Next: about 5 Apr 2027
Qingming
The tomb-sweeping day, with green rice dumplings and cold dishes kept plain and lightly seasoned.
Spices for Qingming
Qingming is when families sweep graves and bring food as offerings. In the Jiangnan region a green rice dumpling (qingtuan) is coloured with mugwort or barley grass and filled with sweet red bean or savoury pickles, and in the north cold foods are eaten. Offerings of rice wine, meat and fruit are accompanied by incense. Spices are mild: a trace of white pepper, ginger and spring onion in soups, with five-spice used lightly in braised pork.
The spices
Written by the EveryMasala desk with AI assistance. Background: "Qingming Festival" on Wikipedia. Customs differ from place to place and family to family. If this is your tradition and we have it wrong, tell us.
Photo credits on this page
The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Ginger: Venkatx5, CC BY-SA 3.0, source
- Black pepper: David Monniaux, CC BY-SA 3.0, source