Dragon Boat Festival

Celebrated on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month each year, the Dragon Boat Festival combines its famous dragon boat races with a food tradition just as central to the occasion: zongzi, pyramid-shaped glutinous rice dumplings wrapped in bamboo or reed leaves. The festival's origins trace to the Warring States Period, when the poet and statesman Qu Yuan drowned himself in the Miluo River after failing to prevent the Qin invasion of his home state of Chu, and local villagers reportedly threw packets of rice into the river specifically to keep fish from consuming his body.

That act of throwing rice evolved over centuries into the modern zongzi, prepared differently across China's vast regional divides — northern versions often favour sweet fillings like dates, while southern zongzi lean savoury, packed with mung beans, pork, mushroom, salted egg yolk or the eight-treasure combination associated with Guangdong's celebrated salted meat zongzi. The custom of soaking glutinous rice and washing bamboo leaves at the start of the fifth lunar month has remained a fixture of Chinese households for thousands of years, alongside the dragon boat races themselves that give the festival its more widely recognised international name.

For a festival whose racing spectacle draws most international attention, the zongzi tradition offers a quieter, more domestic counterpart — a dish still prepared by hand in kitchens across the country each year, exactly as it has been for over two thousand years.