C H I N A DA I LY
AS I A W E E K LY
Language | LIF E 29
January 20-26, 2017
Dumpling lovers need no reason
For a range of festivals, and whatever the season, jiaozi can be regarded as one of China’s most representative dishes
By SUN JIAHUI
The World of Chinese
H
ow do Chinese
people celebrate
festivals? Even
if you are not a
China expert, you
might have been able to guess this
one: Eating 饺子 (jiǎozi), thin pieces
of dough with ground meat or vegetable filling, steamed or boiled (also
known as dumplings).
In a country with a history of
thousands of years and a diverse
culinary culture, it’s hard to imagine
that such a commonplace item can
be regarded as one of the country’s
most representative dishes.
It can be said without exaggeration that, at least in northern China
(not all over the country — more on
that later), jiaozi plays an important
role in almost half of Chinese festivals. One should eat jiaozi at Chinese new year, the fifth day of the
first month according to the lunar
calendar, the Autumn Commencement, the Winter Commencement
and the Winter Solstice. As the Chinese saying goes: “Food is the god of
the people.”
Alternatively, we can conclude
that when foodies really want to
eat something, they can always find
reasons.
Eating jiaozi on Chinese new
year’s eve is the most important
custom in northern China during
Spring Festival. Families unite to
wrap jiaozi together in the evenings
and eat them at midnight. That is
because, according to ancient timekeeping customs, a day was divided
into 12 two-hour periods and the
period between 11 pm and 1 am was
called 子时 (zǐshí), or the Zi period.
On new year’s eve, the Zi period
marked the transition from an old
year to a new year and had a special
name, 交子 (jiāozǐ), which sounded
very similar to jiaozi.
What’s more, the shape of a jiaozi
is just like a gold yuánbǎo (元宝,
ingot), an ancient currency, so people eat jiaozi at the dinner with the
wish that they will have prosperity in
the new year. Some cooks will hide a
coin inside a jiaozi and whoever happens to find it is said to have good
luck in the coming year.
Just five days after new year’s eve,
people eat jiaozi again. This custom
is called “breaking the fifth”, or 破五
(pòwǔ), because there are so many
taboos during the Spring Festival
period such as doing needlework,
breaking things, getting your hair
cut and so on. However, after the
fifth day of the new year, those
taboos disappear, so people celebrate
by eating jiaozi.
A special custom exists in the city
of Tianjin and surrounding areas,
where people believe that when you
wrap jiaozi, you need to press the
wrapper edges tightly so that people
who like to talk about you behind
your back will have their mouths
zipped in the coming year.
The Fu days can be understood
as the “dog days” of the Chinese
summer, which usually last 30 or 40
days between the traditional calendar seasons of Little Heat and Great
Heat. The first day of Fu is another
jiaozi day. Because the Fu days are
the hottest time of the year, people
usually lack appetite, so something
delicious is needed to stimulate their
taste buds. Jiaozi, a popular food
that many people liked since ancient
times, became the optimal choice.
And because the Fu days took place
during the start of harvest, every
household could afford the good
meal.
When the high temperature that
takes away people’s appetites finally
drops, cool autumn arrives, and it is
definitely worth celebrating. On the
Autumn Commencement day of the
lunar calendar, it is believed people
should eat something good, especially meat, to 贴秋膘 (tiēqiūbiāo)
gain autumn weight, because most
people have lost some weight during the long hot summer and need
to gain it back to stay healthy during the winter. Of course, for jiaozi
lovers, dumplings with meat filling
work perfectly.
Eating jiaozi on the Winter Commencement day is one of the bestknown jiaozi customs in China, and
it is related to the origin of jiaozi.
Though there are many folk stories
explaining how jiaozi was invented,
the most popular one was about the
famous doctor Zhang Zhongjing.
Zhang was a great practitioner
of traditional Chinese medicine,
jiǎo zi, dumpling
who lived during the Eastern Han
Dynasty (AD 25-220). One day in
winter, when Zhang was on his way
home, he found many poor people
had frostbitten ears, because they
did not have warm clothes and sufficient food. Zhang tried to heal their
ears. He stewed lamb, peppers and
some medicine in a pot, chopped
them into small pieces and used
them to fill small dough wrappers.
Zhang named these dumplings娇耳
(jiāo’ěr), literally meaning “tender
ear”, and boiled them every day to
feed his patients.
Gradually, these patients became
better and, when Spring Festival
came, their ears were healed. In
order to express their gratitude to
Zhang, people began to imitate his
recipe to make jiao’er, which later
became the current jiaozi, and ate
them to celebrate Spring Festival.
Chinese people have long placed
a great deal of importance on the
Winter Solstice. Family members
get together, worship their ancestors and eat jiaozi. Some claim the
reason people eat
jiaozi on this day is also to commemorate Zhang Zhongjing, while
others said it is because of a goddess
in ancient Chinese legend, Nuwa,
who is known for creating humans
and repairing a great hole that one
day appeared in the sky.
It is said that Nuwa existed at the
beginning of the world and created
humans by sculpting them with yellow clay. But when she made ears for
these humans, she worried that the
clay would freeze and the ears would
not stay attached to their heads
when it became cold. Therefore, she
pierced their ears and used a string
to fix them to their heads.
So, on the Winter Solstice, which
is the darkest and one of the coldest times of year, people make and
eat the ear-shaped jiaozi in memory
of Nuwa, and it is said if you don’t
eat jiaozi on this day, your ears will
freeze and drop from your head.
Jiaozi lovers can always find a reason to eat jiaozi, but the interesting
thing is that it just happens in the
north, where there is a tradition of
eating wheat-based food. South-
ern people, whose traditional dishes
tend to be based more on rice, are
not crazy about it, even though as
more people migrate around the
country for work and consume mass
media, the northern customs are
becoming better known and even
adopted by some southerners.
However, traditionally, southerners had other choices for festivals. At
Spring Festival, they eat tangyuan
or fried nian’gao, traditional dishes
made from sticky rice; on the Winter Solstice, they eat tangyuan; for
Lantern Festival they of course also
eat tangyuan.
There are also dishes special to
certain regions; other Winter Solstice foods, for instance, include
fried sticky rice consumed in the
Jiangnan region, nine-layer rice
cakes and soy flour-covered sweet
round cakes made of glutinous rice
paste in parts of the southeastern
coast (and Taiwan), and noodles
and pumpkin patties in East China’s
Anhui province.
After all, China is a vast land, so to
designate one dish as the official festival food would probably lead to a civil
war — but at least we can agree that
the holidays are the perfect excuse to
binge on all your favorite dishes.
Courtesy of The World of Chinese,
www.theworldofchinese.com