Month: April 2018

So … apparently there is a bit more to the Qing Ming Festival / 清明节 / Tomb Sweeping Holiday than I previously wrote about. Not surprising as I’m am anything but well versed in Chinese culture. So consider this blog post as an addendum to the previous one!

It seems that, just like most cultures around the world, the Chinese have a traditional food component to some of their holidays. For Qing Ming Festival, that food component is called qing tuan (青团;qīng tuán) and it resembles a green, glutenous ball filled with black or red bean paste.

The kitchens at work today had a number of 青团 available on trays for us to grab and enjoy, and enjoy I did! These beautiful green balls of goodness reminded me of Japanese mochi, though the ones we had today were a bit wet or maybe even oily. (Pete, if you’re reading this, I almost used your favorite word, unctuous, but decided it wasn’t quite fitting as I enjoyed the treat!)

For those of you following along at home who like to cook, there are a number of recipes on the internet for 青团 so go ahead and make a batch or two and drop a comment in the section below to let me know how they came out!

If I’m lucky over the next few days I’ll find some 青团 for sale by street food vendors.

While China has over the past 60 or so years transformed from a largely rural agrarian society into an urban manufacturing powerhouse, the Chinese people still hold on firmly to a number of traditions. One of those traditions, the Qing Ming Fesitval (清明节 / Qīngmíng jié), is a time when families pay respect to their deceased relatives by cleaning up their burial grounds, presenting their deceased loved ones with their favorite foods and drinks, and also burning joss paper (金纸 / Jīn zhǐ) in hopes that the deceased will never go hungry or be without money.

For the foreigners (老外 / Lǎowài) that are living here in China, the holiday can be summarized as public holiday (no work!) nestled within a three day weekend. Depending on which day the Qing Ming Festival falls on (technically the 15th day after the Spring Equinox, so usually  April 4, 5, or 6) that three day weekend might begin on Thursday and extend through Saturday. What that really means is a really short work week (3 days) followed by a long one (6 days, Sunday through Friday). Ugggh. Working on a Sunday, who are these people?!

So what, you might be asking, am I planning on doing during this festival seeing as I don’t have any nearby ancestral tombs to sweep and I’m not really into the other traditional Qing Ming Festival activity of kite flying? I’ll be partaking in another “traditional” activity of my own: playing cards. A friend in Shanghai is hosting a three-day long poker match which should be pretty epic. Here’s hoping that I win some money instead of losing it faster than burning it like it is joss paper!