A fortnight ago, it was Dragon Boat Festival. I would say it’s my favourite Chinese festival as I love rice dumplings! It’s a whole lot of goodies packed into one. When you unwrap it, it’s like opening a treasure chest! More on that later as I want to share about a text I received from my extended family chat group (the ones with all your uncles and aunties and relatives containing loads of drama) that caught my attention.

It’s interesting how most of us would greet each other ‘Happy Dragon Boat Festival’ on that day as it’s how we greet on other festivals as well, such as ‘Happy Chinese New Year’ and ‘Happy Mooncake Festival’. Here’s what the text sort of explained is that Dragon Boat festival should be treated as ‘Ching Ming Festival’.

“Dragon Boat Festival is a sacrificial festival because this day Wu Ziyi voted for the Qiantang River, Cao Yu saved his father to vote for Cao Yongjiang, and the literary tyrant Qu Yuan cast Luojiang. The fifth day of May is the poisonous day, which is a tragic day and a sacrifice day.” – translation credits go to Google :p If that was also too long for you to digest, basically it was a tragedy. Someone died and it’s not something to be celebrated or be happy about. It’s to commemorate filial piety.

So here’s where the dragon boats and rice dumplings came about. If I got my history right, the locals tried to save Qu Yuan by rowing their boats out to the river. To no avail, they couldn’t save him so they dropped balls of sticky rice into the river, hoping the fish would eat those instead of his body. I got to admit all these while I thought it was like a sacrificial offering to him, for him to eat or some sort.

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Rice dumplings, also commonly known as ‘Ba Zhang’ is one of the most amazing things ever created. The contents always include glutinous rice and a bunch of other ingredients ranging from pork, mushrooms and all sorts of nuts and beans.

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Here’s what’s even more amazing, every dialect has their own version! I’ve attached a photo below for reference.

I’m Hakka and my wife’s Hokkien. I find myself preferring the Hokkien ‘ba zhang’ as it contains a generous portion of pork. I suggested to her that she take the opportunity to learn how to make rice dumplings as it’s really an art to pack all that and wrap it with just bamboo or reed leaves! I do find it a dying tradition as I barely could find people around my age knowing how to make rice dumplings and it will indeed be a pity if the tradition is lost. Do you think you can do something about this LEDGIT? Just putting it out there as well, wonder if a Hakka could have access to Hokkien recipes? ;)

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The Malays have something similar as well, called the Ketupat. They’re usually served with satays, which I perhaps will share more in future posts. This post has been long enough. Much love for rice dumplings, the ones with pork especially!