Solar Maximus Festival

Few different names were given to such festival, such as the Rice Dumpling festival and Duan Wu Jie (in chinese). This festival is normally celebrated on every 5th day of the 5th lunar month of the chinese calendar, producing a chinese proverb which goes something like 'double fifth'. This year in 2009, the “Fifth of the Fifth” falls on May 28. Traditionally, the festival is a widely celebrated festival amongst the Chinese. Intentionally, they wanted to pay a respect to the famous chinese patriot and poet, namely Qu Yuan (pinyin: 屈原).

Caption: a sculpture of Qu Yuan

This is what I heard. The chinese would usually do two things on that day, that is (1) eating rice dumplings (chinese called that as zongzi) and (2)participating in dragon boat races. You may ask, why do chinese eat dumplings then? An extremely short history of this festival is that traditional chinese people would eat the rice dumplings on the dragon boat competition. The two activities were correlated to the day of death of Qu Yuan on the fifth of fifth.


Caption: rice dumpling with bamboo leaves (i)


Caption: rice dumpling with bamboo leaves (ii)

To celebrate this festival, my aunt has made some of the rice dumplings for us. It tastes brilliant. Okay, what is a rice dumpling? In summary, it is made of glutinous rice and stuffed with some fillings (such as chinese black mushroom, salted duck egg, drief shrimp, chestnuts, scallops, chinese barbeque pork etc.), and finally wrapped with bamboo leaves. I heard washing the bamboo leaves is extremely difficult, since the leaf emerge blades that may cut your finger? This is all i know :)


Caption: traditional rice dumpling with red bean filling


Caption: rice dumpling with pork

Anyway, Happy Rice Dumpling Festival to you!