In the book Shuo Wen Jie Zi written by Xu Shen in the Han Dynasty, it has been recorded that Zongzi is a kind of food wrapped in reed leaves.
however, in ancient times, zongzi was called jiaoshu.
after the Ming and Qing dynasties, zongzi were mostly wrapped in glutinous rice. At this time, they were called zongzi instead of horny millet.
Due to different regions, there are great differences in materials and even in the shape of "wrapping". For example, in the early days, it was popular for people to worship heaven with horns, so in the Han and Jin Dynasties, rice dumplings were mostly made into horns as one of the offerings for ancestor worship. In addition, there are generally regular triangles, regular quadrangles, pointed triangles, squares, long shapes and so on.
The taste of zongzi varies from place to place. In the Tang Dynasty, there were many zongzi shops on Chang 'an Avenue, which contained a variety of nuts.
The name of the brown seed has also undergone many changes. According to the local customs of the Western Jin Dynasty, millet, chestnut and jujube are wrapped in leaves during the Dragon Boat Festival, which is called tube zongzi, also called horn millet. In Li Shizhen's Compendium of Materia Medica in the Ming Dynasty, it was clearly stated that millet was wrapped in leaves and cooked into food in the shape of sharp corners or palm leaves, so it was called "angular millet" or "zongzi".