An Lingrong’s Hometown New Year’s Feast: Anticipated from Start of Winter to New Year’s Eve

I. Spreading White to Dry, Hanging Gold to Cure; Fragrant Wine and Curling Smoke

In these valley settlements, cradled by streams and slopes, sweet potatoes freshly dug from the hillside terraces—large and small, still dusted with fresh earth—are carried to the water’s edge in wide woven bamboo baskets. They are scrubbed clean and their rough skins scraped away, revealing tubers that are soft, floury, and unpretentious. Chopped into chunks, they are mixed with water and pressed to extract the juice. The liquid is decanted into wooden buckets and left to stand for half a day or overnight, allowing the starch to sink to the bottom. The cloudy water is poured off, the residue washed into snow-white blocks, and these are spread evenly onto bamboo slats to dry. It is like laying out snow that never melts, as fluffy and pale as the cold moon. Then there are the crimson-gold persimmons, growing half-wild along field edges and village entrances. Knocked down with bamboo poles, scalded in boiling water, peeled, and strung on thread, they hang to dry beneath the eaves like a row of tiny suns.

Alongside these preparations come the brewing and distilling of wine, the smoking of cured meats, and the steaming and pounding of sticky rice cakes… In the run-up to the New Year, such scenes—white spread to dry, gold hung to cure, the air thick with wine and curling smoke, punctuated by the steady thud of wooden mallets—are a common sight in almost every village and household across Songyang.

In Songyang county town, the market is held every first and sixth day of the lunar month. “Braid Grandma” from Songzhuang Village in Sandu Township is heading down to the county for the day’s trading. Her husband sees her off warmly to the village entrance, balancing a carrying pole between hemp sacks and bamboo baskets. The early bus rocks and sways along the route, stopping at numerous villages to pick up passengers. Some carry empty baskets, others hoist heavy sacks; all are heading to buy, sell, or simply join the market bustle. By Braid Grandma’s feet sits a plastic woven sack half-filled with sun-dried sweet potato starch, and in her bamboo basket lie freshly dug taro tubers.

Tossed together, sweet potato starch and taro make up the ingredients for Songyang’s “shanfayuan” (taro-starch balls). A seasonal autumn and winter speciality in the region, it is also an essential taste of “togetherness” on the Lunar New Year’s Eve table. The taro is steamed, pounded into a mash, and combined with sweet potato starch in roughly a two-to-one ratio. Stock is added and stirred until a thick paste forms (some families also fold in diced prawns, minced meat, and chopped bamboo shoots). This mixture is kneaded into balls and steamed in a bamboo basket until they achieve a semi-translucent, gelatinous consistency. They can be eaten straight away, prized for their smooth, resilient texture and delicate flavour, or prepared further: sliced and stir-fried with vegetables, braised with meat, pan-fried, simmered in soups, added to hot pots, or baked. When used as a wrapper for a filling, the starch dough is shaped into triangular shanfen jiao or crescent-shaped shanfen guo.

Arriving at the market, heads bobbed and shadows jostled. Granny with the braids, balancing her pole on her shoulders, slipped into the throng and vanished from sight in an instant. The county market sprawls near Changsong East Road, an open-air affair centred around the Songyang Agricultural Market. The lively bustle of folk trade spills out from the tidy, modern indoor halls, yet amid the commerce, long-standing customs follow their own quiet rhythm. Everyone who arrives finds their place, whether from the flatlands or the hills, locals or travellers from afar. Whatever you require for daily life—food, clothing, household goods—and the produce of every village can all be found here.

Once the 24th day of the twelfth lunar month passes, the market runs almost every day. The atmosphere and aroma of the festival season gather on display: dried and fresh seafood and meats, pastries and rice cakes, roasted nuts and seeds, fermented rice wine, cured ham and pork, aromatic herbs and spices… If you need it, you will find it here. Pushing through the crowds, one mentally runs through the New Year’s Eve menu, checking off what’s missing and stocking up in advance for the visits and gatherings of the first lunar month.

“When snowflakes drift, Grandmother fries her cakes; when the snow falls thick, she boils the sugar.” So runs a Songyang nursery rhyme. In Chinese, “cake” (糕) shares the same sound as “high” (高), so steamed cakes symbolise fortunes rising step by step—how could one celebrate the New Year without eating them? Sister Zuhua’s cart is already ringed by customers. Wearing a bright red apron, she holds up steaming white fermented rice loaves, her expression radiant with festive cheer. Bamboo steamers are lined with broad camphor leaves, arranged in tight circles. A smooth batter is poured in and left to steam slowly over gentle heat, sending up clouds of fragrant vapour. Add green juice from mugwort to the batter and you have “green cake”; stir in syrup boiled from local brown sugar and it becomes “red cake,” also known as “sugar cake.”

Sister Zuhua, from Xiping Town, has been making cakes for nearly thirty years, patiently turning a traditional craft into a thriving livelihood. After university, her son returned home to carry on her trade. He set up a cooperative, expanded the workshop, and now supplies dozens of restaurants and shops across Songyang. By the twelfth lunar month, demand for sugar cakes soars. Songyang residents need them for ancestral rites and entertaining guests, and for a while, dozens of extra hands are drafted in to work overtime at the workshop. Yet Sister Zuhua still prefers to take her wares to the market and cry them out on the street, moving through the lanes and alleys at her own unhurried pace, just as she always has.

III. People Warm the Wine, Wine Warms the People

Beyond the rich red of the steamed sugar cakes, the market also displays the crimson of ‘red yeast’. In Songyang, home-brewed drinks are predominantly red yeast rice wine, and the brewing process is colloquially known as ‘dajiu’ (setting up a brew). By the tenth lunar month, with fieldwork winding down, the fresh glutinous rice harvested, and the weather turning pleasantly mild, households in Songyang begin to set up their ‘October vats’.

Traditionally, villagers would carefully choose an auspicious date to start brewing. Today, as long as the season is right, exact dates matter less, making the practice more fluid and free. With traditional earth stoves and large cauldrons becoming scarce in both towns and villages, home brewing conditions are limited. This has given rise to mobile distillation wagons that travel from street to village, offering on-site services. Their work is twofold: first, steaming the rice—glutinous grain is cooked, cooled, and inoculated with koji for fermentation; second, distilling the wine—where the freshly fermented brew can be further refined into a clear spirit. The ratios of rice, koji, and water are a matter of personal craft, meaning each household’s brew carries its own distinctive flavour. Seedlings are planted in spring, koji is prepared in summer, and wine is brewed through autumn and winter; every sip holds the essence of the four seasons.

The mobile steaming cart has already passed through Maoyuan Village. At Xu Yeyin’s home, the new brew has been settled into the vats. This year, a full hundred jin of glutinous rice was steamed. The white glutinous rice, mingled with the red yeast, puffs up and begins to gather at the rim of the vat. Lean in and listen closely, and you can hear the soft, rhythmic bubbling of fermentation—microbes at play, bustling with vigour. During the first few days, the batch requires attentive care. Each day, the rice and yeast that rise to the surface must be broken up with a paddle and pressed down to the bottom of the crock, encouraging a thorough blend. If the temperature runs too high, the liquor will turn sour; yet as the weather grows colder, the vats must be guarded against freezing. Just as we add blankets when the chill sets in, the wine too needs its own cover. Tending to it feels much like caring for a loved one.

By the time the New Year’s Eve dinner is set, a few ounces of the vividly hued fresh red yeast wine are heated and shared among guests, young and old, to warm the body and enliven the room. The company warms the wine, and the wine warms them in return. The rich red lees strained off after decanting prove invaluable for cutting through gaminess and deepening flavour; in Songyang, locals make ingenious use of this residue, cycling it right back to the dining table. At Xu Yeyin’s family reunion dinner, a dish of braised pork large intestine or hairtail prepared in red lees is always a staple.

IV. “Why eat ‘bitter’ foods during the New Year?”

After retiring, Xu Yeyin was re-employed as a local forest ranger, tasked with safeguarding a section of woodland near Maoyuan Village. Raised by the hills and hollows, he now tends to them in his twilight years. Each day he patrols the trails, guarding against wildfires and clearing hazards, with an intuitive grasp of nature’s shifting rhythms. In the mountain villages of Songyang, life is sustained by the land. The bounty of bamboo, timber, tobacco, and tea has nourished generations, steadily enriching the local table.

Xu brews his own wine using roots from wild fruit trees gathered in the woods. The bitter greens that sprout beneath the canopy in spring and summer are exceptionally tender; he never tires of them, and always preserves a portion by blanching and freezing, or by drying, so the household can draw on them at will. Yet when the New Year arrives, no matter how much is stored away or how much he craves them, he abstains. “How could we eat anything ‘bitter’ during the New Year?” he remarks. The same logic applies to fermented dried mustard greens. Though dearly loved by the people of Songyang, they are strictly kept off the New Year’s Eve dinner table. There is, however, one mountain delicacy exclusive to winter that would never be omitted from the reunion feast, and it pairs effortlessly with nearly any ingredient. Naturally, it is the winter bamboo shoot. That first bite of the season’s initial harvest is a quiet declaration on the palate that winter has truly arrived.

The New Year’s Eve dinner showcases just how versatile winter bamboo shoots can be. Shredded or sliced, they can be gently stir-fried with pickled mustard greens. Slices of starch dumplings and yellow millet rice cakes are wok-tossed with shredded shoots, while diced shoots are wrapped inside starch dumplings. The “Eight-Treasure Dish” is a household staple, chosen for its auspicious implication of “wealth from all directions”. It cuts through the richness of a table heavy with fish and meat, adding a refreshing, sour and crisp note. Typically, it consists of shredded red and white radish, pickled greens, spinach, kelp, and cabbage, served either stir-fried or cold. Naturally, “shredded winter bamboo shoots” is an essential ingredient. Over a brazier, a wok simmers large chunks of plump, freshly dug winter shoots with cured pork until the broth turns milky white. A handful of deep-fried puffy tofu from Shicang is added to soak up the flavours, creating a fresh, sweet and savoury stew that truly warms and comforts the stomach. When fresh shoots run out, they are preserved as dried or salted shoots, ensuring the season’s taste lasts until the next harvest.

V. Pleasant to the Palate, Peaceful for the Heart

Cai Wenbin, who is based in the Shicang Hakka community of Dadongba Town, readily admits that sun xian (a cured bamboo shoot specialty) is indeed very salty and can be hard for visitors to get used to. Born in the 1990s, he is known locally as Manager Cai, and he truly is a “master of the kitchen.” Originally trained as a chef, he joined a boutique homestay in Liucun in 2018 and currently oversees its culinary operations. Most of the homestay’s ingredients come from within the village; local farmers who harvest their own vegetables and fruit often bring them in on shoulder poles to consult with Manager Cai. And the homestay’s biggest annual kitchen undertaking is, without doubt, the New Year’s Eve dinner.

When planning the menu, Manager Cai honours Songyang’s Hakka traditions while making subtle adjustments to suit visitors’ preferences. For instance, the ham is always the locally sourced Songyang ham; its traditional smoked flavour stands out distinctly from hams produced in other parts of the province. As for drinks, the focus is on Shicang Hakka laobaijiu (aged white rice wine). Brewed using white, pellet-shaped fermentation starters, it differs markedly from the red yeast rice wine more widely found across Songyang. Guests who travel all the way to Songyang for the New Year naturally want to experience local food culture, but their tastes must also be considered. The kitchen does not rigidly confine itself to a single culinary style; after all, during the festive season, the food should sit comfortably on the palate and leave diners feeling content.

Shicang is a cluster of ancient Hakka villages, situated in the “Shicang Yuan” (the Shicang stream valley) about 25 km south of Songyang. Alongside the aged white wine, Shicang’s fried tofu puffs—also known as Hakka pao doufu—enjoy considerable renown, well beyond the boundaries of Songyang County itself.

The quality of Shicang tofu comes down to two things: ingredients and craft. Heirloom soybeans, cultivated by locals for generations, are paired with clear, crisp mountain spring water from the Shicang source. The master tofu-makers work with patient reliability through every stage: washing, soaking, grinding, boiling, straining, coagulating, pressing, cutting, and frying—never cutting corners. Freshly fried tofu puffs, tossed with a pinch of fine salt, are crisp outside and silky within, their nutty aroma filling the room. They can be stir-fried with vegetables or braised with meat. Slotted into stews first, they soak up the broth as if drinking their fill, simmering until the exterior firms and the interior turns melt-in-the-mouth tender. A single bite reveals the depth of the stock, and during the New Year festivities, they are even worthy of a place on the ancestral altar.

Upon that same altar, tofu stands for the simple fare of everyday life, while nothing carries more ceremonial weight than a whole pig’s head. In harder times, meat was a rarity on ordinary days; pigs were slaughtered for the New Year, and the New Year was defined by the slaughter. As living standards rose and trade became easier, fewer households kept pigs, preferring to buy them at market. Uncle Li, born in 1947, recalls when every family raised livestock. By the twelfth lunar month, pigs were being slaughtered almost daily across the village. Each morning, children were woken by the commotion, delighted to know meat was imminent. On slaughter day, fresh offal was boiled in large pots of clear water, steam billowing as neighbours gathered to share the feast and reward themselves for a year’s labour. The hind legs were smoked into ham, the belly and ribs cured into bacon, the skin boiled into jellies, the large intestines cooked with fermented rice lees, and the trotters slow-stewed with Xieli tea……

VI. Granny Song and Grandpa Li

Grandpa Li joined the army in his youth and, after his discharge, became a county cinema projectionist. Working as a duo, they effectively formed a mobile cinema. Together they carried the heavy projectors, generators, and screens on shoulder poles, crossing mountains and ridges to show films, leaving footprints in village after village. After a long day of winding routes, they would return to Songzhuang Village, arriving right at their doorstep. The screen would be stretched out, casting dreamlike light and shadow in the darkness, while his wife would bring a stool from the house. One stood before the screen, the other behind it; in this way, the couple watched the film together.

By New Year’s Eve at year’s end, the projector would be put away, and they would shoulder their baskets to visit the community shrine and ancestral hall. Pork alongside chicken, duck, or fish formed the “three sacrificial meats,” joined by rice cakes, dried provisions, tofu, and wine, all laid out as offerings. As the year drew to a close and circumstances had brightened, these tributes were offered to ancestors and the village deity, both giving thanks for the year gone by and seeking blessings for the one ahead. When the rites concluded, the fare moved from the altar to the dining table: cold-tossed pork jowl, salt-wine chicken, poached duck… In Songyang, the New Year’s Eve feast is a meal shared between the living and ancestral spirits, where ancient and modern coexist, and the natural world and human realm endure in steady harmony.

Grandpa Li and Granny Song cooked together, whether on ordinary days or on New Year’s Eve. While Granny washed the vegetables, Grandpa chopped them. When it was time to stir-fry, Grandpa would pour oil into the hot wok in advance. They would pick up their chopsticks together and clear the table together. Yet in Songzhuang Village, the New Year’s Eve dinner is actually eaten at breakfast time! Quite a novelty, indeed. Grandpa Li explains that the founding ancestors of Songzhuang were hired farmhands; they would finish their New Year’s Eve feast early on the thirtieth so they could still make it to the landlord’s estate for work, and the custom stuck. An early feast means sons and daughters-in-law can arrive promptly for the reunion. Once they’ve eaten, they can head down the mountain to visit their parents-in-law for another meal, neatly satisfying both families.

After washing up, Grandpa and Granny close the door to see in the New Year, listening to the gentle trickle of the stream outside. They have watched the Spring Festival Gala together for many years, never finding it tedious. Having grown old together since their youth, they find comfort in each other’s company. Their years are tranquil, their spirits quiet, and their days stretch on peacefully.

Past midnight, the New Year arrives, and opening the door is met with a roar! Fireworks and firecrackers thunder across the sky and shake the ground. To properly celebrate the lunar New Year, you need this kind of startling energy and bold cheer; the happiness of everyday folk should be announced to the heavens, the earth, and all living things. Rising early to the crisp atmosphere of the New Year, on the first day of the lunar month, some areas in Songyang “share a thick stew.” Leftover rice cakes and sweet pastries from the New Year’s Eve feast are tossed into broth and simmered into a soft, glutinous pot. This represents the “roots of good fortune” from the year behind, a nod to the virtue of “cherishing food.” To cherish food is to cherish time; the year has undoubtedly passed. Yet there is little room for lingering, for the first lunar month is still brimming with lively celebrations.

Foodthink Author

Zhang Xiaoshu

Writes, shoots film, cooks, and learns to weave and rock-climb. Captures relative speeds amid personal displacement and social change, observes within limits, and grows organically. Personal WeChat Official Account: Eat Xiao Rice FoodWeave

 

 

 

Author’s Note

This piece was originally published in 2025 in *Song Sheng SONG: Chasing the New Year in Songyang*. Many thanks to the editorial and production team for permitting this online debut, and to the Songyang County Culture, Radio, Television, Tourism and Sports Bureau for their support during my research and writing.

My time in the field was brief, and my prose is but a modest effort. As an outsider, I visited Songyang to experience both its unique character and its enduring warmth. Where I may have fallen short or erred, I warmly invite friends from Songyang to offer corrections and additions.

All photographs in this article were taken by the author

Editor: Yu Yang