The glutinous rice needs to be very soft and chewy.
Then it’ll be fragrant.
It wouldn’t be Dragon Boat Festival if there weren't any zongzi.
Zongzi is a sticky rice dumpling wrapped in reed,
bamboo, or lotus leaves.
Chinese people eat it during the Dragon Boat Festival
to commemorate a patriotic poet named Qu Yuan.
Legend has it he threw himself into a river
as he grieved his country.
Zongzi are either sweet or salty,
and stuffed with all sorts of fillings.
Our zongzi have eight flavors.
This is Liang Qing. She owns a famous zongzi store
in Emeishan, a city in Sichuan.
Once, it sold over 100,000 zongzi in a month.
Our eight flavors include pork, salted duck egg yolk and pork,
preserved vegetables, and sweet ones like
brown sugar, red bean, and dates.
Plain zongzi is paired with brown sugar.
That’s how you’re supposed to eat it.
But our most famous zongzi is the original (filled with pork).
That made us famous online.
Different flavors appeal to different Chinese people.
It depends on where they come from.
We have a lot of customers from Beijing and Sichuan.
People from Beijing prefer zongzi with lean pork,
and sweet zongzi.
Us Sichuanese prefer ones with meat,
and we like it numbingly spicy.
We like this sort of taste in particular.
Traditionally, families come together to wrap zongzi every June.
Leaves are essential to the process.
The leaves are natural,
so they have a refreshing scent.
Even after they’re cooked, they keep their natural fragrance.
Local farmers grow this dotted cast iron plant
in the mountains specially for zongzi.
Wang Zhidong has been doing it for almost 20 years.
We follow him to the harvest.
Within the Emeishan region,
the main area that produces these zongzi leaves
is here in Leshan.
We produce tens of millions, even hundreds of millions
of zongzi leaves every year.
Emeishan is next to Ya’an county.
It’s also known as the rain city.
It’s particularly rainy with a mild climate.
And there’s not much sunshine.
Sometimes it rains for half a month
and we can’t see the sun.
The leaves thrive in humidity.
They don’t need sunshine.
These are the ideal conditions to grow zongzi leaves.
They take a year to grow.
We harvest only once a year.
Normally, demand peaks during Dragon Boat Festival.
Why do you use a sickle?
We use a sickle to reap. It’s the most effective tool.
The curved blade is too heavy
and doesn’t cut as well as the sickle.
I sell my zongzi leaves at the market.
I sell them in bundles.
A bundle has around 50 leaves.
A bundle costs $2 to $3.
Farmers like Wang also supply his leaves to stores
in the area who still hand make this snack.
Liang’s store is one of them.
A lot of zongzi available during Dragon Boat Festival
are machine-made.
Our zongzi are all handmade, which is what attracts customers.
We use a recipe passed down in our family.
We soak the rice for a night the day beforehand.
Our glutinous rice comes from Wuhan.
They grow high-quality sticky rice there.
The men in our family usually wake up at 5 in the morning
to start making zongzi.
The rice, meat, and beans are all very heavy.
We buy pork in the morning too.
Then we add our own seasoning to the meat
and marinade it for a couple of hours.
Then, we wrap the zongzi.
The way to wrap zongzi varies between regions.
Here in Sichuan, they wrap it into a pyramid.
In places like Guangxi and Fujian, the zongzi are rectangular.
The women in our family are in charge of more meticulous tasks,
like wrapping the zongzi and washing the leaves.
The lady who’s behind me can wrap 1,500 zongzi in a day.
Then we simmer them for over 10 hours.
The glutinous rice needs to be very soft and chewy.
Having handmade zongzi for breakfast
has always been a culture here.
I remember grabbing a couple to eat on my way to school
when I was a kid.
For us, it’s not about getting creative about flavors.
It’s more about keeping the original flavor and
the traditional way of making it.