Dongzhi: The Shortest Day of the Year, and the Meal That Pulls Every Chinese Family Back to One Table
In Suzhou, people bring their own bottles to buy winter wine. Ten days before Dongzhi, the queue outside the old shop on Guanqian Street is full of empty soda bottles, five-litre water jugs and rinsed glass jars; the shopkeeper lifts amber, osmanthus-scented liquid out of a ceramic vat with a wooden dipper and sells it by weight. It is two or three percent alcohol and keeps for about ten days, and it is sold only around the solstice. Why mark the shortest day of the year with a cup of sweet wine? Three thousand years ago China measured this day out of a pole's shadow — Dongzhi was the first of the twenty-four solar terms to be fixed mathematically. The Zhou treated the month containing it as the first month of the year; the Han gave officials the day off; Tang statute granted seven days' leave, equal with New Year, earning it the name 'the second New Year'; Ming and Qing emperors sacrificed to heaven at the Circular Mound Altar. Folk custom splits the country in two. The north wraps dumplings shaped like ears, traced to the Eastern Han physician Zhang Zhongjing, with a proverb threatening frostbitten ears for anyone who skips them. The south rolls glutinous rice balls — Chaoshan's winter festival balls come with the saying that eating them makes you a year older, and in Fujian and Taiwan families press them onto doorframes, water vats and ox horns to reward the tools and animals that worked all year. Suzhou drinks osmanthus winter wine with braised meats, Hangzhou eats rice cake, Tengzhou and Yinchuan queue for mutton soup. Dongzhi is also where Chinese patience begins: from this day you 'count the nines' for eighty-one days, and a Ming text instructs you to draw a plum branch of eighty-one petals and dye one a day until spring arrives. Today the festival arrives in an insulated bag, with dumpling orders at a yearly peak and clinics booked out for winter tonics. Includes a full dumpling method, rice-ball tips, how to draw your own cold-dispelling chart, where to go in Suzhou, Beijing, Tengzhou and Guangzhou, and the phrases to use on the day.
