粽
粽 – Zong4 – Rice wrapped in leaves
Today you are supposed to eat 粽子 – Zong4 Zi5 – Zongzi because it’s 端午節 – Duan1 Wu3 Jie2 – Dragon Boat Festival. There’s a bunch of different stories of why this is the custom. They mostly revolve around this poet 屈原 – Qu1 Yuan2, who killed himself by drowning in a river on the fifth day of the fifth month (by the Chinese calendar) in 227 BC. One story says that people threw Zongzi into the water so the fish would eat them instead of Qu Yuan. A variation on that says that after death Qu Yuan appeared in people’s dreams and said he was hungry, and people threw rice in, wrapped in leaves, so that the fish couldn’t eat it, but Qu Yuan could! This version goes on to say that Qu Yuan later told them to throw them into the water from dragon shaped boats, so the fish will think that the zongzi are meant for the Dragon King.
This page has even more on Dragon Boat Festival, with more stories of how it originated, and two other interesting side points: the fifth month on the Chinese calendar is also known as “POISON MONTH” (btw: the seventh is “GHOST MONTH”, also cool). And, they used to celebrate Dragon Boat Festival in Taiwan by having massive rock throwing fights.
REPLY))
My grandmother makes the best 粽子, but she claims that she had forgotten how.